ancestors of the celebrated Emerson, who had himself spent his early
manhood and written some of his most beautiful essays there. "He
used," as Hawthorne says, "to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphian
sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From its
clerical occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of
theological association--a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic
sermons, which served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent
quality. The three years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should
suppose, among the happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in
any special manner assured; but the present was sufficiently genial.
In the American Note-Books there is a charming passage (too long to
quote) descriptive of the entertainment the new couple found in
renovating and re-furnishing the old parsonage, which, at the time of
their going into it, was given up to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little
drawing-room, which had been most completely reclaimed, he writes that
"the shade of our departed host will never haunt it; for its aspect
has been as completely changed as the scenery of a theatre. Probably
the ghost gave one peep into it, uttered a groan, and vanished for
ever." This departed host was a certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable
scholar, who left behind him a reputation of learning and sanctity
which was reproduced in one of the ladies of his family, long the most
distinguished woman in the little Concord circle. Doctor Ripley's
predecessor had been, I believe, the last of the line of the Emerson
ministers--an old gentleman who, in the earlier years of his
pastorate, stood at the window of his study (the same in which
Hawthorne handled a more irresponsible quill) watching, with his hands
under his long coat-tails, the progress of Concord fight. It is not by
any means related, however, I should add, that he waited for the
conclusion to make up his mind which was the righteous cause.