old, and upon the walls hang crayon portraits of Emerson,
Sumner, and Hawthorne.

"Emerging into the hall, the eyes of the enamored visitor fall upon the
massive old staircase, with the clock upon the landing. Directly he
hears a singing in his mind:

'Somewhat back from the village street,
Stands the old-fashioned country-seat;
Across its antique portico
Tall poplar trees their shadows throw,
And from its station in the hall
An ancient time-piece says to all,
"Forever--never!
Never--forever!"'

"But he does not see the particular clock of the poem, which stood upon
another staircase, in another quaint old mansion,--although the verse
belongs truly to all old clocks in all old country-seats, just as the
'Village Blacksmith' and his smithy are not alone the stalwart man and
dingy shop under the 'spreading chestnut-tree' which the Professor daily
passes on his way to his college duties, but belong wherever a smithy
stands. Through the meadows in front flows the placid Charles."

So calmly flows the poet's life. The old house has other charms for him
now besides those with which his fancy invested it when he first set
foot within its walls, for here have come to him the joys and sorrows of
his maturer life, and here, "when the evening lamps are lighted," come
to him the memories of the loved and lost, who but wait for him in the
better land. Here, too, cluster the memories of those noble achievements
in his glorious career which have made him now and for all times the
people's poet. Others, as the years go by, will woo us with their lays,
but none so winningly and tenderly as this our greatest master. There
was but one David in Israel, and when he passed away no other filled his
place.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

There came to the old town of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts,
in the early part of the seventeenth century, an English family named
Hawthorne--Puritans, like all the other inhabitants of that growing
town. They proved their fidelity to Puritan principles by entering
readily into all the superstitions of the day, and became noted for the
zeal with which they persecuted the Quakers and hung the witches. The
head of the family was a sea captain, and for many generations the men
of the family followed the same avocation, "a gray-haired shipmaster, in
each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead