This book was an impulse pick at my local library. The title grabbed my attention, for I could see an obvious connection: Dickinson’s contemplation of This book was an impulse pick at my local library. The title grabbed my attention, for I could see an obvious connection: Dickinson’s contemplation of nature, her meditations on death, and her tranquility deliberately achieved through renunciation. But a mystic? That seemed to be pushing things a little. Still, I was anxious to hear what Monsignor Murphy had to say.
Turns out, the good monsignor was not just pushing things a little; he was pushing things a lot. He strives to make actual links between Dickinson and the mystics, but the connections are tangential at best: Emily’s sister-in-law gave her a volume of Thomas a Kempis, Emily liked Middlemarch, a novel which contains a passage about St. Teresa of Avila, etc., etc.. Still. The words of the saints quoted here—from Gregory of Nyssa to the Little Flower—resonate with Dickinsons poems, and often helped show me connections I had not noticed before. (The prose passages from the recent popes, however—Benedict and Francis mostly—are not very interesting in themselves, and could well have been eliminated.)
On the subject of Dickinson the mystic I remain unconvinced. Still, some of Dickinson’s poems look different to me now, deeper and richer because of the way they resonate with the great spiritual warriors of the ages. The poems about death affect me like this, but the ones that move me the most are the ones that celebrate nature. Here are three of those: the first about gathering flowers; the second about the coming of spring; and the third about insect singin on a hot August afternoon.
I dwell in Possibility - A fairer house than Prose - More numerous of Windows - Superior – for Doors -
Of Chambers as the Cedars - Impregnable of eye - And for an Everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky -
Of Visitors – the fairest - For Occupation – This - The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise -
* * * *
New feet within my garden go - New fingers stir the sod - The Troubadour opon the Elm Betrays the solitude.
New Children play opon the green - New weary sleep below - And still the pensive spring returns - and still the punctual snow!
* * * *
Further in Summer than the Birds - Pathetic from the Grass - A minor Nation celebrates It’s unobtrusive Mass.
No Ordinance be seen - So gradual the Grace A gentle custom it becomes Enlarging Loneliness -
Antiquest felt at Noon - When August burning low - Arise this spectral Canticle Repose to typify -
Remit as yet no Grace No furrow on the Glow, But a Druidic Difference Enhances Nature now -
"Bon-Bon" (1835) is a comic tale, extensively revised, which was first published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (December, 1832) as "The Bargain "Bon-Bon" (1835) is a comic tale, extensively revised, which was first published in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (December, 1832) as "The Bargain Lost." Whereas the original was merely a brief anecdote concerning the devil and a drunken Italian philosopher, the revised version features a French philosopher instead, one who is also a cook. Since human souls are food for the devil, the change brings with it a few ironies.
I’ve never been particularly fond of Poe’s humorous pieces. I think he usually tries way too hard. But I have to admit this is one of his better comic efforts, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I’ll end with the following monologue of Monsieur the Devil, who discusses the preservation of souls (not for salvation, of course, but for eating), and the advantages of taking possession of the human soul—and consuming it—prior to death, a process which—his Lordship claims—entails no inconvenience to the living whatsoever:
Why we are sometimes exceedingly pushed for provisions. You must know that, in a climate so sultry as mine, it is frequently impossible to keep a spirit alive for more than two or three hours; and after death, unless pickled immediately, (and a pickled spirit is not good,) they will — smell — you understand, eh? Putrefaction is always to be apprehended when the souls are consigned to its in the usual way … there are several ways of managing. The most of us starve: some put up with the pickle: for my part I purchase my spirits vivente corpore, in which case I find they keep very well … Why, sir, the body is not at all affected by the transaction. I have made innumerable purchases of the kind in my day, and the parties never experienced any inconvenience. There were Cain and Nimrod, and Nero, and Caligula, and Dionysius, and Pisistratus,(29) and — and a thousand others, who never knew what it was to have a soul during the latter part of their lives; yet, sir, these men adorned society. Why is n’t there A——, now, whom you know as well as I? Is he not in possession of all his faculties, mental and corporeal? Who writes a keener epigram? Who reasons more wittily? Who —— but, stay! I have his agreement in my pocket-book.”
