Literary and Social Essays

Literary and Social Essays



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Title: Literary and Social Essays
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LITERARY AND SOCIAL ESSAYS
BY
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

CONTENTS
EMERSON _Homes of American Authors, 1854._
HAWTHORNE _Homes of American Authors, 1854._
THE WORKS OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE North American
Review, Vol. XCIX., 1864.
RACHEL _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. VI., 1855.
THACKERAY IN AMERICA _Putnam's Magazine_, Vol. I., 1853.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY Hitherto unpublished. Written in 1857.
LONGFELLOW HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol. LXV., 1882.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HARPER'S MAGAZINE, Vol.
LXXXIII., 1891.
WASHINGTON IRVING Read at Ashfield, 1889. Printed by the
Grolier Club, 1892.

EMERSON
The village of Concord, Massachusetts, lies an hour's ride from Boston,
upon the Great Northern Railway. It is one of those quiet New England

towns, whose few white houses, grouped upon the plain, make but a
slight impression upon the mind of the busy traveller hurrying to or
from the city. As the conductor shouts "Concord!" the busy traveller
has scarcely time to recall "Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill"
before the town has vanished and he is darting through woods and
fields as solitary as those he has just left in New Hampshire. Yet as it
vanishes he may chance to "see" two or three spires, and as they rush
behind the trees his eyes fall upon a gleaming sheet of water. It is
Walden Pond--or Walden Water, as Orphic Alcott used to call
it--whose virgin seclusion was a just image of that of the little village,
until one afternoon, some half-dozen or more years since, a shriek,
sharper than any that had rung from Walden woods since the last
war-whoop of the last Indians of Musketaquid, announced to
astonished Concord, drowsing in the river meadows, that the nineteenth
century had overtaken it. Yet long before the material force of the age
bound the town to the rest of the world, the spiritual force of a single
mind in it had attracted attention to it, and made its lonely plains as
dear to many widely scattered minds as the groves of the Academy or
the vineyards of Vaucluse.
Except in causing the erection of the railway buildings and several
dwellings near it, steam has not much changed Concord. It is yet one of
the quiet country towns whose charm is incredible to all but those who,
by loving it, have found it worthy of love. The shire-town of the great
agricultural county of Middlesex, it is not disturbed by the feverish
throb of factories, nor by any roar of inexorable toil but the few puffs of
the locomotive. One day, during the autumn, it is thronged with the
neighboring farmers, who hold their high festival --the annual
cattle-show--there. But the calm tenor of Concord life is not varied,
even on that day, by anything more exciting than fat oxen and the
cud-chewing eloquence of the agricultural dinner. The population of
the region is composed of sturdy, sterling men, worthy representatives
of the ancestors who sowed along the Concord shores, with their
seed-corn and rye, the germs of a prodigious national greatness. At
intervals every day the rattle, roar, and whistle of the swift shuttle
darting to and from the metropolitan heart of New England, weaving
prosperity upon the land, remind those farmers in their silent fields that
the great world yet wags and wrestles. And the farmer-boy--sweeping

with flashing scythe through the river meadows, whose coarse grass
glitters, apt for mowing, in the early June morning--pauses as the
whistle dies into the distance, and, wiping his brow and whetting his
blade anew, questions the country-smitten