Nathaniel Hawthorne
by
George E. Woodberry
Part 4 out of 4
an amateur in art, and he probably knew it; he had begun too late to
enter that world; and he contented himself with a moral sympathy, an
apprehension of idea and feeling, rather than the seeing eye and
understanding heart by which one takes possession of the artistic world
as a free citizen there. It was not an important matter, however; his
comments on art have only a personal interest, lighting up his own
nature; but, within his limits, he enjoyed a new and great experience,
one that illumined and softened his mind, in his wanderings about the
galleries and churches and his sittings in artists' studios. The
contemporary and native world of Italy he attended to but very little,
noting its picturesque aspects somewhat, but taking the slightest
interest in its people; if he had felt a barrier between himself and the
English, here was a gulf of difference that it was hopeless to attempt
to pass over, and he left the Italians in the inaccessible foreignness
in which he found them.
The first four months were spent at Rome, in this gradual opening of his
mind to the new impressions of the city, so fascinating to his
imagination, and in establishing himself and his family in the new
society of their daily life. Late in May, 1858, they went north by the
carriage road, and settled at Florence in the Casa Bella, near Casa
Guidi, where the Brownings were, and not far from Powers's studio. In
August they took possession of the old villa of Montaueto on the hill of
Bellosguardo, near the city, which is so closely associated with
Hawthorne's Italian days as the tower of Monte Beni. Here he began to
write "The Marble Faun," shutting himself up for an hour or two every
day in the stern effort, as he describes it, of coming "to close grip
with a romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind." The
scene of his labors was quite remote, such a place as he liked to have
to write in, and he was undisturbed unless it were by the Spiritualism
of the Browning villa, where Mrs. Browning was a believer; and, perhaps
under the influence of this association, Mrs. Hawthorne showed more
plainly her natural inclination to a more than curious interest in the
phenomena. She was, indeed, somewhat a believer in the power of
communication with the spiritual world, and its near presence and
influence in our lives. The seclusion of the villa of Montaueto was very
grateful to Hawthorne, and he writes of it to Fields with almost a
home-feeling, as if he had again found a lodging place at least for his
wandering Penates:--
"It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America--a
satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long as I stayed in
Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and
hand-shaking Yankeedom was gradually filtered and sublimated through my
consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with
my own countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here
in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have
escaped out of all my old tracks, and am really remote. I like my
present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking
Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment, insomuch that each
member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of
apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms into which we
have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At one end of the house there
is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by the ghost of a monk who
was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burnt at
the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower
and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away
bodily and clap it into a romance, which I have in my head, ready to be
written out."
The kind of life that was led by the family is more vividly sketched by
his daughter in her reminiscences of the time, and her pages afford the
only full companion picture to those of the Old Manse and the Berkshire
cottage, and to some extent supply the lack of that autobiographic
background to "The Marble Faun" which the reader misses in Hawthorne's
own preface.
"The walls of the hall and staircase were of gray stone, as were the
steps which led echoingly up to the second story of the house. My sister
exclaims in delight concerning the whole scene: 'This villa,--you have
no idea how delightful it is! I think there must be pretty nearly a
hundred rooms in it, of all shapes, sizes, and heights. The walls are
never less than five feet thick, and sometimes more, so that it is
perfectly cool. I should feel very happy to live here always. I am
sitting in the loggia, which is delightful in the morning freshness. Oh,
how I love every inch of that beautiful landscape!' The tower and the
adjacent loggia were the features that preeminently sated our thirst for
suggestive charm, and they became our proud boast and the chief
precincts of our daily life and social intercourse. The ragged gray
giant looked over the road-walls at its foot, and beyond and below them
over the Arno valley, rimmed atop with azure distance, and touched with
the delicate dark of trees. Internally, the tower (crowned, like a rough
old king of the days of the Round Table, with a machicolated summit) was
dusty, broken, and somewhat dangerous of ascent. Owls that knew every
wrinkle of despair and hoot-toot of pessimism clung to narrow crevices
in the deserted rooms, where the skeleton-like prison frameworks at the
unglazed windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these
unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the
other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In
contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares
of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian
heavens and countryside....
"Some of the rooms at Montaueto I studiously avoided. The forlorn cavern
of a parlor, or ballroom, I remember to have seen only once. There was a
painful vacuum where good spirits ought to have been. Along the walls
were fixed seats, like those in the apse of some morally fallen
cathedral, and they were covered with blue threadbare magnificence that
told the secrets of vanity. Heavy tables crowded down the centre of the
room. I came, saw, and fled. The oratory was the most thrilling place of
all. It opened out of my sister's room, which was a large, sombre
apartment. It was said to attract a frequently seen ghost by the force
of its profound twilight and historic sorrows; and my sister, who was
courageous enough to startle a ghost, highly approved of this corner of
her domain. But she suddenly lost her buoyant taste for disembodied
spirits, and a rumor floated mistily about that Una had seen the
wretched woman who could not forget her woes in death. In 'Monte Beni'
this oratory is minutely pictured, where 'beneath the crucifix ... lay a
human skull ... carved in gray alabaster, most skillfully done ... with
accurate imitation of the teeth, the sutures, the empty eye-caverns.'
Everywhere the intense picturesqueness gave material, at Montaueto, for
my father's romance."
Amid such surroundings the new romance was sketched out, but not very
much progress could have been made with it. In October the family
returned to Rome by way of Siena, where some happy days were spent with
Story,--a town which impressed Hawthorne almost temperamentally,
standing apart in his mind with Perugia. "A thoughtful, shy man," he
says, "might settle down here with the view of making the place a home,
and spend many years in a sombre kind of happiness." At Rome they
settled again in the Piazza Poli, and entered on the winter days with
much happiness, feeling acquainted now and partly at home in the city.
But a misfortune came to them in the illness of Una, who was taken with
Roman fever, and her life was despaired of. Hawthorne always took his
sorrows hard, and he suffered much in this period of anxiety, enduring
in his stoic way the heavy pressure; happily the doctor proved mistaken
in his confidence that the child would die, and though her illness was
long, she gradually recovered strength. It was during her convalescence
that Pierce came to Rome, and Hawthorne found in his friendship a great
support and comfort. It is plain that Pierce was the only man that
Hawthorne loved with his full heart, and he had come to recognize the
great place this friendship held in his life. His loyalty to Pierce was
a true tribute, and its expression does honor to both men:--
"I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even
better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind
much widened and deepened by the experience of life. We hold just the
same relation to one another as of yore, and we have passed all the
turning-off places, and may hope to go on together, still the same dear
friends, as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for
having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his
power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favor, and perhaps says a
little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might
not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other, as
friend for friend."
