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Updated: June 24, 2025
It was now that Professor John K. Paine, the musical composer, introduced a new element into the Shoals life. One morning he walked into Mrs. Thaxter's parlor with a large folio under his arm and said, "I am going to play you one of Beethoven's sonatas, for I think you will like it." Mrs. Thaxter was not quite sure that she would, but listened attentively.
All the Browning clubs that have nourished so extensively for many years past might be considered Levi Thaxter's lineal descendants. His conversation on art and literature was often so interesting that it is a pity his occasional bursts of eloquence could not have been preserved.
People lose their artificial ways in that atmosphere and their peculiarities are brought out distinctly, as oil brings out the veins in black walnut. The epic gift, however, is very different from the lyric and the two are not often united in the same person. Mrs. Thaxter's prose writings are almost as rare as Whittier's.
It was Celia Thaxter's hurrying footsteps which traced her friend to the spot where, in extreme weakness, he fell in death. She wrote, "It was that pretty lake where my wild roses had been blooming all summer, and where the birds dipped and sang at sunrise." Her gratitude to the men and women who brought music to her door knew no limit; it was strong, deep, and unforgetting.
The Professor was so much pleased with Mrs. Thaxter's frank enthusiasm, that he dedicated a sonata he was composing to her, which was performed the following winter in Boston, and greatly praised also by the critics. Piano recitals and concertos thus became the fashion at Appledore, and classical music was in good demand.
Thaxter's sudden death, seventeen years later, a friend asked her eldest son where his mother was, with the intent to discover if she had been well enough to leave her room. "Oh," he replied, "her mother came in the night and took her away."
Thaxter's poetry, like all genuine poetry, is indigenous, native to the soil. The vessel consequently became unmanageable, and was finally thrown up on Londoner's, where the island is so low that at high tide the sea nearly divides it in two. The crew tried to escape by jumping on to the rocks.
Thaxter's sister, sat round her, babbling cheerfully, and singing; and they were so merry that it did not seem as if there could be an incurably sick one in the midst of them. The Spy came to-day, with more passengers of no particular character. She still remains off the landing, moored, with her sails in the wind. The mail arrived to-day, but nothing for me.
And there was another, more distinguished than them all, a tall figure, more erect than a soldier, pacing across the long piazza, or watching a game in the billiard-room, or seated in a retired corner of Mrs. Thaxter's parlor, whose face had long since been known to Hawthorne as that of John G. Whittier.
The sun shone before it set; and the mist, which all day has overhung the land, now takes the aspect of a cloud, drawing a thin veil between us and the shore, and rising above it. In our own atmosphere there is no fog nor mist. September 13th. I spent last evening, as well as part of the evening before, at Mr. Thaxter's.
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