frightful despair at this rainy day. It has flooded here in sheets, with heavy thunder. But I have snatched intervals to weed. I could see and hear everything growing around me in the warm rain. The army corn has hopped up as if it were parched. The yellow lilies are reeling up to the skies. Pigweed has become camelopard weed. . . . Alas that you should be insulted with dried-apple pie and molasses preserves! Oh, horror! I thought that you would have fresh fruit and vegetables. Pray go to a civilized house and have decent fare. I know it will do you immense good to make this journey. You should oftener make such visits, and then you would "like things" better. Your spirits get below concert pitch by staying in one place so long at a time. I am glad Leutze keeps you on [to paint his portrait]. Do not come home till the middle of September. Just remember how hot and dead it is here in hot weather, and how you cannot bear it. — I do not think I have a purer pleasure and completer satisfaction, nowadays, than I am conscious of when I get you fairly away from Concord influences. I then sit down and feel rested through my whole constitution. All care seems at an end. I would not have had you here yesterday for all England. It was red-hot from morn to dewy eve. We burned without motion or sound. But you were in Boston, and not under this hill. If you wish me to be happy, you must consent to spend, the dogdays at the sea. After a cool morning followed a red-hot day. It seemed to me more intolerable than any before. You could not have borne such dead weather. The house was a refrigerator in comparison to the outdoor atmosphere. We have had some intolerably muggy days. That is, they would have been so, if you had not been at the sea. You have been far too long in one place without change, and I am sure you will get benefit under such pleasant conditions as being the guest of Mr. and Mrs. [Horatio] Bridge,

and a witness of such new phases of life as those in Washington. Splendors upon splendors have been heaped into this day. Loads of silky plumed corn or even sheaves of cardinal flowers cannot be compared to the new sunshine and the magnificent air which have filled the earth from early dawn. The brook that became a broad river in the flood of yesterday made our landscape perfect. It seemed to me that I must dance and sing, and now I know it was because you were writing to me. Rose and I went down the straight path [called later the Cathedral Aisle] to look at the fresh river. I delayed to be embroidered with gold sun over and over, and through and through. At the gate I was arrested by the tower, also illustrious with the glory of the atmosphere, and very pretty indeed, lifting its nice, shapely head above the decrepit old ridge-pole of the ancient house. I took my saw and went on a lovely wander, with a fell intent against all dead and confusing branches. How infinitely sweet it is to have access to this woodland virtue! It does me measureless good; and I am sure such air as we have on these fine days must be the effect of heroic and gentle deeds, and is a pledge that there are not tens only, but tens of thousands of heroes on this earth, keeping it in life and being.Your letter has kindled us all up into lamps of light to-day. But I am wholly dissatisfied with your boarding-house, so full of deaf women, and violin din, and schoolgirls! Pray change your residence and have peace. You will curse your stars if you have to "bellow" for three weeks, when you so hate to speak even in your natural inward tone. Mary has just sent me a note, saying that there is a paragraph in the paper about your being at Washington, and that the President [Lincoln] received you with especial graciousness. Stay as long as you can, and get great good. I cannot have you return yet. The President has had a delicious palaver with a deputation of

black folk, talking to them as to babies. I suspect the President is a jewel. I like him very well. — If it were not such a bore, I could wish thou mightest be President through this crisis, and show the world what can be done by using two eyes, and turning each thing upside down and inside out, before judging and acting. I should not wonder if thy great presence in Washington might affect the moral air and work good. If you like the President, then give him my love and blessing. The President's immortal special message fills me with unbounded satisfaction. It is so almost superhumanly wise, moderate, fitting, that I am ready to believe an angel came straight from heaven to him with it. He must be honest and true, or an angel would not come to him. Mary Mann says she thinks the message feeble, and not to the point. But I think a man shows strength when he can be moderate at such a moment as this. Thou hadst better give my high regards to the President. I meant to write to him; but that mood has passed. I wish to express my obligations for the wisdom of his message.

Towards the last an unacknowledged fear took hold of my mother's consciousness, so that she gave every evidence of foretelling my father's death without once presenting the possibility to herself. This little note of mine, dated April 4, 1864, six weeks before he died, shows the truth:

"I am so glad that you are getting on so well; but for your own sake I think you had better stay somewhere till you get entirely well. Mamma thought from the last letter from Mr. Ticknor that you were not so well; but Julian explained to her that, as Mr. Ticknor said in every line that you were better, he did not see how it could possibly be. I do not either."