The illness of Una had thrown a shadow over these last days at Rome, and
it was in any case necessary to take her away. In a characteristic
outburst Hawthorne writes to Fields:--
"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell forever;
and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to
it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site
had been obliterated before I ever saw it."
They left Rome late in May and went by sea to Marseilles, and after a
rapid journey up the Rhone and to Geneva went by Paris to London. The
return to England was somewhat like homecoming, and during this second
residence Hawthorne shows a more sympathetic and contented spirit. He
determined to finish his romance here, and settled first at Whitby and
afterwards at Redcar, and still later he migrated to Leamington; but the
romance was mainly put into shape at Redcar, where the necessary
conditions of solitude were best realized. He lived very much as when he
had written his other works at home, writing in the morning and spending
the rest of the day with the children out of doors on the sands. He
finished the book on November 8, and it was published early the
following spring. [Footnote: _The Marble Faun_, or the Romance of
Monte Beni. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of "The Scarlet Letter."
Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1860. 12mo. 2 vols., pp. 283; 288.]
Hawthorne came to the writing of "The Marble Faun" after his genius was
matured, with his temperament fully ripened, his intellectual and moral
and artistic nature consonant in its varied play, and at the height of
his literary powers. The story is in one sense a culmination, and it is
perhaps his most complete expression of life; but it is less
characteristic of him, less peculiarly his own, than the American tales,
notwithstanding its greater breadth, its finer beauty, and its more
profound mystery. In method he develops nothing new; the scheme, the
manner, the tone are the same already made familiar. He had recourse to
his life abroad for the realism of the scene, and took out of his
note-books and memory the whole visible world of his romance, precisely
as he had formerly utilized the New England village life and the Brook
Farm experience. He has drunk in the charm of Italy and absorbed the
picturesque and artistic atmosphere of Rome and its religious
impressiveness; he has taken most delicately and harmoniously into his
sensitive temperament the loveliness and the power of both the world of
the past and the world of art, and he renders them back in description
as they were mirrored in himself; the stir of Roman life, its antiquity,
its still and immutable forms of picture and sculpture, are given back
with full sympathy and as clearly as the autumn woodland of the old
Puritan town in his first romance; and this realism, for such it is
notwithstanding its glamour, is the substance of the tale, though it is
all surface, just as was the case with "The House of the Seven Gables."
He has done for Rome and Italy what he there did for Salem, different as
the effect may seem, owing to the greater nobility and dignity of the
material.
He has also in the management of the story confined himself, as was his
wont, to a few characters, Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon, each
strictly isolated in peculiar individuality, and offering the
opportunity for powerful contrasts; and he has allowed his imagination
to find its spring in the symbolism of a physical object, here the
marble statue of the faun, and let his moral scheme evolve out of the
brooding of his thought upon the spiritual thing thus suggested for the
play of meditation. The plot itself, though more definitely disclosed in
its main incident of crime, which is made central in the narrative, is
of the simplest sort, and no more than enough to provide corporal fact
sufficient to give the body of event and situation; and, for the rest,
the story both before and after is left wholly vague, the mystery of
Donatello's fate repeating the mystery of Miriam's past. In this he
showed again his indifference to what became of his characters when they
had fulfilled their function artistically; he had no human sympathy with
their personal fortunes. This peculiarity is only another phase of the
fact that crime itself did not interest him in its mortal career. The
use he found in crime was only as the means by which sin was generated
in the soul; and his concern was with the latter, not the former.
He has projected on such a background and out of such a group of
characters an analytic study of the nature of evil, and this is his main
theme, overlaid as it is with all the decorative beauty of his
interpretation of Italy. He had formerly set forth the history of sin in
the heart, taking the evil for granted and reflecting upon it as a thing
given; he now looks backward and is engaged with the genesis of sin in a
natural man, the coming of sin into the world of nature; and yet this is
not all, but he endeavors to think about the meaning of evil, the reason
for sin's existence, the old problem fundamental in thought about the
spiritual life. It cannot be regarded as a matter on which he came to
any satisfactory conclusion or even uttered any novel reflections; and
it is this that gives its lack of firmness to the work on the ethical
side. Donatello is made into a living soul of a higher capacity by his
experience of crime; but Hawthorne suggests that evil serves a good
purpose in this only with much reluctance, and indeed he may almost be
said to reject this explanation. Donatello became "a sadder and a wiser
man," and with that old phrase the issue for him seems to be summed. It
is noticeable that, as in "The Scarlet Letter," there is no question of
how this soul that has come into a miserable consciousness is to be
healed; and it is remarkable that the only consolation the Church can
give is vouchsafed by Hawthorne to the heretic Hilda, but not to the
child of its own bosom. Hawthorne, if he indicates through Kenyon his
ideas, seems to advise, as elsewhere, letting the dead past bury its
dead while Donatello and Miriam should go on to what self-sacrificing
life they can find. Unsatisfactory as the story is, merely as a tale, it
is less vague than the central truth, the moral theme which it embodies.
The truth is that after all, in the ethical sphere of the story,
Hawthorne has given no more than his meditations, very much at random,
upon sin as it appears in the world of nature, and the way in which his
chosen characters react under its influence. Hilda is as innocent as
Donatello, but her soul frees itself from the contact; and Miriam is as
guilty, yet she alone is unaffected by the crime in her essential
nature, so far as appears. She is the most vital character in the book,
having touches in her of both Hester and Zenobia; the three women are
all of one kind in their different environment, and Miriam is the most
human of the three,--strong, assertive, practical as they all are, and
also entirely resourceless in their tragedies.
The romance is not of a kind to sustain very firm critical handling, for
its structure is thus weak, not merely in the plot but in its ethical
meaning; if the former is left unwrought, so the latter is left
unclarified. The power of the work lies rather in its artistic effects,
independent of any purpose Hawthorne had in writing; his genius was
creative in its own right, and when he had once brought the background,
the characters, and the idea together, they in a certain sense took life
and built up their own story, while his hand linked picture to picture
in the unfolding scene, with a free play of sentiment, fancy, and
meditation round about them. Intense points show out, as if by an inner
and undesigned brilliancy. The companionship of Donatello, full of the
freshness and laughter of the early world, with Miriam tracked by her
own terrible secret, is itself a startling situation, and the effecting
of their union by a crime, which paralyzes the love of one while it
creates the love of the other, is the work of a master imagination.
