Smoking and talking metaphysics

Dr. Theodore F. Wolfe
Cabinet Photo, Co. H, 11th NJ Civil War via Ancestorville 

This reminiscence by Theodore Frelinghuysen Wolfe is pretty well-known in Melville scholarship, or used to be. Jay Leyda gives an excerpt in the first volume of The Melville Log (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951) at page 407. Steven Olsen-Smith has the whole thing in Melville in His Own Time (University of Iowa Press, 2015) on pages 146-7. 

I'm posting it here now so I don't forget the bit about Hawthorne and Melville at Arrowhead in March 1851, "smoking and talking metaphysics in the barn." Nobody smokes anymore, obviously.

Farther away is a little farm-house, with a “huge, corpulent, old Harry VIII. of a chimney,” to which Hawthorne was a frequent visitor,—the “Arrow-Head” of Herman Melville.  "Godfrey Graylock” says the friendship between Hawthorne and Melville originated in their taking refuge together, during an electric shower, in a narrow cleft of Monument Mountain. They had been coy of each other on account of Melville's review of the “Scarlet Letter” in Duyckinck's Literary World, but during some hours of enforced intercourse and propinquity in very contracted quarters they discovered in each other a correlation of thought and feeling which made them fast friends for life. Thereafter Melville was often at the little red house, where the children knew him as “Mr. Omoo,” and less often Hawthorne came to chat with the racy romancer and philosopher by the great chimney.

Once he was accompanied by little Una—“Onion” he sometimes called her—and remained a whole week. This visit—certainly unique in the life of the shy Hawthorne—was the topic when, not so long agone, we last looked upon the living face of Melville in his city home. March weather prevented walks abroad, so the pair spent most of the week in smoking and talking metaphysics in the barn,—Hawthorne usually lounging upon a carpenter's bench. When he was leaving, he jocosely declared he would write a report of their psychological discussions for publication in a volume to be called “A Week on a Work-Bench in a Barn,” the title being a travesty upon that of Thoreau's then recent book, “A Week on Concord River,” etc. 

Sitting upon the north piazza, of “Piazza Tales,” at Arrow-Head, where Hawthorne and his friend lingered in summer days, we look away to Graylock and enjoy "the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza” which Melville so whimsically describes. At Arrow-Head, too, we find the astonishing chimney which suggested the essay, still occupying the centre of the house and leaving only the odd holes and corners" to Melville's nieces, who now inhabit the place in summer; the study where Hawthorne and Melville discussed the plot of the “White Whale” and other tales; the great fireplace, with its inscriptions from “I and my Chimney;” the window-view of Melville's “ October Mountain,”—beloved of Longfellow,—whose autumn glories inspired that superb word-picture and metaphysical sketch. 

-- Theodore F. Wolfe, Literary Shrines: The Haunts of Some Famous American Authors (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1895) pages 191-192.