Edward S. Ellis - "The Lost Trail"

(A.E.) George William Russell - "Imaginations and Reveries"

Margaret Sidney - "The Adventures of Joel Pepper"

A. H. Leahy - "Heroic Romances of Ireland Volume 2"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Memories of Hawthorne

R >> Rose Hawthorne Lathrop >> Memories of Hawthorne




In Leamington there seemed to be some opportunity for quiet pursuits.
In the first place, there were great preparations for Christmas; which
means, that my sister Una made a few little hand-worked presents in
complete secrecy, and there was a breathless spending of a few
sixpences. If a good deal of money was used by my parents, it was
never distributed with freedom, but for those luxuries which would
gather the least rust; and not a little was exchanged for heavenly
treasure itself, in charity that answered appeals too pathetic to
disregard. And we children learned--though we did not learn to save
money, because our parents could not--to go without the luxuries money
oftenest brings; a lesson that comes to happy fruition in maturer
life, if there is need of it. I say happy, because we look back with
joy to the hours spent in toughening the sinews of endurance. I
remember that long and Penelope-like were my own Christmas
preparations; but what they evolved is a matter as lost to thought as
a breeze on the desert, in spite of the clearness with which I
remember the gifts from my sister and our genteel Nurse, Fanny, who
was with us again, and shone more sweetly than ever in Leamington.
The handsomest objects we had were given us by Fanfan, or Fancy, as my
mother called her. My mother writes, "Our Twelfth Cake was a superb
little illuminated Book of Ruth, which never can be eaten up, and will
be a joy forever to all our posterity after us, and to our
contemporaries."

I will insert here an account of how perfect the smoothness of English
mechanism may be:--


13 CHARLES STREET, BATH.

MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--We asked the porter at the depot to tell us of a
good hotel, and he sent us to York House. After being deposited in it,
with our stones round our necks (as I call our luggage), we found it
was not only the first hotel in Bath, but one famous throughout the
land. A terrible fear came over me that a year's income would scarcely
defray our expenses even for one day and night; but as we did not
arrive till five, we could not leave till the next day. So we had
nothing to do but to take it grandly. We were put in possession of a
lordly sitting-room, hung with crimson. There was nothing gaudy, but a
solid richness. Papa and Mamma were the Duke and Duchess of Maine [in
remembrance of a lordly claim at Raymond], Julian was Lord Waldo, and
Una, Lady Raymond. The finest cut crystal, and knives and forks with
solid silver handles, and spoons too heavy to lift easily, delicate
rose and gold china, and an entire service of silver dishes, came upon
the table. Our attendants were the Sublime and the Pensive, in the
form of two men. The Sublime had a bosom full of linen lilies in
peculiarly wide bloom; while the Pensive was adorned rather with
snowdrops. Their footfalls were descending snowflakes, their manners
devout, solemn, and stately. It was really quite delicious, just for a
short time; and it was impossible not to be convinced that we at least
came over with William the Conqueror; or we might be descended in a
straight line from Prince Bladud, who flourished in Bath eight hundred
years before the Christian era. At all events, we were the noblest in
the land, and received the salaams of the Sublime and the Pensive as
obviously due to our exalted rank. As I looked at my husband, so
kingly in aspect by nature, of such high courtesy in manner; and at
Una, princesslike, with her sweet dignity, I did not at all wonder at
the stolen glances of our waiters; that looking without looking for
which a thorough-bred English waiter is so remarkable. Lord Waldo also
"bore it well;" and as to the Lady Rose, she might have bloomed in a
royal conservatory. Sumptuous wax candles, in richly chased silver
candlesticks, lighted us up in the evening. Whenever I left the
sitting-room for my chamber, the Sublime was suddenly at the door to
open and shut it for me, bowing down with all his lilies. Ah, me! But
how can I describe the York House table! Such Apician food, so
delicately touched with fire! And who can ever sing adequately the
graceful curves in which the Pensive swept off the covers, at the
sound of some inaudible music--inaudible except to his ear--as soon as
we were all seated! I felt so grand that I was ready to shout with
laughter--having gone full circle from the sublime to the ridiculous
several times. I felt the ducal coronet on my brow, flashing fine
flames from diamonds and emeralds. His Grace's diadem put my eyes out
(as it often does, even when not in York House, and we not all in full
dress). The weather was dull and cold, and a glorious fire blazed in
the large grate, fed and tended by a third noiseless apparition, the
Soft, in the shape of a boy, who gently deposited black boulders of
coal without raising any dust, and with a brush delicately invited
away the ashes from the bars and the hearth, and poked as one would
kiss a sleeping babe. The eyes of the Soft did not wander; they were
kept snug beneath their lids with well-trained reverence; and this
genius of the fire always appeared as soon as the glow began to fade,
as if by inspiration. In my large chamber, draped with white muslin
over rose color and drab damask, a superb fire glowed. I must make an
end of this nonsense.