Hilda in her dove-cote, keeping the perpetual lamp burning at the
Virgin's shrine and taking into her heart the lovely pictures of old
time as a pool reflects heaven in its quiet depths, is a figure of
sensitive purity, rendered symbolically, with the same truth and
delicacy as Donatello, though so opposed in contrast to his natural
innocence blighted and stained; even the quality of mercilessness, which
Hawthorne gave her out of his own heart, she turns to favor and to
prettiness, till it seems to belong to her as a part of her chastity of
nature. The reduplication of the characters in the world of art about
them, though it is frequently resorted to by Hawthorne, does not grow
monotonous; but by this method he rather animates the external world, as
if picture and statue and tower had absorbed life and were permeated
with its human emotion. The faun is, perhaps, a somewhat hard symbol,
and needs to be vitalized in Donatello before its truth is felt to be
alive; but the drawing that reproduces the model as the demon's face,
the sketches of Miriam portraying a woman's revengeful mischief, the
sights that Donatello and Kenyon shape out of the sunset, the
benediction of the statue of the pontiff, the evasive eyes of Beatrice
felt in Hilda, Donatello, and Miriam, are instances of borrowed or
attributed life, which illustrate how constantly and effectively
Hawthorne uses this means of expression, and it is the chief means by
which he has integrated and harmonized the various material into a whole
artistically felt. It is an error, however, to force his interpretation
too far, as in the attempt to see in the Beatrice portrait a shadow of
Miriam's mystery; if such a thought crossed his mind, it left no record
of itself, and he was as ignorant as others of Miriam's actual past, one
may be sure. That unwillingness to be gazed upon, of which he makes so
much, recurring to it again and again and most pointedly in Donatello,
was the simplest and primary symbol to him, apparently, of the shock of
sin, whether it were in the victim like Beatrice or the participant like
Donatello or the spectator like Hilda. In Miriam it is less felt,
because to her the knowledge of evil had come in her earlier career.
It is in rendering this spiritual shock, disturbing the very seat of
life, that Hawthorne best succeeds in the moral part of his subject; and
it is by awakening some answering vibration in his readers that he
imparts to the romance that universal interest which makes it rank so
high as it does in the literature of the soul's life. He was not,
however, very apt in the mechanics of his art, and in lieu of structure
such as a man of far less faculty might be an adept in, he finds in his
imagined tale a principle of life itself; his work is seldom well
reasoned, but it has vital germs of thought, emotion, and action, and
these are loosed into activity and grow of themselves, and he fosters
and develops them in his richly brooding mind. So, here, the spiritual
shock, which is the central spring of the romance, is allowed to
transmit itself in every direction, and he lays bare its workings. It is
saddest in Donatello in the moment when he heard the cry of the falling
wretch, when he turned cold at Miriam's touch, when he lost his kinship
with the wild creatures he loved; and it is fixed in his unquiet,
evasive eyes. One loves Donatello, and of no other character of
Hawthorne can it be said that it wins affection; and one wishes that, if
he must have a soul, he might have come into it in some way of natural
kindness dissociated from a moral theory. This theory--and here is the
one discord--is, after all, felt to be an exotic in the Italian air.
Donatello has been puritanized, and though the character may be a
perfect symbolic type, it has nothing racial in it; and to be racial was
Donatello's charm. It is the same wherever the story is taken up; it is
charming as an artistic work, but when one begins to think about it, the
method of approach is proved to be wrong because it solves nothing and
ends in futility. It is throughout a Puritan romance, which has wandered
abroad and clothed itself in strange masquerade in the Italian air.
Hawthorne's personality pervades it, like life in a sensitive hand. It
is the best and fullest and most intimate expression of his temperament,
of the man he had come to be, and takes the imprint of his soul with
minute delicacy and truth. It is a meditation on sin, but so made
gracious with beauty as to lose the deformity of its theme; and it
suffers a metamorphosis into a thing of loveliness. To us it is in
boyhood our dream of Italy, and in after years the best companion of
memory; it is also a romance of nature and art, and of the mystery of
evil, shot through with such sunshine gleams, with the presence of pure
color and divine forms, as to seem like the creations of that old mythic
Mediterranean world which, though it held shapes of terror, was the most
beautiful land that the imagination has ever known.
VIII.
LAST YEARS.
Hawthorne reached Concord, on his home journey, late in June, 1860, and
took possession of the Wayside almost unobserved. He had intended to
improve the house and grounds, and set about the task; the well-known
tower, in memory of the tower of Montaueto, was added for his study, and
some other changes were made, but his funds, which were diminished by an
unfortunate loan, were insufficient to enable him to do all he desired.
He was welcomed by his old Concord friends, and began again the
agreeable village life he had formerly known; but he mingled more on
equal terms with other people than had been his custom before his
foreign residence had forced him into some share of society. He went not
infrequently to the Saturday Club in Boston, and though always a silent
and reserved person in such gatherings, his enjoyment of these occasions
was as great as he could ever derive from literary companionship, and
many of the members were old and familiar acquaintances. It was at home,
however, that he spent his days, working in his study over his writing,
and pacing the footpath on the hill-ridge back of his house, and from
time to time going to the seaside at Beverly or in Maine with his son
Julian for a companion. His health was not so firm as it had been. A
change seems to have fallen on him with some suddenness on his return to
America; for some years, ever since the hard winter of "The Scarlet
Letter" at Salem, he had complained of fatigue in writing and of
lassitude and slowness of mind; after the winter in Rome he felt this
with new weariness, as he says when he practically ended his notebooks
in Switzerland, not having the vital impulse to continue them, and in
the intervening time he had completed "The Marble Faun;" now he began
perceptibly to lose physical force, to grow thin, and to lack energy. He
wrote a good deal, sitting down to his desk and "blotting successive
sheets of paper as of yore;" but with little satisfaction to himself.
