refine it; and, by and by, this rude old potency bestirred itself, and undid all her labor in the twinkling of an eye. On the whole, I do not know, but I like her the better for it; because she proved herself a very woman after all, and fell as the weakest of her sisters might.[1]
After his departure from Brook Farm, Hawthorne married that fine intelligent Emersonian woman Sophia Peabody, July 9, 1842, and lived for the next four years at the Old Manse in Concord. There in former days, as he remembers in the quietly rapturous introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse, Emerson had written Nature; "or 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." For Hawthorne it was a return from an uncomfortable hot-bed of culture to Eden, and he was accustomed indeed to speak of himself and his wife at that period as Adam and Eve. In a serene felicity of mutual understanding and perfect sympathy they dwelt in their solitude à deux, each sufficient for the other, though occasionally he would hunt Indian arrowheads or water lilies with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, or they would meet Emerson "in the woodpaths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment of a shining one; and he, so quiet,
- ↑ Extract from Roman Journal quoted in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, by Julian Hawthorne, 1889, vol. I, pp. 260 ff.
