Ives HAWTHORNE ["Essays Before a Sonata"]:

"If the same anyone happens to live in the 'Old Manse' near the Concord Battle
Bridge, he is likely 'of a rainy day to betake himself to the
huge garret,' the secrets of which he wonders at, 'but is too
reverent of their dust and cobwebs to disturb.' He is likely to
'bow below the shriveled canvas of an old (Puritan) clergyman in
wig and gown--the parish priest of a century ago--a friend of
Whitefield.' He is likely to come under the spell of this
reverend Ghost who haunts the 'Manse' and as it rains and darkens
and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely
'to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that
the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands'...
'that thought grows moldy,' and as the garret is in
Massachusetts, the 'thought' and the 'mold' are likely to be
quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels
rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the
life around him--about the inherited mystery of the town--than a
poet of philosophy is."