The times were unfavorable to peace of mind and the quiet of literary
occupation. Secession began soon after he arrived, and war followed in
the spring with that outburst of passionate devotion to the Union which
was transforming all his neighborhood into a camp and sending all the
youth of his people to the battle southward. To Hawthorne, being in such
imperfect sympathy with this feeling and the causes which gave it
passion, the war was only vexation and disaster, with much
meaninglessness, foolishness, uselessness, however he might try to look
at it with Northern eyes. In nothing is his natural detachment from life
so marked as in this incapacity to understand the national life in so
supreme a crisis and under the impulse of so profound a passion. He
stood aloof from it, unmoved in his superannuated conservatism, as
abroad he had stood aloof from the English life wrapped in his
imperturbable New England breeding. He was obliged to take some stand in
his own mind, and he naturally went with his own State, never having
been really an American, on the national scale, but only a New
Englander, as he confessed. During his life at Liverpool, four years
before, he had made up his mind which side he would be on, when the
prospect of war began to loom up as a possibility, and wrote briefly to
Bridge about it:--
"I regret that you think so doubtfully (or, rather, despairingly) of the
prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the
old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent
with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a
stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. At present we have no
country--at least, none in the sense an Englishman has a country. I
never conceived, in reality, what a true and warm love of country is
till I witnessed it in the breasts of Englishmen. The States are too
various and too extended to form really one country. New England is
quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.
"Don't let Frank Pierce see the above, or he would turn me out of
office, late in the day as it is. However, I have no kindred with, nor
leaning towards, the abolitionists."
In the first flush of the war he felt the contagion of the patriotic
thrill, and was with his friends a "war Democrat;" but his mind was
filled with reservations. On May 26, 1861, he again writes to Bridge:--
"The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits,
which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it was delightful
to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a
country,--a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing
as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The
regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and
the joyful thing is that Julian is too young. He drills constantly with
a company of lads, and means to enlist as soon as he reaches the minimum
age. But I trust we shall either be victorious or vanquished before that
time. Meantime, though I approve the war as much as any man, I don't
quite understand what we are fighting for, or what definite result can
be expected. If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none
the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should
be to cut them adrift. If we are fighting for the annihilation of
slavery, to be sure it may be a wise object, and offer a tangible
result, and the only one which is consistent with a future union between
North and South. A continuance of the war would soon make this plain to
us, and we should see the expediency of preparing our black brethren for
future citizenship by allowing them to fight for their own liberties,
and educating them through heroic influences. Whatever happens next, I
must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one
people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was
formed."
Six months later he writes again with nearly the same point of view,
accepting in fact the theory of disunion as the only possible result:--
"I am glad you take such a hopeful view of our national prospects so far
as regards the war; but my own opinion is that no nation ever came safe
and sound through such a confounded difficulty as this of ours. For my
part I don't hope, nor indeed wish, to see the Union restored as it was.
Amputation seems to me much the better plan, and all we ought to fight
for is the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members
shall be lop't off. I would fight to the death for the northern slave
States and let the rest go."
It is this despair of the Union that characterizes his attitude
throughout, and with it goes also an absence of belief in the Union; but
one feels that he is not deeply interested in the matter for its own
sake. Thus after another interval he again writes to Bridge, February
14, 1862:--
"Frank Pierce came here and spent a night, a week or two since, and we
mingled our tears and condolences for the state of the country. Pierce
is truly patriotic, and thinks there is nothing left for us but to fight
it out, but I should be sorry to take his opinion implicitly as regards
our chances in the future. He is bigoted to the Union, and sees nothing
but ruin without it; whereas I (if we can only put the boundary far
enough south) should not much regret an ultimate separation."
The next month Hawthorne visited Washington and saw the edges of the
conflict, and he wrote out his impressions of men and of the scenes in
his article "Chiefly about War Matters," which was published in "The
Atlantic Monthly" for July, 1862. The text was sufficiently
unsympathetic with the times to trouble the editor's mind, and
Hawthorne, to ease the situation, added explanatory comments of his own
as if from an editorial pen. The article shows conclusively how little
Hawthorne had been affected, how completely he stood out of the national
spirit, being as mere an observer of what was going on as at any time in
his life and expressing his own view from time to time with entire
obliviousness, as in the passages on Lincoln and on John Brown, of
everything except his own impression. The judgment he passes on John
Brown illustrates, too, better than pages of comment, his mental
attitude in politics, its excuses and its limitations:--
"I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown, any farther
than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did
I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage,
whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that
saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source), that the
death of this blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as venerable
as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom
fairly, and took it firmly. He himself, I am persuaded (such was his
natural integrity), would have acknowledged that Virginia had a right to
take the life which he had staked and lost; although it would have been
better for her, in the hour that is fast coming, if she could generously
have forgotten the criminality of his attempt in its enormous folly. On
the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking at the matter
unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual satisfaction in
seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of his preposterous
miscalculation of possibilities."
Whatever one may think of this as the truth of common-sense, its
publication in the summer of 1862 in Massachusetts showed an
impenetrable self-possession in the author, and it is doubtless true, as
has been said, that no other Northern man could have written such an
article as this, so disengaged from the realities, the passion and
prejudices of the time, so cold in observation and so impartial in
feeling, so free from any participation in the scene.
It was during the winter of this year and the spring of 1863 that
Hawthorne renewed his literary work by contributing to "The Atlantic
Monthly" the papers afterwards published as "Our Old Home." [Footnote:
_Our Old Home_. A Series of English Sketches. By Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. 1863. 12mo. Pp. 398.] The
contents of this volume have already been spoken of, and it need only be
remarked here that some allowance may fairly be made for their tone and
manner on the score of the depression of the time, arising from
Hawthorne's increasing ill-health as well as from public confusion. The
one memorable incident connected with the new book is the adherence of
the author to his design of dedicating it to Franklin Pierce, to whom
indeed it fitly belonged. Fields, however, was doubtful how the public
would look on a compliment paid to the unpopular ex-President, and on
communicating his views to Hawthorne he received this answer:--
"I thank you for your note of the 15th instant, and have delayed my
reply thus long in order to ponder deeply on your advice, smoke cigars
over it, and see what it might be possible for me to do towards taking
it. I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw
either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My long and intimate
personal relations with Pierce render the dedication altogether proper,
especially as regards this book, which would have had no existence
without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his
name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that
an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of
pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have
deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out
the dedication, I should never look at the volume again without remorse
and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely
as I think fit to give it, or let it alone."
Hawthorne's decision was in the line of his character, and the
dedication itself was in excellent taste.
The imaginative work of these last years was considerable in bulk, but
it was never brought to any perfection; and though it has been
published, the entire mass of it is only a bundle of more or less rough
or uncompleted sketches and studies. It is comprised in the group of
half-wrought tales, "The Ancestral Footstep," "Septimius Felton," "Dr.
