gloomier the better--that the visitor, among the felicities of whose
life was included the freedom of the Manse, could not but fancy that
our author's eyes first saw the daylight enchanted by the slumberous
orchard behind the house, or tranquillized into twilight by the
spacious avenue in front. The character of his imagination, and the
golden gloom of its blossoming, completely harmonize with the rusty,
gable-roofed old house upon the river-side, and the reader of his
books would be sure that his boyhood and youth knew no other friends
than the dreaming river and the melancholy meadows and drooping
foliage of its vicinity.

Since the reader, however, would greatly mistake if he fancied this,
in good sooth, the ancestral halls of the Hawthornes--the genuine
Hawthorne-den--he will be glad to save the credit of his fancy by
learning that it was here our author's bridal tour--which commenced in
Boston, then three hours away--ended, and his married life began.
Here, also, his first child was born, and here those sad and silver
mosses accumulated upon his fancy, from which he heaped so soft a bed
for our dreaming. "Between two tall gate-posts of rough hewn stone
(the gate itself having fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch)
we beheld the gray front of the old parsonage, terminating the vista
of an avenue of black-ash trees." It was a pleasant spring day in the
year 1843, and as they entered the house nosegays of fresh flowers,
arranged by friendly hands, welcomed them to Concord and summer.

The dark-haired man, who led his wife along the avenue that afternoon,
had been recently an officer of the customs in Boston, before which he
had led a solitary life in Salem. Graduated with Longfellow at Bowdoin
College, in Maine, he had lived a hermit in respectable Salem, an
absolute recluse even from his own family, walking out by night and