has kept the reputation of Concord green, and it has been watered,
moreover, so to speak, by the life-long presence there of one of the
most honoured of American men of letters--the poet from whom I just
quoted two lines. Concord is indeed in itself decidedly verdant, and
is an excellent specimen of a New England village of the riper sort.
At the time of Hawthorne's first going there it must have been an even
better specimen than to-day--more homogeneous, more indigenous, more
absolutely democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign immigration
had scarcely begun to break upon the rural strongholds of the New
England race; it had at most begun to splash them with the salt
Hibernian spray. It is very possible, however, that at this period
there was not an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a
village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village
community was not the least honourable item in the sum of New England
civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous
summers and ponderous winters, its immediate background of promiscuous
field and forest, would have been part of the composition. For the
rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-schools
and the self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly and
familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to
manage its affairs itself. In the delightful introduction to the
_Mosses_, Hawthorne has given an account of his dwelling, of his
simple occupations and recreations, and of some of the characteristics
of the place. The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the
surface of which--even in the dry New England air, so unfriendly to
mosses and lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a
picturesque complexion--a hundred and fifty years of exposure have
imparted a kind of tone, standing just above the slow-flowing Concord
river, and approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees. It had
been the dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian ministers,