Grimshawe's Secret," and "The Dolliver Romance," which are all various
shapes of the one work that Hawthorne was trying to evoke from his mind.
They are interesting illustrations of the operation of his imagination,
of his methods of thought, construction and elaboration, and in general
of the manner in which a romance might grow under the hand; but there is
little probability, so far as can be judged, that Hawthorne ever before
worked in this experimental and ineffectual way. He had sketched an
English romance "The Ancestral Foot-Step," in 1858, before his Italian
experiences, and laid it aside. It was after his return to Concord that
he again took up the scheme, and he attempted to join it with another
plan involving a different idea. The four states in which the romance
exists are the results of his various efforts, but in none of them is it
anything more than inchoate. The idea on the English side of the story
sprang from the imprint of a bloody footstep at the foot of the great
staircase at Smithell's Hall; on the American side it sprang from a
tradition which Thoreau reported about the Concord house, to the effect
that a man had lived there in the Revolution who sought the elixir of
life. But neither of these two topics developed satisfactorily. The
physical type which had served Hawthorne so well hitherto no longer
responded to his art; neither the bloody footstep, nor the flower that
grew upon the grave, which was after all only a fungus and not the real
flower of life, had any story in them, either alone or together, and the
figure of Sylph, who embodies allegorically this graveyard flower, has
no power to win credence such as other, earlier, symbolic characters had
won. The power of narration, the rich surface of romantic art, the
character of the physician and the child, the scene of the Revolutionary
morning, the English chamber, the white-haired old man, the treasure
chest with its secret of golden hair,--all these things are in one or
another of these studies, and there is much loveliness of detail; but
there is no vitality in any of these; that element of life which has
been spoken of before, as the germinal power in Hawthorne's imaginative
work, is gone; here are only relics and fragments, the costume and
settings, the figures, the sentiment, the beauty of surface, the
atmosphere of romance, but the story has refused to take life. Whether
it was due to Hawthorne's failing powers or to inherent incapacities of
the theme, is immaterial; he was not to finish this last work, and he
knew it. He had gone so far as to give Fields the promise of "The
Dolliver Romance," as if it were in that form that he meant to reduce
the whole; but he did so with no confidence, as appears from his
successive notes:--
"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantoms to be
encountered if I enter.... I don't see much probability of my having the
first chapter of the Romance ready as soon as you want it. There are two
or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not robust enough to
begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through." And he writes
again: "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as
soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like
most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages,
and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor.
That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a
further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost
its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better
keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor, if I wait
quietly for it; perhaps not."
In February, 1864, he advises that some notice be given the readers of
the magazine that he cannot furnish the promised romance, and he tries
to touch the subject with humor, but it is too plain that his spirits
are ill at ease:--
"I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive romance,
though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish
it. Yet it is not quite pleasant for an author to announce himself, or
to be announced, as finally broken down as to his literary faculty.... I
cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too
great an effort to do so, it will be my death; not that I should care
much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win it, thus
ending a life of much smoulder and a scanty fire in a blaze of glory.
But I should smother myself in mud of my own making.... I am not
low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to me
realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I
could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voyage and the 'old
Home' might set me all right."
At the end of March he started south with Ticknor, in hopes of some
improvement by the change of air and scene; his companion, who was
expected rather to have the care of Hawthorne, was himself taken ill and
suddenly died in Philadelphia. The shock to Hawthorne in his state of
health was a great one, and he returned home excited and nervous. He
failed rapidly, and his family and friends became anxious about him,
though they did not anticipate the suddenness of the end. In the middle
of May Frank Pierce proposed that they should go to the New Hampshire
lakes and up the Pemigewasset, by carriage, and Hawthorne consented. He
bade his wife and children good-by, and was perhaps convinced that he
would never return; whatever thoughts were in his mind, he kept silence
concerning them. The narrative of the journey, with its end, is given by
Pierce in a letter to Bridge:--
"I met H. at Boston, Wednesday (11th), came to this place by rail
Thursday morning, and went to Concord, N. H., by evening train. The
weather was unfavorable, and H. feeble; and we remained at C. until the
following Monday. We then went slowly on our journey, stopping at
Franklin, Laconia, and Centre Harbor, and reaching Plymouth Wednesday
evening (18th). We talked of you, Tuesday, between Franklin and Laconia,
when H. said--among other things--'We have, neither of us, met a more
reliable friend.' The conviction was impressed upon me, the day we left
Boston, that the seat of the disease from which H. was suffering was in
the brain or spine, or both; H. walked with difficulty, and the use of
his hands was impaired. In fact, on the 17th I saw that he was becoming
quite helpless, although he was able to ride, and, I thought, more
comfortable in the carriage with gentle motion than anywhere else; for
whether in bed or up, he was very restless. I had decided, however, not
to pursue our journey beyond Plymouth, which is a beautiful place, and
thought, during our ride Wednesday, that I would the next day send for
Mrs. Hawthorne and Una to join us there. Alas! there was no next day for
our friend.
"We arrived at Plymouth about six o'clock. After taking a little tea and
toast in his room, and sleeping for nearly an hour upon the sofa, he
retired. A door opened from my room to his, and our beds were not more
than five or six feet apart. I remained up an hour or two after he fell
asleep. He was apparently less restless than the night before. The light
was left burning in my room--the door open--and I could see him without
moving from my bed. I went, however, between one and two o'clock to his
bedside, and supposed him to be in a profound slumber. His eyes were
closed, his position and face perfectly natural. His face was towards my
bed. I awoke again between three and four o'clock, and was surprised--as
he had generally been restless--to notice that his position was
unchanged,--exactly the same that it was two hours before. I went to his
bedside, placed my hand upon his forehead and temple, and found that he
was dead. He evidently had passed from natural sleep to that sleep from
which there is no waking, without suffering, and without the slightest
movement."
The funeral took place at Concord on May 24, 1864, and he was buried in
Sleepy Hollow; on his coffin lay his unfinished romance, and his friends
stood about the open grave, for he was almost the first of the
distinguished group to which he belonged to lay down the pen. Emerson
and others whose names have been frequent in this record now lie with
him in that secluded spot, which is a place of long memory for our
literature. His wife survived him a few years and died in London in
1871; perhaps even more than his genius the sweetness of his home life
with her, as it is so abundantly shown in his children's memories,
lingers in the mind that has dwelt long on the story of his life.
INDEX
Advertisement, the tenth Muse.