The next day I drove about Bath to get apartments,--the first hour in
vain; and everybody said the city was full, and we should not succeed.
The children cried out to stay in York House, enjoying the luxury. But
again I took a Bath chair, and with Fanny the nurse at my side to talk
for me, and Rosebud to look out for signs of "To Let," we tried again,
and found this modest house; where, such is the simplicity of my
nature, I am ten times as comfortable and at home as at even York
House, with its shaded grandeur. Yet I am very fond of splendor, I
have to confess; and, moreover, our surprise was great when, upon
demanding the account, the Sublime brought on a silver salver charges
actually more moderate than those of many inferior hotels all about
England.

I will proceed here with our visit to Redcar, though that occurred in
1859, when we had returned from Rome.

Redcar is in the midst of a stately region, grand with an outline of
hard-bosomed, endless beach and vast sky, of sea and sand-hills, where
my father stands forth very distinctly in my memory. When he went out
at fixed hours of the day, between the hours for writing, he walked
over the long, long beach, and very often with my brother and myself;
stopping now and then in his firm, regal tread to look at what nature
could do in far-stretching color and beckoning horizon line. Along the
sand-hills, frolicking in the breeze or faithfully clinging in the
strong wind to their native thimbleful of earth, hung the cerulean
harebells, to which I ardently clambered, listening for their chimes.
In the preface to "Monte Beni," the compliment paid to Redcar is well
hidden. My father speaks of reproducing the book (sketched out among
the dreamy interests of Florence) "on the broad and dreary sands of
Redcar, with the gray German Ocean tumbling in upon me, and the
northern blast always howling in my ears." Nothing could have pleased
him better as an atmosphere for his work; all that the atmosphere
included he did not mean to admit, just then. And London was not so
very far away.

On September 9, 1859, my mother says in her diary, "My husband gave me
his manuscript to read." There are no other entries on that clay or
the next, except, "Reading manuscript." On the 11th she says, "Reading
manuscript for the second time." The diary refers to reading the
manuscript on the third day, but on the two following days, in which
she was to finish as much of the romance as was ready, there are
wholly blank spaces. These mean more than words to me, who know so
well how she never set aside daily rules, and how unbrokenly her
little diaries flow on. She writes home:--

"Mr. Hawthorne has about finished his book. More than four hundred
pages of manuscripts are now in the hands of the publishers. I have
read as much as that, but do not yet know the denouement. He is very
well, and in very good spirits, despite all his hard toil of so many
months. As usual, he thinks the book good for nothing, and based upon
a very foolish idea which nobody will like or accept. But I am used to
such opinions, and understand why he feels oppressed with disgust of
what has so long occupied him. The true judgment of the work was his
first idea of it, when it seemed to him worth the doing. He has
regularly despised each one of his books immediately upon finishing
it. My enthusiasm is too much his own music, as it were. It needs the
reverberation of the impartial mind to reassure him that he has not
been guilty of a betise.

"Mr. Hawthorne had no idea of portraying me in Hilda. Whatever
resemblance one sees is accidental."

On November 8 (we were then in Leamington once more) she records in
very large script, "My husband to-day finished his book, 'The Romance
of Monte Beni.'"

My mother was especially fortunate in finding the smallest rose-tinted
and most gleaming among the shells which we came across upon the
sands, and of these a few superlative but almost invisible specimens
were long the cherished possession of her English work-box. She often
went with me to the sands, spending much time there; her diary saying:
"Superb, calm day. I went on sands with Rosebud to gather shells.
Stayed three hours." Or: "Most superb day possible. I went on the
sands with Rose, and sat all the morning in a sand-chair, reading,
while Rose played. It was a divine day; the air like rose petals, the
sky cerulean, the sea sapphire. I felt so serene and quiet;--a great
calm." Then comes the inevitable contrast: "Tremendous sea. Rose and I
went on the sands to gather shells." These shells, which we could none
of us find in so perfect a state as my mother could, were
object-lessons to me in the refinements of art, as the harebells were
in the refinements of nature; for were not the dancing flowers alive,
and the stirless shells the passive work of thought?

