Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/215

Rh, meeting with a forlorn, dejected, used-up old man, tries to identify his own mind with the old fellow's, and take his view of the world, as if looking through a smoke-blackened glass at the sun. In a carious disposition of mind, of which these habits are exponents, lies much of the author's power and weakness both. With special ability to depict exceptional modes of human nature, is conjoined special temptation to linger amid what is morbid, and to court intimacy with whatever deviates from the dull standard of conventionalism, and give to distortion and oddity the preference over "harmonic union." He has been described as walking abroad always at night, so that it is but a moonlight glimmering which you catch of reality. Applying to him what has been said of a countryman of his, we may pronounce his delight to lie in treading the border-land between the material and spiritual worlds—the debateable country of dreams, sleep-walking, and clairvoyance. The impression he leaves on the mind is usually one of despondency and sadness; a depressing, enervating presence not to be put by. He puts on paper, in palpable letters, which the dejected, doubting heart, in moody moments, knows too well how to spell into "words that bum" into its own core—the floating, timid, but ever-recurring fears and fancies with which that heart, knowing its own bitterness, and not knowing its own whence and whither and why, is tremblingly familiar. No wonder that Mr. Hawthorne should be so richly endowed, as some of his observers assure us he is, When occupying the Old Manse, Mr. Hawthorne is said to have been, to his neighbours, as much a phantom and a fable as the old parson of the parish, dead half a century before, whose faded portrait in the attic was gradually rejoining its original in native dust. "The gate, fallen from its hinges in a remote antiquity, was never re-hung. The wheel-track leading to the door remained still overgrown with grass. No bold villager ever invaded the sleep of the glimmering shadows in the avenue. At evening, no lights gleamed in the windows. Scarce once in many months did the single old nobby-faced coachman at the railroad bring a fare to Mr. Hawthorne's." If ever his "darkly-clad figure" was to be seen in the garden, it was as a "brief apparition"—and passing farmers would think they had but dreamed of it, till again they caught a glimpse of the solitary. One of his vis-à-vis observers, however, thus describes him:—"During Hawthorne's first year's residence in Concord, I have driven up with some friends to an æsthetic tea at Mr. Emerson's. It was in the winter, and a great wood fire blazed on the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled, and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that were said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the hedge (?) of the circle, a little withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his bright eyes clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow, looked to me—a kind of poetic Webster. He rose and walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long time, watching the dead white landscape. No appeal was made to him, nobody looked after him, the conversation flowed steadily on as if everybody understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed æsthetic tea. Whatever fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light in his eye which assured me that nothing was lost. So with the