The Old Manse (From Mosses From An Old Manse)
N >>
Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Old Manse (From Mosses From An Old Manse)
This eBook was produced by David Widger
MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE
By Nathaniel Hawthorne
THE OLD MANSE.
The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.
Between two tall gate-posts 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 windows 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 upon 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 atempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of
the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of
Raphael's Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of
Como. The only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers,
always fresh, and a bronze one containing graceful ferns. My books
(few, and by no means choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as
chance had thrown in my way) stood in order about the room, seldom to
be disturbed.
The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side
looked, or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the
orchard, with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third,
facing northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot
where its hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of
history. It was at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in
the Manse stood watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle
between two nations; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on
the farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the British
on the hither bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of
the musketry. It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the
battle-smoke around this quiet house.
Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of sight-showing,--
perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the memorable spot.
We stand now on the river's brink. It may well be called the
Concord,--the river of peace and quietness; for it is certainly the
most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly
towards its eternity,--the sea. Positively I had lived three weeks
beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which way the
current flowed. It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day. From the
incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of
becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a
wild, free mountain torrent. While all things else are compelled to
subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even water-
power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks. The torpor
of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much
as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course. It
slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and
bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the
roots of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes
grow along its plashy shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad,
flat leaves on the margin; and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds,
generally selecting a position just so far from the river's brink that
it cannot be grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.
It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the mud-
turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same
black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
noisome odor. Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons
assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral
circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance
of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.
The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
towards our slumberous stream. In the light of a calm and golden
sunset it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the
quietude that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after
blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest. Each tree and
rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and, however
unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The
minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are
pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity of success.
All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through
the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
peaceful heart. We will not, then, malign our river as gross and
impure while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the
heaven that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the
muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul
has an infinite spiritual capacity and may contain the better world
within its depths. But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of
any mud-puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us
everywhere, it must be true.
Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
battle-ground. Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed
by the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of
the contest. On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a
wide circumference of shade, but which must have been planted at some
period within the threescore years and ten that have passed since the
battle-day. On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-
bushes, we discern the stone abutment of the bridge. Looking down
into the river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers,
all green with half a century's growth of water-moss; for during that
length of time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased
along this ancient highway. The stream has here about the breadth of
twenty strokes of a swimmer's arm,--a space not too wide when the
bullets were whistling across. Old people who dwell hereabouts will
point out, the very spots on the western bank where our countrymen
fell down and died; and on this side of the river an obelisk of
granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized with British
blood. The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as
it befitted the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration of a
matter of local interest rather than what was suitable to commemorate
an epoch of national history. Still, by the fathers of the village
this famous deed was done; and their descendants might rightfully
claim the privilege of building a memorial.
A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the
granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which
separates the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is
the grave,--marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head
and another at the foot,--the grave of two British soldiers who were
slain in the skirmish, and have ever since slept peacefully where
Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis buried them. Soon was their warfare
ended; a weary night-march from Boston, a rattling volley of musketry
across the river, and then these many years of rest. In the long
procession of slain invaders who passed into eternity from the battle-
fields of the Revolution, these two nameless soldiers led the way.
Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, told me a
tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below. The story has
something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot
altogether be reconciled with probability. A youth in the service of
the clergyman happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the
back door of the Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to
side of the bridge, he hastened across the intervening field to see
what might be going forward. It is rather strange, by the way, that
this lad should have been so diligently at work when the whole
population of town and country were startled out of their customary
business by the advance of the British troops. Be that as it might,
the tradition, says that the lad now left his task and hurried to the
battle-field with the axe still in his hand. The British had by this
time retreated; the Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of
strife was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the
ground,--one was a corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh,
the other Briton raised himself painfully upon his hands and knees and
gave a ghastly stare into his face. The boy,--it must have been a
nervous impulse, without purpose, without thought, and betokening a
sensitive and impressible nature rather than a hardened one,--the boy
uplifted his axe and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow
upon the head.
I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his
skull. The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an
intellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor
youth through his subsequent career and observe how his soul was
tortured by the blood-stain, contracted as it had been before the long
custom of war had robbed human life of its sanctity and while it still
seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This one circumstance has
borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us of the fight.
Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of
the river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and
died there. There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a
hundred yards in breadth--which extends between the battle-field and
the northern face of our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and
orchard. Here, in some unknown age, before the white man came, stood
an Indian village, convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants
must have drawn so large a part of their substance. The site is
identified by the spear and arrow-heads, the chisels, and other
implements of war, labor, and the chase, which the plough turns up
from the soil. You see a splinter of stone, half hidden beneath a
sod; it looks like nothing worthy of note; but, if you have faith
enough to pick it up, behold a relic! Thoreau, who has a strange
faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set
me on the search; and I afterwards enriched myself with some very
perfect specimens, so rudely wrought that it seemed almost as if
chance had fashioned them. Their great charm consists in this
rudeness and in the individuality of each article, so different from
the productions of civilized machinery, which shapes everything on one
pattern. There is exquisite delight, too, in picking up for one's
self an arrow-head that was dropped centuries ago and has never been
handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand of the
red hunter, who purposed to shoot it at his game or at an enemy. Such
an incident builds up again the Indian village and its encircling
forest, and recalls to life the painted chiefs and warriors, the
squaws at their household toil, and the children sporting among the
wigwams, while the little wind-rocked pappose swings from the branch
of a tree. It can hardly be told whether it is a joy or a pain, after
such a momentary vision, to gaze around in the broad daylight of
reality and see stone fences, white houses, potato-fields, and men
doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and homespun pantaloons. But
this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than a thousand wigwams.
