intermingled gloom and brightness. It was worthy to have been one of
the time-honored parsonages of England, in which, through many
generations, a succession of holy occupants pass from youth to age,
and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to pervade the house and
hover over it as with an atmosphere.

Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A
priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men
from time to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers
had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to
reflect how many sermons must have been written there. The latest
inhabitant alone--he by whose translation to paradise the dwelling was
left vacant--had penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the
better, if not the greater, number that gushed living from his lips.
How often, no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue,
attuning his meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs and deep and
solemn peals of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees! In that
variety of natural utterances he could find something accordant with
every passage of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential
fear. The boughs over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as
well as with rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for having been
so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom
would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that
I should light upon an intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well
worth those hoards of long-hidden gold which people seek for in moss-
grown houses. Profound treatises of morality; a layman's
unprofessional, and therefore unprejudiced, views of religion;
histories (such as Bancroft might have written had he taken up his
abode here, as he once purposed) bright with picture, gleaming over a