AEsthetic Papers, Hawthorne's contributions to.
Alcott, Amos Bronson.
Aliston, Washington.
American Magazine of Useful and
Entertaining Knowledge, The, Hawthorne edits.
American Monthly Magazine, The;
Hawthorne's contributions to;
Benjamin writes of Hawthorne in.
Andrews, Ferdinand, a Salem printer.
Androscoggin Loo Club.
Annuals, contemporary opinion of.
Arbella, the ship.
Athenaeum Society at Bowdoin College.
Athenaeum, The London, favorable
notice of Hawthorne in.
Atherton, Senator Charles G., meets Hawthorne.
Atlantic Monthly, The, Hawthorne's contributions to.
Atlantic Souvenir, The, Philadelphia.
Augusta, Maine, Hawthorne visits Bridge at.
Austin, William, so-called "American predecessor"
of Hawthorne.
Bacon, Delia, Hawthorne's kindness to.
Bancroft, George, appoints Hawthorne
weigher and ganger in Boston Custom House;
offers Hawthorne a clerkship in Charlestown
Navy Yard.
Benjamin, Park, recognizes Hawthorne's genius;
coolness of Hawthorne toward.
Bewick Company, The, Boston.
Blithedale Romance, The, estimate of;
external realism of.
Blodgett, Mrs., with whom Hawthorne
boarded at Liverpool.
Boston American Stationers' Company.
Boston Athenaeum.
Boston Miscellany, The, "A Virtuoso's
Collection" published in.
Bowditch family, the.
Bowdoin College;
simplicity of;
Hawthorne's distinguished classmates in.
Boys' and Girls' Magazine, The,
Hawthorne's contributions to.
Bradford, George P.
Bradley, Rev. Caleb, Hawthorne tutored by.
Bremer, Fredrika.
Bridge, Horatio, Hawthorne's early confidant;
Hawthorne's letters to, quoted;
his friendship for;
guarantees publication of "Twice-Told Tales";
again aids Hawthorne;
Hawthorne assists in revising
"Journal of an African Cruiser";
his "naval picnic," _note_;
visits Hawthorne in Berkshire;
"a reliable friend,".
Bright, Henry,
his "Song of Consul Hawthorne,"
Brook Farm;
Hawthorne at;
broken up.
Brown, Charles Brockden, so-called
"American predecessor"
of Hawthorne.
Brownings, the, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett.
Bryant, William Cullen.
Buchanan, James.
Buckingham, Joseph Tinker.
Barley, Miss Susan,
of Salem.
Canterbury,
Shaker Community in.
Carlyle, Thomas,
wherein Hawthorne resembled.
Casa Bella,
Hawthorne's residence in Florence.
Chamber under the Eaves, the.
Charming, Ellery.
Channing, William Ellery.
Choate, Rufus.
Chorley, Henry F.
Cilley, Jonathan,
classmate of Hawthorne;
elected to Congress;
shot in a duel.
Clark, S. Gaylord,
editor Knickerbocker Magazine.
Concord, Mass.,
Hawthorne moves to Old Manse in;
literary work in;
hard conditions of Hawthorne's life in;
Hawthorne settles at The Wayside in.
Cooper, James Fenimore.
Custom House, Boston.
Custom House, Salem,
Hawthorne appointed surveyor;
his sketch of;
an antidote to Transcendentalism.
Democratic Review, The, Hawthorne's contributions to.
Dewey, Rev. Orville.
Dial, The, transcendental publication.
Diary, Hawthorne's first, _note_.
Dickens, Charles,
his manner suggested in "House of the Seven Gables".
Dike, Mrs. Priscilla Manning.
Duyckinck, Evert Augustus.
Dwight, Mrs. William (Eliza White).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo,
his visit to Sophia Peabody;
relations with Hawthorne.
Everett, Edward.
Faerie Queene, The,
Hawthorne's first book purchase.
Fairfield, Senator John,
meets Hawthorne at Portsmouth Navy Yard.
Farley, Frank.
Fesseuden, Thomas Green.
Fields, James T.,
quoted;
his wise suggestion;
good advice;
Hawthorne writes to, from Montaueto;
from Rome;
regarding dedication to "Life of Franklin Pierce";
about "The Dolliver Romance".
Fuller, Margaret,
Hawthorne's hard judgment of.
Gardner family, the.
Giddings family, the.
Goodrich, Samuel Griswold,
"Peter Parley";
his "Recollections," quoted;
transactions with Hawthorne;
Hawthorne's ungenerous view of.
Graham's Magazine,
Hawthorne's contributions to.
Graves, William J.,
his duel with Jonathan Cilley.
"Greenwood, Grace" (Sara Jane Lippincott),
Hawthorne's comment on.
Griswold, Rufus Wilmot.
Hathorne, family stock of.
Hathorne, Daniel,
of Revolutionary ballad fame.
Hathorne, Judge John,
of witchcraft memory.
Hathorne, Joseph.
Hathorne, William, emigrant planter.
Hathorne, Nathaniel.
Hawthorne, Elizabeth;
her mental resemblance to Nathaniel;
quoted;
"an invisible entity,".
Hawthorne, Julian;
quoted.
Hawthorne, Louisa;
letter from Nathaniel to, quoted;
no recluse;
letters to Nathaniel quoted;
death of.
