I possess the manuscript journal of a lady, native of this town (and descended from three of its clergymen), who removed into Maine, where she possessed a farm and a modest income. She was much addicted to journeying and not less to reading, and whenever she arrived in a town where was a good minister who had a library, she would persuade him to receive her as a boarder, and would stay until she had looked over all his volumes which were to her taste. On a very cold day, she writes in her diary, “Life truly resembles a river—ever the same—never the same; and perhaps a greater variety of internal emotions would be felt by remaining with books in one place than pursuing the waves which are ever the same. Is the melancholy bird of night, covered with the dark foliage of the willow and cypress, less gratified than the gay lark amid the flowers and suns? I think that you never enjoy so much as in solitude with a book that meets the feelings,” and in reference to her favorite authors, she adds, “The delight in others’ superiority is my best gift from God.”[224] Lemuel Shattuck, by his history of the town, has made all of us grateful to his memory as a careful student and chronicler; but events so important have occurred in the forty years since that book was published, that it now needs a second volume. Henry Thoreau we all remember as a man of genius, and of marked character, known to our farmers as the most skilful of surveyors, and indeed better acquainted with their forests and meadows and trees than themselves, but more widely known as the writer of some of the best books which have been written in this country, and which, I am persuaded, have not yet gathered half their fame. He, too, was an excellent reader. No man would have rejoiced more than he in the event of this day. In a private letter to a lady, he writes, “Do you read any noble verses? For my part, they have been the only things I remembered,—or that which occasioned them,—when all things else were blurred and defaced.[225] All things have put on mourning but they: for the elegy itself is some victorious melody in you, escaping from the wreck. It is a relief to read some true books wherein all are equally dead, equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakspeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so: and all the more, that they are not intended for consolation.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s residence in the Manse gave new interest to that house whose windows overlooked the retreat of the British soldiers in 1775, and his careful studies of Concord life and history are known wherever the English language is spoken.[226]