Mosses from an Old Manse

The gate has fallen, the avenue is feeding vagrant cows, and the old parsonage seems scarcely part of the material world. Nathaniel Hawthorne has come to live there—and hopes its long history of sermons will teach him how to write something wiser than “idle stories.”

In Concord, beside a river that mirrors heaven over its muddy bed, Hawthorne settles into the Old Manse a year after its last clergyman’s funeral. The quiet house carries the weight of generations, while the nearby bridge recalls a battle between two nations. Among its shadows and golden light, the writer searches for moral insight—and for a story with substance enough to stand alone. The sketches and tales gathered here move through that same uneasy territory, where beauty and darkness share a source. What might the Manse’s silence bring to the surface?

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