Catherine M. Sedgwick.
the English historian and novelist, who lived down by Stockbridge on the road to Monument Mountain. His works embrace no less than one hundred and eighty-nine "sloppy" volumes, as one critic styles them. A more welcome visitor was Hermann Melville,—"Mr. Omoo," the children used to call him, a man of large Scotch build, bushy hair, and full, square-cut beard. Of an evening he used to ride over from Pittsfield on horseback to chat with his Lenox friend. It would be difficult to find two men more unlike in character. Melville ran away to sea in his youth on a whaling vessel, and brought up in the Polynesian Islands. His experiences there gave him material for two of his stories, "Typee" and "Omoo," both somewhat Robinson Crusoe like in construction. Longfellow makes mention in his diary of reading the former of these at Portland one evening, and of being much interested in the author's glowing descriptions of life in the Marquésas. The "Piazza Tales," written on the veranda of his home, facing Greylock, and "October Mountain," half philosophy, half autumn tints, exhibit more distinctly the Berkshirean spirit.
Then, too, Hawthorne had another visitor, a fairer one, who came from nearer home, —one full of spirit and enthusiasm, with fire in her piercing black eyes. The little stream that comes dancing and singing down the hillsides was not merrier than Fanny Kemble in her earlier days at Lenox. Her father had failed as proprietor of the Covent Garden Theatre in London, and at twenty-one she was suddenly forced upon the stage, and soon found herself in America. A visit to the Sedgwick family long before Hawthorne's time, somewhere about 1836, explains her first acquaintance with Lenox. In those days her hostess, Mrs. Charles
Sedgwick, kept her long-famous Young Ladies' School, in which Charlotte Cushman, Harriet Hosmer, Maria Cummings, Alice Delano, and others were educated. Having once come, this niece of Mrs. Siddons came and came again, like so many lovers of Lenox to-day, and by and by she bought "The Perch." Thus for thirty years she would wend her way Berkshireward just as often and for just as long as her public life, with its numerous engagements, permitted. The same Lenox charms which once caused a poor band of Hungarian exiles to exclaim, "Beauty! beauty!" —it was all their broken English would permit— reminded her of "the Black Forest near Schaffhausen"; the lovely view from her home down over the Stockbridge Bowl of "the valley of Lake Neuchatel looking toward Jura."
From the country people round about, —whose memories go back to featherbed and caraway cooky times,— you will learn little of Hawthorne. "Yes ! I used to see him occasionally walking alone. He was a very shy man. Oh! very shy and peculiar." This much of positive information one may obtain again and again for the asking, but no more.
Not so of Frances Anne Kemble. She was here, there, and everywhere in Lenox,
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