PS 1850 E 13 Copyright, 1854, BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Copyright, 1882, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. 4. AFTER his marriage, in 1842, Hawthorne established himself at the Manse, the ancient residence of the parish minister at Concord, Massachusetts. It is still owned, as it was then, by descendants of Dr. Ripley, one of the early pastors of the place, and an ancestor of Ralph Waldo Emerson; having been built in 1765, for the Rev. William Emerson, whose widow Dr. Ezra Ripley married. There, in a small back room on the second floor, commanding a view of the river, the old North Bridge, and the battle-field of 1775, Emerson had written his "Nature," six years before; and in the same apartment Hawthorne prepared for the press his "Mosses from an Old Manse." "The study," as he says in his account of the house, "had three windows set with little, old-fashioned panes of glass, each with a crack across it;" and it does not require much imagination, nor perhaps any violation of history, to suppose that these are the self-same panes through which the sun shone at the time of Concord Fight. The cracks in them may have been caused by the concussions of musketry on that memorable April morning. On the glass of one of the two western windows, which, in Hawthorne's phrase, "looked, or rather peeped, be the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with portions of some delicate calf or lamb." "It is one of the drawbacks upon our Eden that it contains no water fit either to drink or to bathe in;" and so on. It was, in fact, a similitude which both the romancer and his bride in this first and so idyllic home of theirs delighted to keep up-this conception that they were a sort of new Adam and Eve in an unpretentious Paradise. "Buds and Bird-Voices 99 also shows the traces of his new surroundings, which he has so fully and exquisitely described in his introductory chapter that nothing remains to be added. Other pieces had been printed in the magazines before he went to the Manse at all. Those which he wrote there "The Celestial Railroad," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and various others came out in the "Democratic Review," then the most important literary magazine in the country. They represent nearly all that he put forward in the line of original composition from 1842 to 1846; but during that period he edited the "Journal of an African Cruiser" by his friend Horatio Bridge, of the United States Navy, and some Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner," neither of which has since been republished. Finally, just at the close of his residence at the Manse, the "Mosses" were issued in two volumes, at New York. 66 G. P. L. |