Hawthorne, Mrs., mother of Nathaniel;
relations with her son;
her solitary life;
Elizabeth Peabody's description of;
delight in her grandchildren;
her home in Herbert Street;
moves to Mall Street;
death.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
parentage;
date of birth;
life at Raymond, Me;
returns to Salem;
early reading;
preparation for college;
letters to his sisters and mother;
considers choice of profession;
enters Bowdoin College;
youthful characteristics;
excels in Latin and English;
narrow circumstances;
early friendships;
changes spelling of his name;
aspirations;
manner of life in Salem;
a born Solitary;
drifts into authorship;
choice of subjects;
literary ventures;
yearly journeys;
basis of imaginative work;
discouragement;
first substantial gains;
a close observer;
editor of American Magazine of
Useful and Entertaining Knowledge;
editorial difficulties;
quarrels with Benjamin;
his anonymity dispelled;
Bridge guarantees publication of "Twice-Told Tales";
Goodrich's services to;
reception of "Twice-Told Tales";
Pierce suggests South Sea Exploring Expedition;
challenges a man to a duel;
his solitude broken;
meets Miss Sophia Peabody;
is appointed weigher and gauger in Boston Custom House;
bids farewell to Herbert Street;
practical life wearies;
his courtship;
loses place in Boston Custom House;
reasons for joining Brook Farm;
life there;
letter to Sophia Peabody;
averse to literary society;
barren years;
marriage;
Paradise in the Old Manse, Concord;
Una's birth;
straits for money;
Bridge and Pierce assist;
temperament and art analyzed;
literary faculty;
permanently influenced by Scott;
prime qualities in his work;
provincial note;
primary element in genius;
allegorizing temperament;
vivid symbolism;
his objectivity;
a moralist;
essentially an artist;
capacity for idleness;
his democracy;
"obscurest man of letters in America,";
made surveyor of the port of Salem;
his feeling for Salem;
as a government official;
literary revenge;
gossip concerning;
imagination languishes;
Julian born;
home happiness;
dismissed from office;
his resentment;
his susceptibility;
applies to Hillard;
his mother's death;
visited by Fields;
a bitter experience,
letter to Hillard;
finishes "Scarlet Letter";
fame established;
characteristics of his genius;
stoicism;
unsympathetic as an artist;
farewell to Salem;
family life in Berkshire;
productive period;
"House of the Seven Gables" written and published;
power of realistic detail;
marvelous art;
no sympathy with reform;
fatalistic trait;
Rose born;
delight in his children;
his "spiritual sense of life";
narrow intellectual interests;
temporary residence in West Newton;
"Blithedale Romance" written;
purchases "The Wayside";
objects to writing Pierce's "Life";
friendship for Pierce;
an unsparing critic;
accepts Liverpool consulate;
life at Liverpool;
notable official action;
his opinion of philanthropy;
kindly received in England;
good after-dinner speaker;
alien in England;
excursions;
competence secured;
resigns consulate;
life in Italy;
its influence;
begins "Marble Faun";
describes Villa Montaueto;
Una's illness;
leaves Rome and finishes "Marble Faun";
height of his literary power;
sensitive temperament;
creative genius;
defective technique;
his fullest expression;
returns to Concord;
health fails;
despairs of the Union;
mental attitude in politics;
last days;
Works.
_Alice Doane's Appeal_;
_Ambitious Guest, The_;
American Note-Books;
Ancestral Footstep, The;
_Artist of the Beautiful, The_;
_Bald Eagle_;
_Bells_;
_Bell's Biography, A_;
Biographical stories, _note_;
_Birthmark, The_;
_Buds and Bird Voices_;
_Canterbury Pilgrims, The_;
_Celestial Railroad, The, note_;
_Chiefly about War Matters_;
_Chippings with a Chisel_;
_Christmas Banquet, The_;
_Cilley, Jonathan_;
_Custom House, The_;
_David Swan_;
_Devil in Manuscript, The_;
_Diary, First_, authenticity questioned, _note_;
Dr. Grimshawe's Secret;
Dolliver Romance, The;
_Dr. Heidegger's Experiment_;
_Downer's Banner, The_;
_Drowne's Wooden Image_;
_Duston Family, The_;
_Earth's Holocaust_;
_Edward Fane's Rosebud_;
_Edward Randolph's Portrait_;
_Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent_;
_Endicott and the Red Cross_;
_Ethan Brand_;
_Fancy's Show Box_;
Famous Old People;
Fanshawe, _note_;
_Fessenden, Thomas Green_;
_Fire Worship_;
_Footprints on the Sea-Shore_;
_Gentle Boy, The, note_;
Grandfather's Chair;
_Graves and Goblins_;
_Gray Champion, The_;
_Great Carbuncle, The_;
_Great Stone Face, The_;
_Hall of Fantasy, The_;
_Haunted Mind, The_;
_Haunted Quack, The_;
_Hollow of the Three Hills, The_;
House of the Seven Gables, The;
_Howe's Masquerade_;
_Intelligence Office, The_;
_John Inglefield's Thanksgiving_;
_Journal of a Solitary Man_;
_Lady Eleanore's Mantle_;
Liberty Tree, The, _note_;
_Lily's Quest, The_;
_Little Annie's Ramble_;
_Little Daffydowndilly_;
_Main Street_;
_Man of Adamant, The_;
Marble Faun, The;
_Maypole of Merry Mount, The_;
_Minister's Black Veil, The_;
_Monsieur du Miroir_;
Mosses from an Old Manse _note_;
_Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe_;
_Mrs. Bullfrog_;
_My Uncle Molineaux_;
_My Wife's Novel,_ attributed to Hawthorne;
_Nature of Sleep_;
_New Adam and Eve, The_;
_New England Village, The_;
_Ontario Steamboat, An_;
_Niagara, My Visit to_;
_Old Apple Dealer, The_;
_Old Esther Dudley,_ first story to
bear Hawthorne's name;
_Old French War, The_;
_Old Manse, The_;
Old News;
_Old Ticonderoga_;
_Old Tory, The_;
Our Old Home _note_;
_Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner_;
_Passages from a Relinquished Work_;
_Pepperell, Sir William_;
_Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure_;
_"Peter Parley's" Universal History, note_;
Pierce, Franklin, Life of;
_Procession of Life, The_;
_Prophetic Pictures, The_;
_Province House Series_;
_Provincial Tales_;
_P.'s Correspondence_;
_Rappaccini's Daughter_;
_Rill from the Town Pump, A_;
_Roger Malvin's Burial_;
Scarlet Letter, The;
Septimius Felton;
Seven Tales of my Native Land;
_Seven Vagabonds, The_;
_Shaker Bridal, The_;
_Sights from a Steeple_;
_Sister Years, The_;
_Night Scenes under an Umbrella_;
_Sketches from Memory_;
_Snowflakes_;
Snow Image, The, _note_;
_Spectator, The,_ first essay in journalism;
_Story-Teller, The_;
_Sunday at Home_;
_Sylph Etheredge_;
Tanglewood Tales;
_Three-fold Destiny, The_;
_Time's Portraiture_;
_Toll Gatherer's Day, The_;
Twice-Told Tales, _note_;
_Veiled Lady, The_;
_Village Uncle, The_;
_Virtuoso's Collection, A_;
_Vision of the Fountain, The_;
_Visit to the Clerk of the Weather, A,_
never yet attributed to Hawthorne;
_Wakefield_;
_Wedding Knell, The_;
_White Old Maid, The_;
_Wives of the Dead_;
Wonder-Book, A;
_Young Goodman Brown_;
_Young Provincial, The, note_.