From the first year of our return to America letters and visitors from abroad had interrupted the sense of utter quiet; and many friends called in amiable pil

grimage. But a week of monotony is immensely long, and a few hours of zest are provokingly short. Nature and seclusion are welcome when, at our option, we can bid them good-by. All England is refreshing with the nearness of London. In the rush of cares and interruptions which we suppose will kill the opportunity, while we half lose ourselves and our intellectual threads of speculation, the flowers of inspiration suddenly blow, the gems flash color. This is a pleasant, but not always an essential satisfaction; yet, in my father's case, I think his life suffered with peculiar severity from the sudden dashing aside of manly interests which he had already denied to himself, or which circumstances had denied to him, with the utmost persistence ever known in so perceptive a genius. He undoubtedly had a large store of inherited experiences to draw upon; he was richly endowed with these, and could sit and walk alone, year after year (except for occasional warm reunions with friends of the cleanest joviality), and feel the intercourse with the world, of his ancestors, stirring in his veins. He tells us that this was ghostly pastime; but it is an inheritance that makes a man well equipped and self-sustained, for all that. When too late, the great men about him realized that they had estimated his presence very cheaply, considering his worth. Should he frequently have sought them out, and asked if they were inclined to spare a chat to Hawthorne; or should they have insisted upon strengthening their greatness from his inimitably pure and unerring perception and his never weary imagination? It is impossible to ignore the superiority of his simplicity of truth over the often labored searchings for it of the men and women he knew, whose very diction shows the straining after effect, the desire to enchant themselves with their own minds, which is the bane of greatness, or else the uneasy skip and jump of a wit that dares not keep still. As time ripens,

these things are more and more apparent to all, as they were to him. In a manner similar to Emerson's, who spoke of his regret for losing the chance of associating fully with my father, Longfellow wrote to my mother:

June 23, 1864.

.. Thank you for your kind remembrance in sending me the volume of Goldsmith. There are some things one cannot say; and I hardly need tell you how much I value your gift, and how often I shall look at the familiar name on the blank leaf, a name which more than any other links me to my youth. I have written a few lines trying to express the impressions of May 23 [1864, the date of Hawthorne's burial]. .. I trust you will pardon their deficiencies for the love I bear his memory. More than ever I regret that I postponed from day to day coming to see you in Concord. With deepest sympathy,

Yours truly,

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

To go back to our Concord amusements. Mr. Bright caroled out a greeting not very long after our return :

WEST DERBY, September 8, 1860. MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE, — Of course not! I knew you'd never write to me, though you declared you would. Probably by this time you've forgot ten us all, and sent us off into mistland with Miriam and Donatello; possibly all England looks by this time nothing but mistland, and you believe only in Concord and its white houses, and the asters on the hill behind your house, and the pumpkins in the valley below. Well, at any rate I have not forgotten you or yours; and I feel that, now, you have left us, a pleasure has slipped out of our grasp. Do you remember all our talks in that odious office of yours; my visits to Rockferry; my one visit, all in the snow, to Southport; our excursions into Wales, and through the London 42 NO. 463.

VOL. LXXVII.

streets, and to Rugby and to Cambridge; and how you plucked the laurel at Addison's Bilton, and found the skeleton in Dr. Williams's library; and lost your umbrella in those dark rooms in Trinity; and dined at Richmond, and saw the old lady looking like a maid of honor of Queen Charlotte's time; and chatted at the Cosmopolitan; and heard Tom Hughes sing the Tight Little Island; and But really I must stop, and can only trust that now at last you will be convinced of my existence, and remember your promise, and write me a good long letter about everything and everybody. The Marble Faun [manuscript] is now in process of binding. The photograph came just as I had begun to despair of it, and I lost not a moment in putting the precious MS. into my binder's hands. I've been for a week's holiday at Tryston, and met several friends of yours: Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hughes, Mrs. and Miss Procter, Mrs. Milnes. The latter spoke most affectionately about you. And so did Mrs. Ainsworth, whom I met two days ago. But she says you promised to write her the story of the Bloody Footstep [The Ancestral Footstep], and have never done it. I'm very fond of Mrs. Ainsworth; she talks such good nonsense. She told us gravely, the other day, that the Druses were much more interesting than the Maronites, because they sounded like Drusus and Rome, whereas the Maronites were only like marrons glacés, etc. The H.'s are at Norris Green. Mrs. H. is becoming "devout," and will go to church on Wednesdays and Fridays. I want news from your side. What is Longfellow about? Tell me about Leaves of Grass, which I saw at Milnes's. Who and what is the author; and who buy and who read the audacious (I use mildest epithet) book? I must now bring this letter to an end. Emerson will have forgotten so humble a person as I am; but I can't forget the pleasant day I spent with him. Ask Longfellow to come over here very

Then, again, Concord itself sparkled occasionally, even outside of its perfect Junes and Octobers, as we can see here in the merry geniality of Louisa Alcott, who no more failed to make people laugh than she failed to live one of the bravest and best of lives. In return for a package of birthday gifts she sent us a poem, from which I take these verses : —

The Hawthorne is a gracious tree
From latest twig to parent root,
For when all others leafless stand
It gayly blossoms and bears fruit.
On certain days a friendly wind
Wafts from its spreading boughs a store
Of canny gifts that flutter in
Like snowflakes at a neighbor's door.

