



Produced by David Widger.  HTML version by Al Haines.









                     MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

                      By Nathaniel Hawthorne

                          THE OLD MANSE.


      The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.


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 now a twelvemonth since the funeral
procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned
from that gateway towards the village burying-ground.  The wheel-track
leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was
almost overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to two or
three vagrant cows and an old white horse who had his own living to
pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows that lay half
asleep between the door of the house and the public highway were a
kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite
the aspect of belonging to the material world.  Certainly it had
little in common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent
upon the road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were,
into the domestic circle.  From these quiet windows the figures of
passing travellers looked too remote and dim to disturb the sense of
privacy.  In its near retirement and accessible seclusion, it was the
very spot for the residence of a clergyman,--a man not estranged from
human life, yet enveloped, in the midst of it, with a veil woven of
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
depth of philosophic thought,--these were the works that might fitly
have flowed from such a retirement.  In the humblest event, I resolved
at least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and
should possess physical substance enough to stand alone.

In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not
fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful
little nook of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a
scholar.  It was here that Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an
inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and
Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill.  When
I first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of
unnumbered years, and made still blacker