Hawthorne, Mrs. Nathaniel. See
Sophia Peabody.
Hawthorne, Rose,
her sketch of Montaueto.
Hawthorne, Una,
a beautiful child;
illness at Rome.
Hillard, George S.,
Hawthorne writes to;
letter to Hawthorne.
Hoffman, Charles Fenno,
his apt characterization of "Twice-Told Tales".
Holden's Dollar Magazine,
"Ethan Brand" published in.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell.
Hosmer, Harriet,
Houghton, Lord (Richard Monckton Milnes).
House of the Seven Gables, The,
analysis of;
lax unity in;
local realism of;
suggestion of Dickens in;
ancestral quality;
ethical meaning in.
Howe, Dr. Samuel Gridley.
Ilbrahim.
International Magazine, The,
"Snow Image" published in.
Irving, Washington,
Hawthorne compared to.
Italy, Hawthorne's life in.
Jameson, Mrs. Anna.
Kemble, Fanny.
Knickerbocker Magazine, The,
Hawthorne's contributions to.
Lander, Louisa.
Lathrop, George Parsons,
his study of Hawthorne;
quoted.
Liverpool.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth;
recognizes college days in "Fanshawe,";
Hawthorne's letter to;
notices "Twice-Told Tales" in North American Review.
Long Wharf.
Lord family, the.
Loring, Dr. George B.,
on Hawthorne's connection with Salem Custom House.
Maine Hall,
at Bowdoin College.
Mann, Horace.
Manning, Elizabeth Clarke. See Mrs. Hawthorne.
Manning, Richard,
of St. Petrox Parish.
Manning, Richard,
Hawthorne's grandfather.
Manning, Richard,
Hawthorne's uncle.
Manning, Robert;
undertakes Hawthorne's education.
Manning, Samuel,
Hawthorne travels with.
Manning, William,
Hawthorne writes in office of.
"Manning's Folly".
Marble Faun, The;
ethical weakness of;
source of its interest;
Puritan romance masquerading;
analytic study of nature of evil.
Marsh and Capen, Boston,
publish "Fanshawe" at Hawthorne's expense.
Mason, Alfred,
Hawthorne's roommate in college.
Melville, Herman.
Montaueto, villa of,
where Hawthorne began "Marble Faun".
Morituri Salutamus, Longfellow's.
Mosses from an Old Manse.
Motley, John Lothrop,
Hawthorne's friendliness toward.
National Era,
The "Great Stone Face" published in.
Navy Club.
Navy Yard, Charlestown.
New England;
homes of;
colonial tradition of;
central fact in life of;
the secret of.
New England Magazine, The,
Hawthorne's contributions to, _note_;
Hawthorne noticed in.
North American Review, The;
Longfellow's notice of "Twice-Told Tales" in.
Note-Books, Hawthorne's,
beginning of;
quoted;
his use of.
"Oberon," signature Hawthorne used
in writing to Bridge;
farewell to his eidolon.
Old Manse, the.
Oliver, Benjamin.
O'Sullivan, John,
editor "Democratic Review,";
U. S. minister at Lisbon.
Our Old Home; remorseless impressionism of, _note_.
Outre-Mer.
Peabody, Elizabeth, quoted;
letters of Hawthorne to.
Peabody, Mary (Mrs. Horace Mann).
Peabody, Sophia;
her love story;
Hawthorne's letters to;
recovers health and is married;
"A New Adam and Eve";
Hawthorne's devotion to;
quoted;
courage in ill-fortune;
spends winter in Lisbon;
English life interests;
uncertain health;
death of.
"Peter Parley." See Goodrich, S. G.
Peter Parley's Universal History on
the basis of Geography, written
by Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hawthorne.
Peucinian Society, at Bowdoin College.
Phelps family, the.
Pickering, John.
Pierce, Franklin
early friendship for Hawthorne;
interests himself in his fortunes;
elected Senator from New Hampshire;
advises change of scene for Hawthorne;
his affection for;
at Portsmouth Navy Yard;
Hawthorne writes Life of;
elected President of the United States,
and appoints Hawthorne to Liverpool consulate;
offers Hawthorne a post in American Legation at Lisbon;
Hawthorne's love for;
writes Bridge about Hawthorne's last days.
Pioneer, The,
Hawthorne's contributions to.
Plymouth, N. H.,
Hawthorne's death at.
Poe, Edgar Allan,
Hawthorne's only rival in harmony of tone.
Polk, James K.
Portsmouth Navy Yard,
political "naval picnic" at.
Potter family, the.
Powers, Hiram.
Raymond, Captain George.
Raymond, Maine,
Hawthorne's boyhood home.
Rome, Hawthorne in.
Ropes, Joseph.
Salem;
Hawthorne born at;
Dr. Worcester's school in;
Hawthorne's life in;
much missed in;
unappreciative "of its illustrious son";
Hawthorne characterizes people of;
Hawthorne's debt to.
Salem Athenaeum, The.
Salem Gazette, The,
Hawthorne writes Carrier's Address for.
Salem Lyceum, Hawthorne an officer of.
Sargent, Epes.
Sargent, John Osborne.
Saturday Club, the.
Sawtelle, Cullen,
a classmate of Hawthorne.
"Scarlet Letter, The";
analysis of;
genesis of;
a study of punishment;
reality of;
parable of soul's life in sin;
moral despair of.
Scott, Sir Walter, Hawthorne influenced by.
Sebago Lake, Maine.
Sedgwick, Catherine Maria.
Siena, Hawthorne's happy days at.
Sleepy Hollow, Concord, Hawthorne's burial place.
Southern Rose, The,
Charleston, S. C., "The Lily's Quest" appeared in.
Spectator, The,
Hawthorne's first essay in journalism.
Stoddard, Richard Henry.
Story, William Wetmore;
Hawthorne's happy days with.
Thompson, Launt.
Thoreau, Henry D.
Ticknor, William D., sudden death of.
Token, The;
Hawthorne's contributions to;
Park Benjamin notices Hawthorne's articles in.
Tupper, Martin Farquhar,
Hawthorne's visit to.
Tyler, John.
Upham, Charles W.
Verplanck, Gulian Crommelin.
Very, Jones.
War, the Civil.
Wayside, The,
Hawthorne's home in Concord.
Willis, Nathaniel Parker.
Worcester, Dr. Joseph Emerson,
Hawthorne's first master.
Youth's Keepsake, The,
Hawthorne's contributions to.
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