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- 3806
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.879Z
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- 3754
- text
- her cheeks--this delightful creature, this charming Cherry says to
me--‘I see you spend your mornings in the haymow; and yesterday I found
there Dwight’s _Travels in New England_. Now I have something far better
than that, something more congenial to our summer on these hills. Take
these raspberries, and then I will give you some moss.’ ‘Moss!’ said I.
‘Yes, and you must take it to the barn with you, and good-bye to
Dwight.’
With that she left me, and soon returned with a volume, verdantly bound,
and garnished with a curious frontispiece in green; nothing less than a
fragment of real moss, cunningly pressed to a fly-leaf. ‘Why, this,’
said I, spilling my raspberries, ‘this is the _Mosses from an Old
Manse_.’ ‘Yes,’ said cousin Cherry, ‘yes, it is that flowery Hawthorne.’
‘Hawthorne and Mosses,’ said I, ‘no more it is morning: it is July in
the country: and I am off for the barn.’
Stretched on that new-mown clover, the hill-side breeze blowing over me
through the wide barn door, and soothed by the hum of the bees in the
meadows around, how magically stole over me this Mossy Man! and how
amply, how bountifully, did he redeem that delicious promise to his
guests in the Old Manse, of whom it is written: ‘Others could give them
pleasure, or amusement, or instruction--these could be picked up
anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest--rest, in a life of
trouble! What better could be done for those weary and world-worn
spirits?... what better could be done for anybody who came within our
magic circle than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him?’ So
all that day, half-buried in the new clover, I watched this Hawthorne’s
‘Assyrian dawn, and Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our
eastern hill.’
The soft ravishments of the man spun me round about in a web of dreams,
and when the book was closed, when the spell was over, this wizard
‘dismissed me with but misty reminiscences, as if I had been dreaming of
him.’
What a wild moonlight of contemplative humour bathes that Old
Manse!--the rich and rare distilment of a spicy and slowly-oozing heart.
No rollicking rudeness, no gross fun fed on fat dinners, and bred in the
lees of wine,--but a humour so spiritually gentle, so high, so deep, and
yet so richly relishable, that it were hardly inappropriate in an angel.
It is the very religion of mirth; for nothing so human but it may be
advanced to that. The orchard of the Old Manse seems the visible type of
the fine mind that has described it--those twisted and contorted old
trees, ‘they stretch out their crooked branches, and take such hold of
the imagination that we remember them as humorists and odd-fellows.’ And
then, as surrounded by these grotesque forms, and hushed in the noonday
repose of this Hawthorne’s spell, how aptly might the still fall of his
ruddy thoughts into your soul be symbolised by: ‘In the stillest
afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great apple was audible,
falling without a breath of wind, from the mere necessity of perfect
ripeness.’ For no less ripe than ruddy are the apples of the thoughts
and fancies in this sweet Man of Mosses.
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