Literary and Social Essays | Page 9

George William Curtis
fancied this, in
good sooth, the ancestral halls of the Hawthornes--the genuine
Hawthorne-den--he will be glad to save the credit of his fancy by
learning that it was here our author's bridal tour--which commenced in
Boston, then three hours away--ended, and his married life began. Here,
also, his first child was born, and here those sad and silver mosses
accumulated upon his fancy, from which he heaped so soft a bed for
our dreaming. "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 a pleasant spring day in the year
1843, and as they entered the house nosegays of fresh flowers, arranged
by friendly hands, welcomed them to Concord and summer.
The dark-haired man, who led his wife along the avenue that afternoon,
had been recently an officer of the customs in Boston, before which he
had led a solitary life in Salem. Graduated with Longfellow at Bowdoin
College, in Maine, he had lived a hermit in respectable Salem, an
absolute recluse even from his own family, walking out by night and
writing wild tales by day, most of which were burnt in his bachelor fire,
and some of which, in newspapers, magazines, and annuals, led a
wandering, uncertain, and mostly unnoticed life.
Those tales among this class which were attainable he collected into a
small volume, and apprizing the world that they were "twice-told", sent
them forth anew to make their own way, in the year 1841. But he piped
to the world, and it did not sing. He wept to it, and it did not mourn.
The book, however, as all good books do, made its way into various

hearts. Yet the few penetrant minds which recognized a remarkable
power and a method of strange fascination in the stories did not make
the public nor influence the public mind. "I was," he says in the last
edition of these tales, "the most unknown author in America". Full of
glancing wit, of tender satire, of exquisite natural description, of subtle
and strange analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird, they
yet floated unhailed barks upon the sea of publicity--unhailed, but
laden and gleaming at every crevice with the true treasure of Cathay.
Bancroft, then Collector in Boston, prompt to recognize and to honor
talent, made the dreaming story-teller a surveyor in the custom-house,
thus opening to him a new range of experience. From the society of
phantoms he stepped upon Long Wharf and plumply confronted
Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick. It was no less romance to our
author. There is no greater error of those who are called "practical men"
than the supposition that life is, or can be, other than a dream to a
dreamer. Shut him up in a counting-room, barricade him with bales of
merchandise, and limit his library to the ledger and cash-book and his
prospect to the neighboring signs; talk "Bills receivable" and "Sundries
Dr. to cash" to him forever, and you are only a very amusing or very
annoying phantom to him. The merchant-prince might as well hope to
make himself a poet, as the poet a practical or practicable man. He has
laws to obey not at all the less stringent because men of a different
temperament refuse to acknowledge them, and he is held to a loyalty
quite beyond their conception.
So Captain Cuttle and Dirk Hatteraick were as pleasant figures to our
author in the picture of life as any others. He went daily upon the
vessels, looked and listened and learned, was a favorite of the sailors as
such men always are, did his work faithfully, and, having dreamed his
dream upon Long Wharf, was married and slipped up to the Old Manse
and a new chapter in the romance. It opened in "the most delightful
little nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar".
Of the three years in the Old Manse the prelude to the Mosses is the
most perfect history, and of the quality of those years the Mosses
themselves are sufficient proof. They were mostly written in the little
study, and originally published in the Democratic Review, then edited
by Hawthorne's friend O'Sullivan.
To the inhabitants of Concord, however, our author was as much a

phantom and a fable as the old pastor of the parish, dead half a century
before, and whose faded portrait in the attic was gradually rejoining its
original in native dust. The gate, fallen from its hinges in a remote
antiquity, was never rehung. "The wheel-track leading to the door"
remained still overgrown with grass. No bold villager ever invaded the
sleep of "the glimmering
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