He delivered a lecture one winter before the Concord lyceum on wild
apple-trees. The subject made his audience laugh, but their laughter
was of short duration. The man who had lived there so long unknown was
at last revealed before them, It was the best lecture of the season,
and at its close there was long continued applause.




HAWTHORNE.


The literary celebrities of Concord, with the exception of Thoreau, were
not indigenous. Emerson may have gone there from an hereditary tendency,
but more likely because his cousins the Ripleys dwelt there. Hawthorne
came there by way of the Brook Farm experiment. How, with his reserved
and solitary mode of life, he should have embarked in such a gregarious
enterprise is not very clear; but the election of General Harrison had
deprived him of a small government office--it seems as if Webster might
have interfered in his behalf--his writings brought him very little, and
perhaps he hardly knew what to do with himself.

All accounts agree that he joined the West Roxbury association of his
own free-will, and without solicitation of any kind. He not only threw
himself into this hazardous scheme with an energy that astounded his
friends but he embarked in it all the money he had in the world, which
was nearly a thousand dollars. He has left no explanation from which we
might infer what his hopes or his motives were.