The spinster who has just been blessed
Finds solemn thirty much improved,
By proofs that such a crabbed soul
Is still remembered and beloved.
Kind wishes "ancient Lu" has stored
In the best chamber" of her heart,
And every gift on Fancy's stage
Already plays its little part.

Time will give it an evergreen name,
Axe cannot harm it, frost cannot kill;
With Emerson's pine and Thoreau's oak
Will the Hawthorne be loved and honored still!

A source of deep enjoyment to my father was a long visit from his sister, Ebie Hawthorne (he having given her that pretty title instead of any other abbreviation of Elizabeth). I came to know her very well in after-years, and was astonished at her magic resemblance to my father in many ways. I always felt her unmistakable power. She was chock-full of worldly wisdom, though living in the utmost monastic retirement, only allowing herself to browse in two wide regions, the woods and literature. She knew the latest news from the papers, and the oldest classics alongside of them. She was potentially, we thought, rather hazardous, or perverse. But language refuses to explain her. Her brother seemed not to dream of this, yet no doubt relished the fact that a nature as unique as any he had drawn sparkled in his sister. She was a good deal unspiritual in everything; but all besides in her was fine mind, wisdom, and loving-kindness of a lazy, artistic sort. That is to say, she was unregenerate, but excellent; and she fascinated like a wood-creature seldom seen and observant, refined and untrained. My sister was devoted to her, and says, for the hundredth time, in a passage among many pages of their correspondence bequeathed to me :—

MY OWN DEAR AUNTIE, -I was made very happy by your letter this week. What perfectly charming letters you write! Now, don't laugh and say I am talking nonsense; it is really true. You make the simplest things interesting by your way of telling them; and your observations and humor are so keen that I often feel sorry the world does not know something of them. I never remember you to have told me anything twice, and that can be said of very few people; but

My father began to express his wishes in regard to provision for our aunt in case of his death; to burn old letters; and to impart to my mother and Una all that he particularly desired to say to them, among other things his dislike of biographies, and that he forbade any such matter in connection with himself in any distance of the future. This command, respected for a number of years, has been, like all such forcible and prophetic demurs, most signally set aside. It would take long to explain my own modifications of opinion from arguments of fierce resistance to the request for a biographical handling of him; and it matters, no doubt, very little. Such a man must be thoroughly known, as great saints are always sooner or later known, though endeavoring to hide their victories of holiness and charity. Certainly my father did not like to die, though he now wished to do so. My mother, later, often spoke, in consolation for us and for herself, of his dread of helpless old age; and she tried to be glad that his desire to disappear before decrepitude had been fulfilled. But such wise wishes are not carried out as we might choose. The sudden transformation which took place in my father after his coming to America was like an instant's change in the atmosphere from sunshine to dusky cold. I have never had the least difficulty in explaining it to myself; but I might ramble on unpardonably if I developed here the hints already given of my view.

One large item in the sum of his regrets was his unexpectedly narrowed means. It would have required a generous amount of money to put The Wayside and its grounds into the delectable order at first contemplated, to bring them into any sort of English perfection, and my parents found that they could not afford it; and so all resulted in semi-comfort and

My mother bore every reverse nobly. She writes, after her husband's death: "I have enjoyed life,' and 'its hard pinches have not too deeply bitten into my heart. But this has been because I am not only hopeful and of indomitable credence by nature, but because this temperament, together with the silent ministry of pain, has helped me to the perfect, the unshadowed belief in the instant providence of God; in his eternal love, patience, sweetness; in his shining face, never averted. It is because I cannot be disappointed on account of this belief. To stand and wait after doing all that is legitimate is my instinct, my best wisdom, my inspiration; and I always hear the still, small voice at last. If man would not babble so much, we could much oftener hear God. The lesson of my life has been patience. has only made me feel the more humble that God has been so beyond count benignant to me. I have been cushioned and pillowed with tender love from the cradle. Such a mother seldom falls to the lot of mortals. She was the angel of my life. Her looks and tones and her acts of high-bred womanhood were the light and music and model of my childhood. Then God joined my destiny with him who was to be all relations in one. Pain passed away when my husband

It

Poverty was lighter than a thistledown with such a power of felicity to uphold it. With lowering clouds' I have never been long darkened, because the sun above has been so penetrating that their tissue has directly become silvered and goldened. Our own closed eyelids are too often the only clouds between us and the ever-shining sun. I