It was on the 19th of May,
1864, that the news came from Plymouth, in New Hampshire,--whither he
had gone with Ex-President Pierce,--that Hawthorne was dead. Afterward,
it was recalled with a kind of awe that through many years of his life
Hawthorne had been in the habit, when trying a pen or idly scribbling at
any time, of writing the number sixty-four; as if the foreknowledge of
his death, which he showed in the final days, had already begun to
manifest itself in this indirect way long before. Indeed, he had himself
felt that the number was connected with his life in some fatal way. Five
days later he was carried to Sleepy Hollow, the beautiful cemetery where
he had been wont to walk among the pines, where once when living at the
Manse he had lain upon the grass talking to Margaret Fuller, when Mr.
Emerson came upon them, and smiled, and said the Muses were in the woods
that day.
A simple stone, with the single word "Hawthorne" cut upon it, was placed
above him. He had wished that there should be no monument. He liked
Wordsworth's grave at Grasmere, and had written, "It is pleasant to
think and know that he did not care for a stately monument." Longfellow
and Lowell and Holmes, Emerson and Louis Agassiz, and his friends
Pierce, and Hillard, with Ellery Channing, and other famous men,
assembled on that peaceful morning to take their places in the funeral
train. Some who had not known him in life came long distances to see
him, now, and ever afterward bore about with them the memory of his
aspect, strong and beautiful, in his last repose.
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