



Produced by David Widger.  HTML version by Al Haines.









                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne

                          FIRE WORSHIP



It is a great revolution in social and domestic life, and no less so
in the life of a secluded student, this almost universal exchange of
the open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove.  On such a
morning as now lowers around our old gray parsonage, I miss the
bright face of my ancient friend, who was wont to dance upon the
hearth and play the part of more familiar sunshine.  It is sad to
turn from the cloudy sky and sombre landscape; from yonder hill,
with its crown of rusty, black pines, the foliage of which is so
dismal in the absence of the sun; that bleak pasture-land, and the
broken surface of the potato-field, with the brown clods partly
concealed by the snowfall of last night; the swollen and sluggish
river, with ice-incrusted borders, dragging its bluish-gray stream
along the verge of our orchard like a snake half torpid with the
cold,--it is sad to turn from an outward scene of so little comfort
and find the same sullen influences brooding within the precincts of
my study.  Where is that brilliant guest, that quick and subtle
spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize mankind and
cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate,
whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient
consolation for summer's lingering advance and early flight? Alas!
blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him cheery and
mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron prison, and compel him to
smoulder away his life on a daily pittance which once would have
been too scanty for his breakfast.  Without a metaphor, we now make
our fire in an air-tight stove, and supply it with some half a dozen
sticks of wood between dawn and nightfall.

I never shall be reconciled to this enormity.  Truly may it be said
that the world looks darker for it.  In one way or another, here and
there and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting
the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.
The domestic fire was a type of all these attributes, and seemed to
bring might and majesty, and wild nature and a spiritual essence,
into our in most home, and yet to dwell with us in such friendliness
that its mysteries and marvels excited no dismay.  The same mild
companion that smiled so placidly in our faces was he that comes
roaring out of AEtna and rushes madly up the sky like a fiend
breaking loose from torment and fighting for a place among the upper
angels.  He it is, too, that leaps from cloud to cloud amid the
crashing thunder-storm. It was he whom the Gheber worshipped with no
unnatural idolatry; and it was he who devoured London and Moscow and
many another famous city, and who loves to riot through our own dark
forests and sweep across our prairies, and to whose ravenous maw, it
is said, the universe shall one day be given as a final feast.
Meanwhile he is the great artisan and laborer by whose aid men are
enabled to build a world within a world, or, at least, to smooth
down the rough creation which Nature flung to it.  He forges the
mighty anchor and every lesser instrument; he drives the steamboat
and drags the rail-car; and it was he--this creature of
terrible might, and so many-sided utility and all-comprehensive
destructiveness--that used to be the cheerful, homely friend of our
wintry days, and whom we have made the prisoner of this iron cage.

How kindly he was! and, though the tremendous agent of change, yet
bearing himself with such gentleness, so rendering himself a part of
all life-long and age-coeval associations, that it seemed as if he
were the great conservative of nature.  While a man was true to the
fireside, so long would he be true to country and law, to the God
whom his fathers worshipped, to the wife of his youth, and to all
things else which instinct or religion has taught us to consider
sacred.  With how sweet humility did this elemental spirit perform
all needful offices for the household in which he was domesticated!
He was equal to the concoction of a grand dinner, yet scorned not to
roast a potato or toast a bit of cheese.  How humanely did he
cherish the school-boy's icy fingers, and thaw the old man's joints
with