The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1871-03-08
SPIRIT OF TzH PRESS.
Editorial Opinions Of the Leading Journals
upon Current Topics Compiled Every
DAY for the Evening Telegraph.
THE WIFE OF HAWTHORNE.

From the N. Y. Tribune.
We noticed briefly when it occurred the
death of the widow of Nathaniel Hawthorne
in England, and there, perhaps, it is best
that we should pause. When the gentle,
quiet life of woman such as this ebbs
away into the gentler quiet of death, silence
over her grave has more meaning than any
requiem. As cheerful song, or happy day
in the autumn fields, her memory becomes
pleasant, tender reality with MS forever but
we cannot, if we would, impart or share 1t
with others. There is morbid curiosity
through the country, however, about Haw-
thorne and all that surrounded him, arising
out of the as yet half-acknowledged feeling
that in him America lost her greatest poet;
and it is only right that this curiosity should
be so far gratifed as to do justice to this
woman, whom if he had verloved, Haw-
thorne would in all probability have died un-
developed and unknown.
No biographer of the great romancer can
ever delineate the strange elements of char
acter that mixed themselves in him, and were
expressed in his figure and face; the heredi-
tary abnormal tendencies towards solitude and
gloom; the almost insane dread of contact
with his fellow-men the oblique and shad-
owed aspect in which, as he stood apart, the
world appeared to him. Friendly hands may
give us the outside facts of his life, the cut
of his clothes, the attitude and gestures which
he used to those about him while trying, out
of keen fear of being ridiculous, to fit him
self with their alien habits of thought and
speech but the only glimpses left to us of
the real Hawthorne are in his books. The
man was of his own blood, alone, in the world
of thought, and has left no kinsman. Between
him and the outer world came only his wife,
There was something at once comical and
pathetic in the dismayed appeal with which
he turned to her when the ordinary business
of life bewildered and Jared on him, and the
alertness and bright gentleness with which
she served as his shield and shelter. She be-
longed to one of those old families in New
England who have imbibed culture with the
air. She had an intellect of quick and har-
monious movement, which found apt and
pleasant expression both by her pen and
pencil. But there are so many of whom all
this may be said Now, when woman seeks
primarily self-development, there are SO many
artists and authors 1t may do US no harm
to look for a moment at this one who had no
other aim than to be simply wife. L lere is
significance to all women in the fact that
while the genius and idiosyncracies of her
husband placed him on an entirely different
intellectual level from her own, the infinite
love between them made them one, and fitted
her, with her keen tact and wholesome sweet
ness of temper, to interpret between him and
the world. If it had not been for that cheer
fulness and sunny temper, which kept day
light about him perpetually, the moody
genius of Hawthorne would never have strug-
gled through its shadows into light The
world owed great debt to this woman, who
was contented to be only wife.
There is pleasant hill-slope near Concord,
full of shady lanes and dusky with apple
trees, where Hawthorne and his wife were
used to walk at evening, cheerfully talking as
they went. He sleeps there now alone. We
cannot bear to think they will leave the
gentle, bright-faced lady to rest in one of the
damp churchyards of foggy London. But
however that may be, we think that some
where, where he waited for her, they must
have met ere now. We like to fancy that the
wife's work is not yet all done; that even in
the limitless possibilities of the hereafter
the homely love and care which are left be-
hind us here are needed and waited for; and
to believe that through the lives to come this
man and his true wife will pass on side by
side together.