Talking Big

I visited The Old Manse today. This is a house built in 1770 for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grandfather, William Emerson. Emerson and Hawthorne both lived there for short periods of time in the 1830s and 1840s. All the photos are mine. The words are mostly by Hawthorne.

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.

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”

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.

It was awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there.

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”

They had all vanished now; a cheerful coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small apartment…

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”

Replica of Emerson’s chair

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.

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”

pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como…

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”

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… 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.

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”

How early in the summer, too, the prophecy of autumn comes! Earlier in some years than in others; sometimes even in the first weeks of July. There is no other feeling
like what is caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception–if it be not rather a foreboding–of the year’s decay, so blessedly sweet and sad in the same breath.

Did I say that there was no feeling like it? Ah, but there is a half- acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the perfected vigor of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never-idle fingers must be to steal them one by one away.

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”

In one respect our precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial City.

• Hawthorne, “The Old Manse”