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- great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader. But that dust
of which our bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler
intelligences among us? With reverence be it spoken, that not even in
the case of one deemed more than man, not even in our Saviour, did his
visible frame betoken anything of the augustness of the nature within.
Else, how could those Jewish eyewitnesses fail to see heaven in his
glance!
It is curious how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss
the grandest or sweetest of prospects by reason of an intervening
hedge, so like all other hedges, as in no way to hint of the wide
landscape beyond. So has it been with me concerning the enchanting
landscape in the soul of this Hawthorne, this most excellent Man of
Mosses. His Old Manse has been written now four years, but I never read
it till a day or two since. I had seen it in the book-stores--heard
of it often--even had it recommended to me by a tasteful friend,
as a rare, quiet book, perhaps too deserving of popularity to be
popular. But there are so many books called "excellent," and so much
unpopular merit, that amid the thick stir of other things, the hint
of my tasteful friend was disregarded and for four years the Mosses
on the Old Manse never refreshed me with their perennial green. It
may be, however, that all this while the book, likewise, was only
improving in flavor and body. At any rate, it so chanced that this long
procrastination eventuated in a happy result. At breakfast the other
day, a mountain girl, a cousin of mine, who for the last two weeks has
every morning helped me to strawberries and raspberries, which, like
the roses and pearls in the fairy tale, seemed to fall into the saucer
from those strawberry-beds, 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-by 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 hillside 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."
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