Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

[ Memories of the Hawthornes at the Wayside in 1862] ( 1900)

[Memories of the Hawthornes at the Wayside in 1862] (1900) Rebecca Harding Davis In this reminiscence of her first journey to New England, the pioneering literary and journalistic realist Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–1910) describes her early desire to become a writer and her first meeting with the Hawthornes, Bronson andLouisaMayAlcott,ElizabethPalmerPeabody,andEmerson,amongothers, in 1862. Since she hailed from Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia), Davis’s experience of the Civil War was a topic of interest wherever she went. Visiting Concord at Nathaniel’s invitation after her “Life in the Iron Mills” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1861, Davis was impressed with the character and friendliness of some of her new acquaintances. She was especially fond of Louisa May Alcott, whom she describes as writing books that were “true and fine”, yet as incapable of imagining “a life as noble as her own” (565), and of Peabody, whom she credits as “a woman of wide research and a really fine intelligence ” but, given the anecdote she relates here, as sometimes possessing “the discretion of a six-year-old child” (569). By contrast, Davis was impatient with the “seers”: Bronson Alcott and Emerson. In this piece written forty years after first meeting them, Davis remembers Alcott as an “awkward . . . old man, absolutely ignorant of the world, but with an obstinate faith in himself” (564), and she remains completely resistant to Emerson, ridiculing him throughout for his aloofness, egotism, and tendency to use people, including his friends, as objects of study. Hawthorne, however, endures as her favorite. Vividly recalling her last day in Concord, she recounts a morning walk with Nathaniel and Sophia to the Old Manse and Sleepy Hollow, the idyllic haunts of their early married life. She reports that as he reclined on the grass at Sleepy Hollow, which had been consecrated as a cemetery in 1855, Nathaniel looked up with a laugh and uttered what has since become one of his most quoted lines: “‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we New Englanders begin to enjoy ourselves— when we are dead.’” “Of the many pleasant things which have come into my life,” Davis concludes, this visit to Concord “was one of the pleasantest and best” (570). [101] [101] XZ hawthorne in his own time [102] In the garden of the old house in Virginia where we lived, there were some huge cherry-trees, with low growing branches, and in one of them our nurse, Barbara, having an architectural turn of mind, once built me a house. Really,even now,old as I am,and after I have seen St.James’s and the Vatican, I can’t imagine any house as satisfactory as Barbara’s. . . . One day I climbed up with a new book, the first cheap book by the way that I ever saw. It was in two volumes; the cover was of yellow paper and the name was “Moral Tales.” The tales, for the most part, were thin and cheap as the paper; they commanded no enchanted company bad or good into the cherry-tree. But among them were two or three unsigned stories which I read over so often that I almost know every line of them by heart now. One was a story told by a town-pump, and another the account of the rambles of a little girl like myself, and still another a description of a Sunday morning in a quiet town like our sleepy village. There was no talk of enchantment in them. But in these papers the commonplace folk and things which I saw every day took on a sudden mystery and charm, and for the first time I found that they, too, belonged to the magic world of knights and pilgrims and fiends. The publisher of “Moral Tales,” whoever he was, had probably stolen these anonymous papers from the annuals in which they had appeared. Nobody called him to account.Their author was then,as he tells us somewhere, the “obscurest man of letters in America.” Years afterward, when he was known as the greatest of living romancers, I opened his “Twice-Told Tales” and found there my old friends with a shock of delight as keen as if I had met one of my own kinsfolk in the streets of a foreign city. In the first heat of my discovery I wrote to Mr. Hawthorne and told him about Barbara’s house and of what he had done for the child who used to hide there. The little story...