I thought I had finished reading all Hawthorne’s short stories, and then—out of nowhere—“Alice Doan’s Appeal” turns up. Well, not “out of nowhere,” ex I thought I had finished reading all Hawthorne’s short stories, and then—out of nowhere—“Alice Doan’s Appeal” turns up. Well, not “out of nowhere,” exactly, but out of a selection of stories published after Hawthorne’s death by his son Julian. Nathaniel Hawthorne himself had published the tale years earlier, in The Token in 1835, and had also thought of including it in his never-published collection, Seven Tales of My Native Land. But Seven Tales was never published, and “Alice Doane’s Appeal” remained uncollected at his death.
I think Hawthorne was wise not to included it in his body of tales. The narrator is a young author who has enticed two young ladies to take a walk with him to Gallow’s Hill in Salem—where the witches were hanged—and proceeds to read them a tale from one his own old manuscripts, a dark tale of doppelgangers, wizardry, erotic passion, and hot murder on an icy night. But this tale of Alice Doane and her brother is not in itself interesting, and primarily serves to surround the three young people—the author and the two ladies on Gallow’s Hill—with a gothic atmosphere which evokes the much more powerful memory of the witch trials and the executions themselves.
It is significant that Hawthorne reserves the stories harshest words for the people who brought this sad episode of hysteria into being:
Behind their victims came the afflicted, a guilty and miserable band; villains who had thus avenged themselves on their enemies, and viler wretches, whose cowardice had destroyed their friends; lunatics, whose ravings had chimed in with the madness of the land; and children, who had played a game that the imps of darkness might have envied them, since it disgraced an age, and dipped a people’s hands in blood. In the rear of the procession rode a figure on horseback, so darkly conspicuous, so sternly triumphant, that my hearers mistook him for the visible presence of the fiend himself; but it was only his good friend, Cotton Mather, proud of his well-won dignity, as the representative of all the hateful features of his time: the one blood-thirsty man, in whom were concentrated those vices of spirit and errors of opinion that sufficed to madden the whole surrounding multitude.
This is another Poe story originally submitted to the Philadelphia Saturday Morning Courier in 1831, and supposedly destined for that never-to-be-publ This is another Poe story originally submitted to the Philadelphia Saturday Morning Courier in 1831, and supposedly destined for that never-to-be-published collection of pastiches, homages and parodies known as Tales of the Folio Club. It is a style-parody of the short horror fiction published in England’s Blackwood’s Magazine, which typically involved breakneck escapes from unusual predicaments. Five years later Poe would write a better parody of this sort (the companion pieces “The Psyche Zenobia” and “The Scythe of Time,” later published as “A Predicament” and “How to Write a Blackwood Article”), and ten years later he would transmute the Blackwood approach into a work of genius: “The Pit and the Pendulum.’
But “A Loss of Breath” (or “A Decided Loss,” as it was originally titled) is considerably removed from any touch of Poe’s genius. It is labored, overly long, and desperately unfunny, and should be avoided by all readers except those fascinated with everything Poe.
Instead of boring you with excerpts showing you how bad this is, I will instead show you a passage toward the beginning that I actually liked. Poe was always a precise observer and a precise thinker, and here we see the narrator, having literally ”lost his breath” arguing with his wife, discovering that he can produce some vocal sounds without any breath at all:
The phrases “I am out of breath,” “I have lost my breath,” etc., are often enough repeated in common conversation; but it had never occurred to me that the terrible accident of which I speak could bona fide and actually happen! Imagine — that is if you have a fanciful turn — imagine, I say, my wonder — my consternation — my despair! ...
Although I could not at first precisely ascertain to what degree the occurence had affected me, I determined at all events to conceal the matter from my wife, until further experience should discover to me the extent of this my unheard of calamity ...
I am serious in asserting that my breath was entirely gone. I could not have stirred with it a feather if my life had been at issue, or sullied even the delicacy of a mirror. Hard fate! — yet there was some alleviation to the first overwhelming paroxysm of my sorrow. I found, upon trial, that the powers of utterance which, upon my inability to proceed in the conversation with my wife, I then concluded to be totally destroyed, were in fact only partially impeded, and I discovered that had I, at that interesting crisis, dropped my voice to a singularly deep guttural, I might still have continued to her the communication of my sentiments; this pitch of voice (the guttural) depending, I find, not upon the current of the breath, but upon a certain spasmodic action of the muscles of the throat.
