ABSTRACT
Modern visitors to Concord may lavish more attention on the ministerial dwelling where Hawthorne lived for several years in the 1840s than on the house where Emerson spent most of his adult life, but in any event Hawthorne’s fictional sketch of “The Old Manse” clearly confers the pride of place on Emerson. Having taken up residence “at the opposite extremity of the village” from this rising star of American literature and philosophy, and confessing that his own modest little tales have been written at the desk where Emerson wrote Nature. Appropriately, then, many of the stories and sketches written at Concord and gathered up into the collection entitled Mosses from an Old Manse imply, if not always Emerson personally, then certainly the definitive Transcendental problematic of matter and spirit. The case looks pretty strong: why he could not be more afraid of her if he expected to contract of her some horrid social disease.
