CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I II III IV V VI VII VIII    IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX ILLUSTRATIONS (not available to this edition) NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse) BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS HERMAN MELVILLE JAMES T. FIELDS THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife) EDWIN P. WHIPPLE JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES ROBERT BRO

The best use we can make of good fortune is to share it with our fellows. Those to whom good things come by way of inheritance, however, are often among the latest to comprehend their own advantage; they suppose it to be the common condition. And no doubt I had nearly arrived at man's estate before it occurred to me that the lines of few fishers of men were cast in places so pleasant as mine. I was the son of a man of high desert, who had such friends as he deserved; and these companions and adm

My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the aid of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on the walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach me all the leading dates of human history—the charts being designed according to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish memory. But as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates and in matters

Horatio Bridge, my father's college friend, was a purser in the navy and lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at Portsmouth. He had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant "I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard. And when my father cast

The sky that overhung Hawthorne's departure from Lenox was gray with impending snow, and the flakes had begun to fall ere the vehicle in which his family was ensconced had reached the railway station in Pittsfield. Travel had few amenities in those days. The cars were all plain cars, with nothing to recommend them except that they went tolerably fast—from twenty to thirty miles an hour. They were chariots of delight to the children, who were especially happy in occupying the last car of the trai

My father's first look at "The Wayside" had been while snow was still on the ground, and he had reported to his wife that it resembled a cattle-pen. But the family advent was effected in June, and although a heavy rain had fallen while the domestic impedimenta were in transit, wetting the mattresses and other exposed furniture, yet when the summer sun came out things began to mend. My mother and Una came a day ahead of the others, and with the help of carpenters and upholsterers, and a neighbori

The steamship Niagara was, in 1853, a favorable specimen of nautical architecture; the Cunard Company had then been in existence rather less than a score of years, and had already established its reputation for safety and convenience. But, with the exception of the red smoke-stack with the black ring round the top, there was little similarity between the boat that took us to England and the mammoths that do that service for travellers now adays. The Niagara was about two hundred and fifty feet l

In a country whose ruling principle is caste, it might be expected that the line of cleavage between the upper and the lower grades would be punctually observed. It is assumed that democracy levels and aristocracy distinguishes and separates. My father was not long in remarking, however, that there was a freedom of intercourse between the patrician and the plebeian—between people of all orders—such as did not exist in America. And the fact, once perceived, was not difficult of explanation. In a

That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality than any other with which we became conversant while in England. With the exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only experience vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time we lived in lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The boarding-houses of England are like other boarding-houses; the hotels, or inns, in the middle of the last century, were for the most part plain and homely compared with w

In the spring of 1854 we were visited by John O'Sullivan, his wife and mother, and a young relative of theirs, Miss Ella Rogers. O'Sullivan had been appointed Minister to the Court of Portugal, and was on his way thither. He was a Democrat of old standing; had edited the Democratic Review in 1837, and had made my father's acquaintance at that time through soliciting contributions from him; later they became close friends, and when my sister Una was born, he sent her a silver cup, and was ever af

Emerson, as a matter of principle, was rather averse from travel, though he made the trip to England twice; but he fortified his theory by his practice of searching out great men rather than historic or picturesque places. Ruskin's Modern Painters had not been written when Emerson first left home, and I doubt if he read it at any time. He found his mountain scenery in Carlyle and his lakes and vales elsewhere among agreeable people. My father's conscience worked in a different way; he thought hi

It was observed a little way back that English boarding-houses were much like other boarding-houses in the civilized world. The rule is proved by the exception of Mrs. Blodgett's establishment. There never was such another; there never will be; it was unique. It has vanished from earth long since; but if there were boarding-houses in paradise, I should certainly expect it to be found again there. Who was Mrs. Blodgett? Save that she was a widow of the British middle class, I doubt if any one of

The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by desire, it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent in those regions for years—two years at least; and I was astonished and almost incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval had been six or eight months only. It was long enough. In the course of the previous s

We spent our first reunited week at the Castle Hotel, which was founded on an ancient castle wall, or part of it; traces of it were shown to guests. The harbor lapped the sea-wall in front; the Isle of Wight, white-ramparted, gleamed through the haze in the offing. I suppose, during that week, we were enough employed in telling one another our histories during our separation; and naturally that of my mother and sisters filled the larger space. They had brought home words and phrases in a foreign

No doubt my father had grown fond of England during his four years' residence there. Except for its profits he had not, indeed, liked the consular work; but even that had given zest to his several excursions from it, which were in themselves edifying and enjoyable. The glamour of tradition, too, had wrought upon him, and he had made friends and formed associations. Such influences, outwardly gentle and unexacting, take deeper hold of the soul than we are at the time aware. They show their streng

We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o'clock at night. After a day or two at Spillman's Hotel, we moved into lodgings in the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended just below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the broad flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d' Espagna, on the left as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new dwelling had not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or architectural pretens

THE Roman carnival opened about a month after our arrival in Rome. The weather was bad nearly all the time, and my father's point of view was correspondingly unsympathetic. The contrast between his mood now and a year later, when he was not only stimulated by his daughter's recovery from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third phase—as art. But

We children had been drilled in Roman history, from Romulus to Caesar, and we could, and frequently did, repeat by heart the Lays of Ancient Rome by Macaulay, which were at that period better known, perhaps, than they are now. Consequently, everything in Rome had a certain degree of meaning for us, and gave us a pleasure in addition to the intrinsic beauty or charm that belonged thereto. Our imagination thronged the Capitol with senators; saw in the Roman Forum the contentions of the tribunes an

While my father was conscientiously making acquaintance with the achievements of old-time art, modern artists were trying to practise their skill on him; he had already sat to Cephas Giovanni Thompson, and he was now asked to contribute his head to the studio of a certain Miss Lander, late of Salem, Massachusetts, now settled, as she intended, permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him, "it is merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my trunk is unpacked." Miss L

The railroad which now unites Rome with Florence defrauds travellers of some of the most agreeable scenery in Italy, and one of the most time-honored experiences; and as for the beggars who infested the route, they must long since have perished of inanition—not that they needed what travellers gave them in the way of alms, but that, like Othello, their occupation being gone, they must cease to exist. Never again could they look forward to pestering a tourist; never exhibit a withered arm or an a

Siena is distant from Florence, in a direct line, not more than fifty miles, but the railway turns the western flank of the mountains, and kept us full three hours on the trip. I had long been familiar with a paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I thought that