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me patient beyond what you think me capable of. I will even be happy, if you will only keep your heart and mind at peace. I will go to Concord tomorrow or next day, and see about our affairs there. P. S. I love you! I love you! I love you! P. S. 2. Do you love me at all?

-On the 9th of July, 1842, the marriage took place at the house of Dr. Peabody, No. 13 West Street, Boston. The ceremony was performed by Rev. James Freeman Clarke, who, by a singular chance, never afterwards met Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne until, on the 19th of May, 1864, he preached the funeral sermon, at Concord church, over Mr. Hawthorne's dead body. The spectators of the wedding were very few; but, such as they were, they looked on with loving and praying hearts. The imagination lingers over this scene, with its simplicity, its deep but happy emotion, its faith, its promise, and its courage. The future that lay before the married lovers had in it its full proportion of joy, of sorrow, of honor, and of loss; but there was, in the chapter of their life which had just closed, an ethereal bloom of loveliness which can come but once even to the pure in heart, and which to many comes not at all.

CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD MANSE.

IN the preceding chapters little space has been given to discussion of the merely literary aspect and details of Hawthorne's life. A good deal might have been said about his early successes and disappointments in this direction: how hard he worked for publishers who paid him only with promises; how the "Athenæum" and Mr. Longfellow praised him; how Poe criticised him; how the "Church Review" attacked him; and more to the same effect, with the writer's meditations and comments thereupon. But such matters appertain less to the biographer than to the bibliographer. They give no solidity or form to our conception of the man. Hawthorne's works are published to the world, and any one may read them, and derive from them whatever literary or moral culture he may be susceptible of. But any attempt to make the works throw light upon their author is certain to miscarry, unless the student be previously impregnated with a very distinct and unmistakable conception of that author's human and natural (as distinct from his merely imaginative and artistic) personality. The books may add depth

and minuteness to this conception, when once it has been attained, but they cannot be depended on to create it beforehand. Accordingly, it is the biographer's business, so far as his abilities and materials allow, to confine himself to putting the reader in possession of this human aspect of his subject, and to let the rest take care, in great measure, of itself. In other words, he must do for the reader only so much. as the reader cannot do for himself. To do more would be superfluous, if not presumptuous. Few men, who have made literature the business of their lives, have been less dependent than Hawthorne upon literature for a character. If he had never written a line, he would still have possessed, as a human being, scarcely less interest and importance than he does now. Those who were most intimate with him not only found in him all the promise of his works, but they found enough more to put the works quite in the background. His literary phase seemed a phase only, and not the largest or most characteristic. In the same way, when he was a consul at Liverpool, nobody could have been a better consul than he; but when you came into his presence, the consul was lost sight of, and the man shone out. Some men are swallowed up by their profession, so that nothing is left of them but the profession in human form. But, for men like Hawthorne, the profession is but a means of activity; they use it, and are not used by it. Hawthorne's son remembers that, twenty or thirty years ago, it seemed to him rather a regrettable thing that

his father had written books. Why write books? He was a very good and satisfactory father without that. When, afterwards, he read the books, they struck him as being but a somewhat imperfect reflection of certain regions of his father's mind with which he had become otherwise familiar.

In the pages which are to follow, the same general aim and principle as heretofore will control the biographer in his selection and treatment of materials; but the character of the materials themselves undergoes a certain modification. A domestic career has been begun; there is a wife to be loved and to love, and there are children to be born and raised. The narrative moves more slowly as to time; it is more circumstantial and homogeneous; it is, for some years, rather contemplative than active. We feel that stories are being written, up there in the little study; we catch echoes, now and then, of the world's appreciation of them; but we are not called upon to give special heed to these matters. For there are the river, and the woods, and Sleepy Hollow; and the Old Manse itself, with its orchard, its avenue, and its vegetable garden; and Mr. Emerson passes by, with a sunbeam in his face; and Margaret Fuller receives rather independent treatment; and those odd young men, Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau, make themselves agreeable or otherwise, as the case may be. The man has reached a region of repose, temporary repose only, and complete merely on the side of the higher nature; for there are res

angustæ domi to be dealt with, and other halfcomical, half-serious difficulties to be overcome. Much of the history of this sojourn in the Old Manse has already been made public in the "NoteBooks," and in the preface to the "Mosses;" but a note slightly more personal remains to be struck. In preparing Hawthorne's literary remains for the press, his wife labored under the embarrassment of being herself the constant theme of his journalizings, and the subject of his most loving observation and reflection; and the omission of this entire element from the record left a very perceptible gap. Even now the omission can be only partially repaired; but the additions, so far as they go, are full of significance and charm. The married lovers during several years were in the habit of keeping a more or less continuous diary of their daily experiences, in which first one and then the other would hold the pen, in lovely strophe and antistrophe; and there is, moreover, that unfailing History of Happiness (as it might well be called), the letters of Mrs. Hawthorne to her mother. In the present chapter, for reasons of clearness and convenience, a strict chronological sequence will occasionally be departed from disconnected references to the same subject will be brought together, and other slight liberties be taken. with some of the more arbitrary arrangements of time. And perhaps we could not begin better than with this eloquent epithalamion — if such a title may be given to a retrospective essay, written after the death

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