Sometimes she read Disraeli's "Sibyl," while I built a sand fortress
round her; or she read "Venetia," "Oliver Twist," "The Life of Mary
II.," "Romany Rye," and "The Lives of the Last Four Popes." She
remembered Pio Nono with unflagging interest, and mentions his serious
illness, and then his recovery. She read "a queer biography of
Wordsworth by Hood," and she regarded Carlyle's diction in the "French
Revolution" as "rubbishy."

Besides the pilgrimages in search of shells, another pursuit was
inaugurated by my mother, in her breathlessly calm way, which was the
finding of multitudinous seaweeds of every eccentricity of style. The
Yankee elm, the English oak, the kitchen-garden herb, or Italian
stone-pine, the fern, and tresses, as they seemed, of women's fair or
dusky hair, were all so cleverly imitated by the seaweeds that one
might have supposed them to be the schoolbooks of the sea; or the
latest news there, regarding the nature of the dry world. Many spare
moments were given to mounting these pretty living pictures of
growths. My lack of success in producing a single very neat specimen
was, I grieve to admit, hardly bettered by any of us; my father
joining in the scientific excess only so far as to turn his luminous
eyes upon our enthusiasm, with his genial "h'm-m" of permission.

Excursions were made to Whitby, Wilton Castle, and other places; and I
made an excursion on my own account, which kept me lame for some time.
"Rose fell and hurt her knees and elbow, following a monkey." But my
most considerate mother would never have let me perceive the humorous
and possibly unintelligent aspect of my adventurous spirit; and the
next day she tenderly inscribes the historical fact, "Poor baby lame."

Here are a few words of testimony, from my sister, to the charm of
this shore:--

REDCAR, October 4, 1859.

Our last day in Redcar, dearest aunt Lizzie; and a most lovely one it
is. The sea seems to reproach us for leaving it. But I am glad we are
going, for I feel so homesick that I want constant change to divert my
thoughts. How troublesome feelings and affections are! When one ought
to forget, they are strongest.

Your loving niece,

U. H.

I thought that the petty lodging in which we were established was an
odd nook for my father to be in. I liked to get out with him upon the
martial plain of sand and tremendous waves, where folly was not, by
law of wind and light of Titan power, and where the most insignificant
ornament was far from insignificant: the whorl of an exquisite shell,
beautiful and still, as if just dead; or the seaweeds, that are so
like pictures of other growths. I felt that this scene was a worthy
one for the kind but never familiar man who walked and reflected
there. We enjoyed a constant outdoor life. But in those uninspired
hours when there was no father in sight, and my mother was resting in
seclusion, I played at grocer's shop on the sands with a little girl
called Hannah, whom I then despised for her name, her homely neat
clothes, her sweetness and silence, and in retrospect learned to love.
As we pounded brick, secured sugary-looking sands of different tints,
and heaped up minute pebbles, a darkly clad, tastefully picturesque
form would approach,--a form to which I bowed down in spirit as,
fortunately for me, my father. He would look askance at my utterly
useless, time-frittering amusement, which I already knew was withering
my brain and soul. In his tacit reproach my small intellect delighted,
and loftier thoughts than those of the counter would refresh me for
the rest of the day; and I thankfully returned to the heights and
lengths of wide nature, full of color and roaring waves.




CHAPTER XII

ITALIAN DAYS: I


My first frequent companionship with my father began in Italy, when I
was seven years old. We entered Rome after a long, wet, cold carriage
journey that would have disillusionized a Dore. As we jolted along,
my mother held me in her arms, while I slept as much as I could; and
when I could not, I blessed the patient, weary bosom upon which I lay
exhausted. It was a solemn-faced load of Americans which shook and
shivered into the city of memories that night. In "Monte Beni," as he
preferred to call "The Marble Faun," my father speaks of Rome with
mingled contempt for its discomforts and delighted heartiness for its
outshining fascinations. "The desolation of her ruin" does not prevent
her from being "more intimately our home than even the spot where we
were born." A ruin or a picture could not satisfy his heart, which
accepted no yoke less strong than spiritual power. Rome supplies the
most telling evidence of human failure, because she is the theatre of
the greatest human effort, both in the ranks of Satan and of God; and
she visibly mourns her sins of mistake at the feet of spiritual
victory, Saints Peter and Paul. (As a Catholic, I could hardly win the
respect of the gentle reader if I were so un-American as to fear to
stand by my belief.) And while the observer in Rome may well feel sad
in the midst of reminders of the enormous sins of the past, there is
an uplifting, for the soul eager to perceive the truth, in all her
assurances of that mercy which is the cause of religion. If the Holy
See was established in Rome because it was the city where the worst
wickedness upon earth, because the most intelligent, was to be found,
we may conclude that the old emperors, stormy and grotesque, are
responsible for its melancholy "atmosphere of sin," to which Hilda
alludes as a condition of the whole planet; and not the popes who have
prayed in Rome, nor the people who believe there. In printed remarks
about Italy both my parents say that she most reminds them of what is
highest.

