Hawthorne and His Circle

Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and shadows of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's life and mine

I

Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of the age

II

Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--The Unpardonable Sin and the Death--less Man--The little red house--Materials of culture--Our best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual hen-fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes, ambrosial breath-My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and melancholy-sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An eighteen-months' work--We leave five cats behind

III

Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President--"The most homeless people in the world"

IV

A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common men feel more like Emerson than he did--His personal appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are in the woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--Sounds of distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An unwritten romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer than in the world--The return of the pilgrim

V

A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the carpenter--W. D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An aristocratic acrobat--Speech that beggars eulogy--The boots of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The last infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic geniality--A standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools, mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-, Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of memorable trifles

VI

Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon tea--An East--Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles--A psalm of praise