robes floated around the Old Manse, ghostly as the decaying surplice
of the old pastor's portrait, and in the snowy seclusion of winter the
mystery was as mysterious as ever.

Occasionally Emerson or Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau--some poet,
as once Whittier, journeying to the Merrimac, or an old Brook-Farmer
who remembered Miles Coverdale with Arcadian sympathy--went down the
avenue and disappeared in the house. Sometimes a close observer, had
he been ambushed among the long grasses of the orchard, might have
seen the host and one of his guests emerging at the back door and,
sauntering to the river-side, step into the boat, and float off until
they faded in the shadow. The spectacle would not have lessened the
romance. If it were afternoon--one of the spectrally sunny afternoons
which often bewitch that region--he would be only the more convinced
that there was something inexplicable in the whole matter of this man
whom nobody knew, who was never once seen at town-meeting, and
concerning whom it was whispered that he did not constantly attend
church all day, although he occupied the reverend parsonage of the
village and had unmeasured acres of manuscript sermons in his attic,
besides the nearly extinct portrait of an utterly extinct clergyman.
Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis were nothing to this, and the
awe-stricken observer, if he could creep safely out of the long grass,
did not fail to do so quietly, fortifying his courage by remembering
stories of the genial humanity of the last old pastor who inhabited
the Manse, and who for fifty years was the bland and beneficent Pope
of Concord. A genial, gracious old man, whose memory is yet sweet in
the village, and who, wedded to the grave traditions of New England
theology, believed of his young relative Waldo Emerson, as Miss Flite,
touching her forehead, said of her landlord, that he was "_m_, quite
_m_", but was proud to love in him the hereditary integrity of noble