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Author
Description
In this vignette, first published in The Token (1831) when Hawthorne was twenty-seven years old, the narrator describes the places and people that he sees atop the steeple of an urban church: the countryside, the stately mansions, the busy wharf, the solitary young man, the two young ladies he encounters, and their father the prosperous merchant. The sun-filled clouds, with which his description begins, are soon succeeded by darker cousins, a thunderstorm,...
Author
Description
First published anonymously (“by a Pedestrian”) in New-England Magazine, IX (November and December 1835), These four fragments were originally part of Hawthorne’s first grand conception The Story Teller in which the stories of the eponymous hero—a young vagabond named Oberon—would be told within the context of a series of American scenes.
Author
Description
I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the faëry legend should be combined with the characters and manners of familiar life. In the little tale which follows a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped, without entirely obliterating the sober...
Author
Description
There is hardly a more difficult exercise of fancy than, while gazing at a figure of melancholy age, to recreate its youth, and without entirely obliterating the identity of form and features to restore those graces which Time has snatched away. Some old people—especially women—so age-worn and woeful are they, seem never to have been young and gay.
Author
Description
This brief essay, first printed in Pioneer, I (February, 1843), is a fine example of Hawthorne’s mature allegorical style. In it, the narrator and his friend visit the hall of fantasy where they encounter writers and artists (of course), but also planners of cities and railroads, idol momentary dreamers, social reformers, religious cultists, and ends with the most extreme fantasist of all: Mister Miller, patriarch of the Millerites (later the Seventh...
Author
Description
In my walks through the burial-ground of Edgartown- where the dead have lain so long that the soil, once enriched by their decay, has returned to its original barrenness -in that ancient burial-ground I noticed much variety of monumental sculpture. The elder stones, dated a century back or more, have borders elaborately carved with flowers and are adorned with a multiplicity of death's- heads, crossbones, scythes, hour-glasses, and other lugubrious...
Author
Description
Balmy Spring--weeks later than we expected and months later than we longed for her--comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and walls of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window, inviting me to throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture of her genial breath with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove.
Author
Description
The author tells us of the time when he was a boy of fifteen, and how once, upon an autumn day, a "Vision” of the same beautiful girl appeared to him twice: first in the morning, her face reflected in “a crystal spring” in a wood (where he takes her for a naiad) and later upon a hill near sunset enveloped in a rainbow “vivid as Niagara’s” (where he takes her for an “emblem of Hope”). Three months go by when he does not see her, and...
Author
Description
In this little essay, first published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1837), Hawthorne writes of his own reflection—the Gentleman in the Mirror—as it he were man distinct from himself, occasionally glimpsed in various contexts, whose character and behavior could be observed and described. The essay is light in tone, but it not only raises psychological questions about the dangers of self-absorption and narcissism, particular...
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