"The

friends, knowing of his scheme, suggested articles for his collection which he admitted or rejected, as he chose. One of these, which he included, is said to have been proposed by Miss Sophia Peabody, afterwards his wife. It was the item, "Some Egyptian darkness in a blacking jug." From another person came the following, which he did not use: spur of the moment, from the heel of time." "A few of the words that burn,' in an old match-safe (very rare)," made still another article, concerning which the recollection is that he invented it; but it was not preserved in print. Of course, the sketch as it stands is his own conception; but, as it was unlike his other productions, he talked it over with his friends something which he scarcely ever permitted himself to do with regard to his fictions and in one instance, as we have seen, adopted a clever hint. The Note-Books contain a detached memorandum, just before the date August 5, 1842: "In my museum, all the ducal rings that have been thrown into the Adriatic." But this was not acted upon. In the same paper the hairy ears of Midas are described as being on exhibition; an early forerunner of the interest which he concentrated upon the mysterious ears of Donatello, in "The Marble Faun."

"The New Adam and Eve" doubtless grew directly out of his humorous musings on the life he was leading at the Manse. They were recorded in his NoteBooks, August 5, 1842. "There have been three or four callers, who preposterously think that the courtesies of the lower world are to be responded to by people whose home is in Paradise. we have so far improved upon 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 draw. backs 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" 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.

G. P. L.

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

THE OLD MANSE.

THE AUTHOR MAKES THE READER ACQUAINTED WITH HIS ABODE.

BETWEEN two tall gateposts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage terminating the vista of an avenue of black ash-trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway towards the village burying-ground. The wheel-track leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world. Certainly it had little in common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic circle. From these quiet win

dows the figures of passing travellers looked too remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In its

near retirement and accessible seclusion it was the very spot for the residence of a clergyman, a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped in the midst of it with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. It was worthy to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England in which, through many generations, a succession of holy occupants pass from youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to pervade the house and hover over it as with an atmosphere.

Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant alone-he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was left vacant had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the better, if not the greater, number that gushed living from his lips. How often, no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue, attuning his meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs, and deep and solemn peals of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees! In that variety of natural utterances he could find something accordant with every passage of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The boughs over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts as well as with rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for having been so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light

apon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those hoards of long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-grown houses. Profound treatises of morality; a layman's unprofessional and therefore unprejudiced views of religion; histories (such as Bancroft might have written had he taken up his abode here as he once purposed) bright with picture, gleaming over a depth of philosophic thought, these were the works that might fitly have flowed from such a retirement. In the humblest event I resolved at least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson and should possess physical substance enough to stand alone.

In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the room its walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim' prints of Puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so sternly with the devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now; a cheerful coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the overhanging eaves attempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raph