But, whether chilly or warm, the Eternal City did not at once make a
conquest of my father's allegiance, though before he bade it farewell,
it had painted itself upon his mind as sometimes the sunniest and most
splendid habitation for a populace, that he knew. In the spring my
sister wrote:--

"We are having perfectly splendid weather now,--unclouded Italian
skies, blazing sun, everything warm and glorious. But the sky is too
blue, the sun is too blazing, everything is too vivid. Often I long
for the more cloudy skies and peace of that dear, beautiful England.
Rome makes us all languid. We have to pay a fearful price for the
supreme enjoyment there is in standing on the very spots made
interesting by poetry or by prose, imagination, or (which is still
more absorbing) truth. Sometimes I wish there had never been anything
done or written in the world! My father and I seem to feel in this way
more than the rest. We agree about Rome as we did about England."

In the course of the winter my mother had written of our chilly
reception thus:--

NO. 37 VIA PORTA PINCIANA, 2D PLANO,

PALAZZO LAIIAZANI, ROME.

MY DEAR ELIZABETH,--I could not have believed I could be in Rome a day
without announcing it to you in words and expressions which would have
the effect at least of the bell of St. Peter's or the cannon of St.
Angelo. . . . But my soul has been iced over, as well as the hitherto
flowing fountains of the Piazza, di San Pietro. I have not been able
to expand like corn and melons under a summer sun. Nipped have been
all my blossoming hopes and enthusiasms, and my hands have been too
numb to hold a pen. Added to this, Mr. Hawthorne has had the severest
cold he ever had, because bright, keen cold he cannot bear so well as
damp; and .Rosebud has not been well since she entered the city. It is
colder than for twenty years before. We find it enormously expensive
to live in Rome; our apartment is twelve hundred a year.

But I am in Rome, Rome, Rome! I have stood in the Forum and beneath
the Arch of Titus, at the end of the Sacra Via. I have wandered about
the Coliseum, the stupendous grandeur of which equals my dream and
hope. I have seen the sun kindling the open courts of the Temple of
Peace, where Sarah Clarke said, years ago, that my children would some
time play. (It is now called Constantine's Basilica.) I have climbed
the Capitoline and stood before the Capitol, by the side of the
equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius,--the finest in the world [my
father calls it "the most majestic representation of kingly character
that ever the world has seen "],--once in front' of the Arch of
Septimius Severus. I have been into the Pantheon, whose sublime
portico quietly rises out of the region of criticism into its own
sphere,--a fit entrance to the temple of all the gods. How wise was
the wise and tact-gifted Augustus to reject the homage of Agrippa, who
built it for his apotheosis, and to dedicate it to the immortal gods!
It is now dedicated to the Immortal God.

And I have been to St. Peter's! There alone in Rome is perpetual
summer. You have heard of the wonderful atmosphere of this world of a
basilica. It would seem to be warmed by the ardent soul of Peter, or
by the breath of prayer from innumerable saints. One drops the
hermetical seal of a curtain behind, upon entering, and behold, with
the world is also shut out the bitter cold, and one is folded, as it
were, in a soft mantle of down, as if angels wrapped their wings about
us. I expanded at once under the invisible sun. There have been
moments when I have felt the spell of Rome, but every one says here
that it dawns gradually upon the mind. It would not have been so with
me, I am convinced, if I had been warm. Who ever heard of an icicle
glowing with emotion? What is Rome to a frozen clod? . . .