The Old Manse! We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
through the orchard. This was set out by the last clergyman, in the
decline of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed
man for planting trees from which he could have no prospect of
gathering fruit. Even had that been the case, there was only so much
the better motive for planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of
benefiting his successors,--an end so seldom achieved by more
ambitious efforts. But the old minister, before reaching his
patriarchal age of ninety, ate the apples from this orchard during
many years, and added silver and gold to his annual stipend by
disposing of the superfluity. It is pleasant to think of him walking
among the trees in the quiet afternoons of early autumn and picking up
here and there a windfall, while he observes how heavily the branches
are weighed down, and computes the number of empty flour-barrels that
will be filled by their burden. He loved each tree, doubtless, as if
it had been his own child. An orchard has a relation to mankind, and
readily connects itself with matters of the heart. The trees possess
a domestic character; they have lost the wild nature of their forest
kindred, and have grown humanized by receiving the care of man as well
as by contributing to his wants. There, is so much individuality of
character, too, among apple trees, that it gives them all additional
claim to be the objects of human interest. One is harsh and crabbed
in its manifestations; another gives us fruit as mild as charity. One
is churlish and illiberal, evidently grudging the few apples that it
bears; another exhausts itself in free-hearted benevolence. The
variety of grotesque shapes into which apple, trees contort themselves
has its effect on those who get acquainted with them: they stretch out
their crooked branches, and take such hold of the imagination, that we
remember them as humorists and odd fellows. And what is more
melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where
once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney
rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit
to every wayfarer,--apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of
Time's vicissitude.
I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world as that of
finding myself, with only the two or three mouths which it was my
privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman's wealth of
fruits. Throughout the summer there were cherries and currants; and
then came Autumn, with his immense burden of apples, dropping them
continually from his over-laden shoulders as he trudged along. In the
stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was
audible, falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of
perfect ripeness. And, besides, there were pear-trees, that flung down
bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and peach-trees, which, in a good
year, tormented me with peaches, neither to be eaten nor kept, nor,
without labor and perplexity, to be given away. The idea of an
infinite generosity and exhaustless bounty on the part of our Mother
Nature was well worth obtaining through such cares as these. That
feeling can be enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer
islands, where the bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange
grow spontaneously and hold forth the ever-ready meal; but likewise
almost as well by a man long habituated to city life, who plunges into
such a solitude as that of the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of
trees that he did not plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox
taste, bear the closest resemblance to those that grew in Eden. It
has been an apothegm these five thousand years, that toil sweetens the
bread it earns. For my part (speaking from hard experience, acquired
while belaboring the rugged furrows of Brook Farm), I relish best the
free gifts of Providence.
Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to cultivate
a moderately sized garden imparts such zest to kitchen vegetables as
is never found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if they
would know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed,--
be it squash, bean, Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless
weed,--should plant it with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy
to maturity altogether by their own care. If there be not too many of
them, each individual plant becomes an object of separate interest.
My garden, that skirted the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the
right extent. An hour or two of morning labor was all that it
required. But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and
stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that
nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the
process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the
world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of
early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate
green. Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted by the
blossoms of a peculiar variety of bean; and they were a joy to me,
those little spiritual visitants, for deigning to sip airy food out of
my nectar-cups. Multitudes of bees used to bury themselves in the
yellow blossoms of the summer-squashes. This, too, was a deep
satisfaction; although, when they had laden themselves with sweets,
they flew away to some unknown hive, which would give back nothing in
requital of what my garden had contributed. But I was glad thus to
fling a benefaction upon the passing breeze with the certainty that
somebody must profit by it and that there would be a little more honey
in the world to allay the sourness and bitterness which mankind is
always complaining of. Yes, indeed; my life was the sweeter for that
honey.
Speaking of summer-squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and
varied forms. They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases,
shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns which a
sculptor would do well to copy, since Art has never invented anything
more graceful. A hundred squashes in the garden were worth, in my
eyes at least, of being rendered indestructible in marble. If ever
Providence (but I know it never will) should assign me a superfluity
of gold, part of it shall be expended for a service of plate, or most
delicate porcelain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer-squashes
gathered from vines which I will plant with my own hands. As dishes
for containing vegetables, they would be peculiarly appropriate.
But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was gratified by my
toil in the kitchen-garden. There was a hearty enjoyment, likewise,
in observing the growth of the crook-necked winter-squashes from the
first little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until
they lay strewn upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads
beneath the leaves, but turning up their great yellow rotundities to
the noontide sun. Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency something
worth living for had been done. A new substance was born into the
world. They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could
seize hold of and rejoice in. A cabbage, too,--especially the early
Dutch cabbage, which swells to a monstrous circumference, until its
ambitious heart often bursts asunder,--is a matter to be proud of when
we can claim a share with the earth and sky in producing it. But,
after all, the hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable
children of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a
meal of them.
What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden,
the reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old
Manse. But, in agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep
him out of doors. I never grew quite acquainted with my habitation
till a long spell of sulky rain had confined me beneath its roof.
There could not be a more sombre aspect of external nature than as
then seen from the windows of my study. The great willow-tree had
caught and retained among its leaves a whole cataract of water, to be
shaken down at intervals by the frequent gusts of wind. All day long,
and for a week together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash-
splash-splashing from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into the tubs
beneath the spouts. The old, unpainted shingles of the house and
outbuildings were black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient
growth upon the walls looked green and fresh, as if they were the
newest things and afterthought of Time. The usually mirrored surface
of the river was blurred by an infinity of raindrops; the whole
landscape had a completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the
impression that the earth was wet through like a sponge; while the
summit of a wooded hill, about a mile distant, was enveloped in a
dense mist, where the demon of the tempest seemed to have his abiding-
place and to be plotting still direr inclemencies.
