



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 by the grim prints of Puritan
ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad
angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so continually and so
sternly with the Devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been
imparted to their own visages.  They had all vanished now; a cheerful
coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small
apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against the
overhanging eaves atempered the cheery western sunshine.  In place of
the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of
Raphael's Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of
Como.  The only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers,
always fresh, and a bronze one containing graceful ferns.  My books
(few, and by no means choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as
chance had thrown in my way) stood in order about the room, seldom to
be disturbed.

The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
glass, each with a crack across it.  The two on the western side
looked, or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the
orchard, with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third,
facing northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot
where its hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of
history.  It was at this window that the clergyman who then dwelt in
the Manse stood watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle
between two nations; he saw the irregular array of his parishioners on
the farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the British
on the hither bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of
the musketry. It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the
battle-smoke around this quiet house.

Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of
sight-showing,--perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the
memorable spot. We stand now on the river's brink.  It may well be called
the Concord,--the river of peace and quietness; for it is certainly the
most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly
towards its eternity,--the sea. Positively I had lived three weeks
beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception which way the
current flowed.  It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a
northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a sunshiny day.  From the
incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of
becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a
wild, free mountain torrent.  While all things else are compelled to
subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even water-power
enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks.  The torpor
of its movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much
as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course.  It
slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and
bathes the overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the
roots of elms and ash-trees and clumps of maples.  Flags and rushes
grow along its plashy shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad,
flat leaves on the margin; and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds,
generally selecting a position just so far from the river's brink that
it cannot be grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.

It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the
mud-turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same
black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and
noisome odor.  Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons
assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral
circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance
of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.

The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
towards our slumberous stream.  In the light of a calm and golden
sunset it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the
quietude that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after
blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest.  Each tree and
rock and every blade of grass is distinctly imaged, and, however
unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection.  The
minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the firmament are
pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity of success.
All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through
the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
peaceful heart.  We will not, then, malign our river as gross and
impure while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the
heaven that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the
muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul
has an infinite spiritual capacity and may contain the better world
within its depths.  But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of
any mud-puddle in the streets of a city; and, being taught us
everywhere, it must be true.

Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
battle-ground.  Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed
by the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of
the contest.  On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a
wide circumference of shade, but which must have been planted at some
period within the threescore years and ten that have passed since the
battle-day.  On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes,
we discern the stone abutment of the bridge.  Looking down
into the river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers,
all green with half a century's growth of water-moss; for during that
length of time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased
along this ancient highway.  The stream has here about the breadth of
twenty strokes of a swimmer's arm,--a space not too wide when the
bullets were whistling across.  Old people who dwell hereabouts will
point out, the very spots on the western bank where our countrymen
fell down and died; and on this side of the river an obelisk of
granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized with British
blood.  The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as
it befitted the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration of a
matter of