We were not able to seize upon the choicest luxuries of living, as our
accommodations, even such as they were, proved to be expensive enough
to hamper us. We had all expected to be blissful in Italy, and so the
inartistic and inhuman accessories of life were harder to bear there
than elsewhere. I remember a perpetual rice pudding (sent in the tin
ten-story edifices which caterers supply laden with food), of which
the almost daily sight maddened us, and threw us into a Burton's
melancholy of silence, for nothing could prevent it from appearing. We
all know what such simple despairs can do, and, by concerted movement,
they can make Rome tame. If we had sustained ourselves on milk, like
Romulus and Remus, and dressed in Russian furs, we might have had
fewer vicissitudes in the midst of the classic wonders on all sides.
But spring was faithful, and at its return we began to enjoy the
scenes of most note within and beyond the walls: the gleaming ruins,
and fresh, uncontaminated daisies that trustfully throve beside some
of them; the little fountains, with their one-legged or flat-nosed
statues strutting ineffectually above them,--fountains either dry as
dead revelers or tinkling a pathetic sob into a stone trough; the open
views where the colors of sunlit marble and the motions of dancing
light surrounded the peasants who sprang up from the ground like
belated actors in a drama we only keep with us out of childish
delight.

My father had never looked so serious as he did now, and he was more
slim than in England. He impressed me as permeated by an atmosphere of
perception. A magnetic current of sympathy with the city rendered him
contemplative and absorbent as a cloud. He was everywhere, but only
looked in silence, so far as I was aware. "The Marble Faun" shows what
he thought in sentences that reveal, like mineral specimens, strata of
ideas stretching far beyond the confines of the novel. While he
observed Rome, as he frequently mentions, he felt the sadness of the
problems of the race which there were brought to a focus. Yet it is a
singular fact that, notwithstanding this regret for her human pathos,
perhaps the best book he ever wrote was created among the suggestive
qualities of this haven of faith,--the book which inculcates the most
sterling hope of any of his works. I saw in my walks with him how much
he enjoyed the salable treasures and humble diversions of the
thoroughfare, as his readers have always perceived. Ingenuous
simplicity, freedom from self-consciousness and whitewash, frank
selfishness on a plane so humble that it can do little harm,--all this
is amusing and restful after long hours with transcendental folk. In
regard to the tenets of these, my mother writes to her sister:--

"I am just on the point of declaring that I hate transcendentalism,
because it is full of immoderate dicta which would disorganize
society, and should never be uttered, in my opinion, except behind the
veil, among priests. As to displaying before the great, innocent eyes
of a girl like Una all the horror of a slave-auction--a convent is
better than such untimely revelations. Now, you must not think I am a
Catholic. I know the Lord withholds the pure from seeing what they
should not--blessed be the Lord!--but I will not be the one to put
what should not be seen before the eyes of the pure."

My father looked in good spirits as we moved along. When he trafficked
with an Italian fruit-vender, and put a few big hot chestnuts into his
pocket, with a smile for me, I (who found his smile the greatest joy
in the world) was persuaded that really fine things were being done.
The slender copper piece which was all-sufficient for the transaction
not only thrilled the huckster with delight, but became precious to me
as my father's supple, broad fingers held it, dark, thin, small, in a
respectful manner. He caressed it for a moment with his large
thumb,--he who was liberal as nature in June,--and when the
fruit-vender was wrought up to the proper point of ecstasy he was
allowed to receive the money, which he did with a smile of Italian
gracefulness and sparkle, while my father looked conscious of the
mirthfulness of the situation with as lofty a manner as you please. As
for the peasant women we met, under their little light-stands of
head-drapery, they were easily comprehensible, and expressed without a
shadow of reserve their vanity and tiger blood by an openly proud
smile and a swing of the brilliantly striped skirt. The handsomest men
and women possible, elaborately dressed, shone beside tiers of the
sweetest bunches of pale violets, or a solitary boy, so beautiful that
his human splendor scintillated, small as he was, sat in the pose and
apparel that the world knows through pictures, and which pigment can
never well render any more than it can catch the power of a sunset or
an American autumn. The marble-shops were very pleasant places. A
whirring sound lulled the senses into dreamy receptiveness, as the
stone wheel heavily turned with soft swiftness, giving the impression
that here hard matter was controlled to a nicety by airy forces; and a
fragrance floated from the wet marble lather, while the polishing of
our newly picked up mementos from the ruins went on, which was as
subtle as that of flowers. A man or two, hoary with marble-dust and
ennobled by the "bloom" of it, stood tall and sad about the wheel, and
we handed to these refined creatures our treasures of giallo-antico
and porphyry and other marbles picked up "for remembrance" (and no
doubt once pressed by a Caesar's foot or met by a Caesar's glance), in
order to observe the fresh color leap to the surface,--yellow, red,
black, or green.