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“Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne” (1882) Moncure Daniel Conway Born in Virginia to a slaveholding family, the Unitarian minister, prolific author, and abolitionist Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907) might seem an unlikely advocate for the core beliefs associated with Transcendentalism. However, after first meeting Emerson in Concord in 1853, and through him being drawn into the eclectic circle that included Thoreau, Elizabeth Hoar and Elizabeth Peabody, Sanborn, the Ripleys, and the Hawthornes, Conway believed he had arrived at his intellectual and ethical home. Like Sanborn, Conway was a second -generation Transcendentalist; since they knew and outlived the principal figures involved in the movement, both enjoyed a quarter-century reign as historians of Transcendentalism and biographers of its leading figures. As Conway states in the following selection drawn from his Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882), he knew Hawthorne through his writings long before he met him. An unapologetic sentimentalist, especially in his account of the relationship he personally witnessed between Nathaniel and Sophia, he was sympathetic to the variety of personal trials Hawthorne endured by virtue of his lineage, the slowness with which his literary reputation emerged, and his position on the Civil War. As far as Conway was concerned, Hawthorne was the creative equal of any of the major writers and thinkers of his time, including Emerson, a conviction that is evident throughout the many reviews he wrote of Hawthorne’s works as well as in his Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1890). On a day in Concord I saw the two men whom Michael Angelo might have chosen as emblems of Morning and Twilight, to be carved over the gates of the New World. Emerson emerged from his modern home, and the shade of well-trimmed evergreens in front, with “shining morning face,” his eye beaming with its newest vision of the golden year. Hawthorne, at the other extreme[,] . . . came softly out of his earlier home, the Old Manse—the greygabled mansion, where dwelt in the past men and women who have gained new lease of existence through his genius—and stepped along the avenue of ancient ash-trees, which made a fit frame around him. A superb man he was! His erect, full, and shapely figure might have belonged to an athlete, [207] [207] XZ hawthorne in his own time [208] were it not for the grace and reserve which rendered the strength of frame unobtrusive. The massive forehead and brow, with dark locks on either side, the strong nose and mouth, with another soul beneath them, might be the physiognomy of a military man or political leader—some man impelled by powerful public passions; but with this man there came through the large soft eyes a gentle glow which suffused the face and spiritualised the form. No wonder such fascination held his college fellows to him! Longfellow used to talk in poetry when his early days at Bowdoin with Hawthorne were the theme; and the memory of President Pierce has lost some stains through his lifelong devotion to his early friend. How the personages who had long before preceded him in that first home of his manhood had become his familiar friends and visitors—preferred to others separated from him by reason of their flesh and blood—no reader of “Mosses from an Old Manse”need be told.As he came down the avenue,unconscious of any curious or admiring eye resting on him, every step seemed a leap, as if his shadowy familiars were whispering happy secrets. What was this genius loci thinking of as he walked there? It may have been about that time he mentioned the Old Manse to a friend, and wrote: “The trees of the avenue—how many leaves have fallen since I last saw them!” It was always on the fallen leaf that Hawthorne found the sentence for his romance, but to what a beautiful new life did it germinate there! It is an almost solemn reflection that in that same Old Manse, and in the same room, were written Emerson’s “Nature” and Hawthorne’s “Goodman Brown.” On the twenty-eighth birthday of the American Republic was born also this last wizard of Salem; and the spirit of the day, as well as of the place, was potent in him. . . . I know not whether it be because Beauty insists on rising from even such distant waves, but the Salem people and their homes always appeared to me to possess a peculiar charm. Here young Nathaniel could read on Gallows Hill...

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