Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ... one of America's illustrious sons, lived, and where, doubtless, he laid the foundations of some of his exquisite writings. On the morning upon which I penned this imperfect sketch, I visited the clean little circus of houses just off the Holly Walk (of which venerable avenue of trees Dickens has given a dainty monograph in "Dombey and Son "), in which Hawthorne found peace and pleasure in 1855. Everything within that ring of brick is the same now as when the author of "The House with the Seven Gables" sojourned there. Nothing is changed. The play-place in the middle is just as green, pretty, and secluded, and girt with the self-same iron railing, as in the days when Hawthorne went inside to be shaded from the sun. There is the house, too, in which, to judge from his own words, he spent so many pleasant hours--No. 10. It seems to me to have a larger or a brighter number than the other doors have; and as I stand gazing upon that door, I can, in imagination, see it opened, and behold the writer of "Twice Told Tales" coming down the little garden path. One of his favourite walks, while a sojourner at Leamington, was to the neighbouring village of Lillington. What the village was in Hawthorne's days that it is to-day. "The village," he says, "consists chiefly of one row of contiguous dwellings, separated only by party-walls, but illmatched among themselves, being of different heights, and apparently of different ages, though all are of an antiquity which we should call venerable." It is simply a marvel how slowly life moves in some of the sequestered village nooks of Mid-England. Yet, who could wish it to move quicker? Here, in the very heart of "Leafy Warwickshire "--and on the road to Lillington there is an old oak planted upon the site of...