"
April 29. A neighbor came yesterday with an English white rose, and
set out the tree for me. He said it was for Rosebud. We are getting
to look quite nice, but all will look black and bare to my husband,
after being at the South. Baby is filled with joy to be out in such
lovely weather, and makes no hesitation to take the heaviest tools,
and dig and rake and hoe. She will not come in even to drink her milk.
Some documents came this morning from the State Department, relating
to the Consulate at Liverpool. The peach-trees are all in bloom, and
the cherry-trees also. I looked about, as I sat down in our pine
grove, and tried to bear my husband's absence but it is desolation
without him. This is the sweetest place--I really cannot bear to leave
it. My scholars drew flowers, this morning. Mr. Emerson and Ellery
Charming passed along; and Mr. Emerson asked Julian to go with the
children to Fairy Land [in Walden woods]. He went, in a state of
ecstatic bliss. He brought me home, in a basket, cowslips, anemones,
and violets.
In June the voyage to England, as Hawthorne was appointed Consul at
Liverpool by President Pierce, was undertaken, and pleasantly
accomplished.
Hawthorne's "English Note-Books," as well as the elaborated papers
that make up "Our Old Home," disclose something of his daily life in
England during his consulship; but it was in the rapid, familiar
letters of my mother to her family that his life was most freely
narrated. I have preserved these letters, and shall give extracts from
them in the pages that follow, prefacing and interpolating a few
girlish memories of my father and of the places in which I saw him,
although they are trivial and meagre in incident.
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