It is little changed since the time Emerson's ancestor hurried thence to the gathering of his parishioners by his church-door before the Concord battle,--still less changed since the halcyon days when the great wizard of romance dwelt--the "most unknown of authors"--within its shades. It is still the unpretentious Eden, "the El Dorado for dreamers," which so completely won the heart of the sensitive Hawthorne.
The picturesque old mansion stands amid greensward and foliage, its ample grounds divided from the highway by a low wall. The gate-way is flanked by tall posts of rough-hewn stone, whence a grass-grown avenue, bordered by a colonnade of overarching trees, leads to the house. Within the scattered sunshine and shade of the avenue, a row of stone slabs sunken in the turf like gravestones paves the path paced by Ripley, Emerson, and Hawthorne as they pondered and planned their compositions. Of the trees aligned upon either side, some, gray-lichened and broken, are survivors of Hawthorne's time; others are set to replace fallen patriarchs and keep the stately lines complete. At the right of the broad _allée_ and extending away to the battle-ground is the field, waving now with lush grass, where Hawthorne and Thoreau found the flint arrow-heads and other relics of an aboriginal village. Upon the space which skirts the other side of the avenue, Hawthorne had the garden which engaged so much of his time and thought, and where he produced for us abundant crops of something better than his vegetables. Here his Brook-Farm experience was useful. Passing neighbors would often see the darkly-clad figure of the recluse hoeing in this "patch," or, as often, standing motionless, gazing upon the ground so fixedly and so long--sometimes for hours together--that they thought him daft. Of the delights of summer mornings spent here with his peas, potatoes, and squashes, he gives us many glimpses in his record of that happy time; but the "Note-Books" show us, alas! that this simple pleasure was not without alloy, for, although his "garden flourished like Eden," there are hints of "weeds," next "more weeds," then a "ferocious banditti of weeds" with which "the other Adam" could never have contended. But a greater woe came with the foes who menaced his artistic squashes,--"the unconscionable squash-bugs," "those infernal squash-bugs," against which he must "carry on continual war." For the moments that we contemplate the scene of his entomic warfare, the greater battle-field, a few rods away, seems hardly more impressive. Few of the trees which in Hawthorne's time stood nearest the house remain; the producers of the peaches and "thumping pears" have gone the way of all trees. So has Dr. Ripley's famous willow--celebrated in Emerson's and Channing's exquisite verse and in Hawthorne's matchless prose--which veiled the western face of the mansion and through which Hawthorne's study-windows peeped out upon orchard, river, and mead. In the orchard that has borne such luscious fruit of fancy, some of the contorted and moss-grown trees, whose branches--"like withered hands and arms"--hold out the sweet blossoms on this June day, are the same that Hawthorne pictures among his "Mosses," and beneath which he lay in summer reverie. Few vines now clamber upon the house-walls, lilacs still grow beneath the old study-window, and a tall mass of their foliage screens a corner of the venerable edifice, which time has toned into perfect harmony with its picturesque environment. It is a great, square, wooden structure of two stories, with added attic rooms beneath an overwhelming gambrel roof, which is the conspicuous feature of the edifice and contributes to its antique form. The heavy roof settles down close upon the small, multipaned windows. From above the door little convex glasses, like a row of eyes, look out upon the visitor as he applies for admission.