bridal pair part way on their journey toward Berkshire. Ah! well is it for mortals that the future lies veiled! Well was it for the poet! In the light of the sad experience so soon to overtake him in the loss of his little daughter, and later in the tragic death of his Berkshire bride, certain lines from the "Old Clock on the Stairs" seem doubly fraught with meaning:
"Through days of sorrow and of mirth,
Through days of death and days of birth,—
Forever, never,
Never, forever!"
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Some two miles farther south on the old Lenox road there stands a villa, "a snug little place with views of the river and the mountains," as Longfellow characterized it. Just below are the canoe meadows, where once the Mohegans used to leave their frail barks when visiting their ancestral burial grounds. "It always seemed to me a sunny afternoon," wrote the merry author of the "One Horse Shay," "when on our annual pilgrimage we arrived in Berkshire." Here "the blue air courses pure and free, which makes our city-pale cheeks again to deepen with the hue of health." Dr. Holmes's relation to the region was more than one of marriage; it was hereditary. His great-grandfather, Col. Jacob Wendell, was one of the three original owners of the early township. Within the limits of his grandfather's portion, about the time of his appointment as professor at Harvard, was built the poet's villa. It was then a chubby, upright block of a house, almost as compact as the good Doctor himself. Now the house is in other hands, quite altered inside and out, richly furnished with grounds most elaborate and daintily kept, —a modern Lenox "cottage," or, rather, "palace." His study, at present part of a richly adorned drawing-room, looked eastward toward the Housatonic. The scene from this study window reminds one of the view from Hawthorne's "little red cottage" looking toward Stockbridge Bowl. There are the same intervening meadows, beautifully even and velvet green; the same distant glimpse of silvery sparkling water; the same fine mountainous background beyond. About the villa stands a fragrant grove, each tree of the poet's planting. He once related how he brought these trees over from Liverpool in little bundles not bigger than bunches of asparagus; while to-day the birds nest and sing in their branches. His fondness for fine trees is proverbial, —fine trees are one of his "specialties." If he were to "talk trees" to-day, and put his "wedding-ring" on them, he would surely include that aristocratic old white pine —last representative of the primeval forest— which looms up so dark and stately in the foreground of his southern view toward Lenox. The virtues of the old Pittsfield Elm alone he failed to recognize. You may come across its likeness on one of those rare, blue "old elm-tree platters," occasionally seen in Berkshire. To be sure, it was rather a straggly tree, shooting up from the ground over ninety feet, without a single branch, and but a sparse tufting of green as head-dress over all. Nevertheless, it had a history, which Geoffrey Greylock in his "Taghconic, or the Romance and Beauty of the Hills," has told eloquently and at length. Ignoring all this, the poet irreverently styled this
Hawthorne's Desk.
Now In The Berkshire Athenæum.
-- page 13 --
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