This tale is of negligible value, but it is amusing, filled with vivid historical atmophere, and mercifully brief. It involves a trick played upon the This tale is of negligible value, but it is amusing, filled with vivid historical atmophere, and mercifully brief. It involves a trick played upon the besieged Jews by the besieging Romans, who not wanting to technical offend the Hebrew deity by denying him sacrificial animals, yet contrived to send him a victim he could not accept and that his devotees could not use. This is yet another of the early Poe tales first submitted to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and eventually intended as one of the sixteen tales in the never-published collection, The Folio Club. It is derived from a passage in Horatio’s Smith’s novel Zillah, a Tale of the Holy City (1828); it is more homage than parody, and contains images—sometimes entire passages—appropriated from the original.
The following is an effective descriptive passage, in which the representatives of the beseiged—Simeon and his associates—hurry to the city walls
That part of the city to which our worthy Gizbarim now hastened, and which bore the name of its architect, King David, was esteemed the most strongly fortified district of Jerusalem; being situated upon the steep and lofty hill of Zion. Here a broad, deep, circumvallatory trench, hewn from the solid rock, was defended by a wall of great strength erected upon its inner edge. This wall was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart, sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower called Adoni-Bezek--the loftiest of all the turrets around about Jerusalem, and the usual place of conference with the besieging army--they looked down upon the camp of the enemy from an eminence excelling by many feet that of the Pyramid of Cheops, and, by several, that of the temple of Belus.
I began to read this book for a discreditable reason. I had come across an excerpt somewhere which seemed snide to me, and I acquired the book hoping I began to read this book for a discreditable reason. I had come across an excerpt somewhere which seemed snide to me, and I acquired the book hoping to find a major “takedown” of one great American writer by another. Why? Human nature, I suppose. “Great One A” condescends to devastate “Great One B,” thus lowering the status of both. But … to what good end? I know, I know. It sounds petty and stupid. But I’m fully capable of petty. And stupid? It’s right in my wheelhouse.
Whatever. Turns out I was dead wrong about the book. It is an affectionate, unpretentious appreciation of one great writer by another, a writer who knows his predecessor’s weaknesses and strengths and isn’t afraid to discuss them.
James is illuminating on the subject of Hawthorne’s journals (writer’s exercises, experiments in description, almost devoid of personality), very good on Hawthorne’s novels (judging The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables as his finest), but I found his most valuable insight in his treatment of the shorter tales.
There he speaks of Hawthorne and his relationship to the Puritan conscience. Having read all of Hawthorne’s shorter tales, I have always been uneasy with the cloak of “dark Romanticism” which has been cast upon the shoulders of Hawthorne. It seems to me he is a smiling, shy sort of fellow, interested in the guilty conscience as a theme, but by no means obsessed by it. I was very pleased to find the great writer Henry James agrees.
Here—as a small taste of the the balance and common sense James bring to his subject—is his treatment of Hawthorne the imaginative creator and his relationship to the Puritan conscience:
He had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not moral and theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively. He was not discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and regular victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his imaginative vision, the great fact of man’s nature; the light element that had been mingled with his own composition always clung to this rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers about the mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan morality for its play-ground. He speaks of the dark disapproval with which his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would see him trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more darkly would they have frowned could they have understood that he had converted the very principle of their own being into one of his toys!
First published in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly (1871), A Passionate Pilgrim is the earliest production of his imagination which James inc First published in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly (1871), A Passionate Pilgrim is the earliest production of his imagination which James included in his collected works. It is not only a successfully realized tale, but it is thoroughly representative, containing what would later be considered frequent Jamesian themes: the innocence heart of the American, the calculating mind of the European, and how they appreciate—and exploit—the beauties of the European world.
In this story, naive American Clement Searle, middle-aged but already in declining health, is convinced by the narrator—a recent acquaintance—to tour Lackley, the English estate he had once hoped might be his, but whose claim upon it has been rejected as insufficiently strong. Once there he meets his charming cousin, Miss Searle, and a tender friendship arises. But her brother Richard considers Clement nothing but a fortune hunter. To avoid further conflict, Clement and his friend depart for Oxford. But the saga of Clement Searle and Lackley is not yet done,
One of the things I like best about this early work is the enthusiastic, almost touristy descriptions of the English countryside. Some critics have found them superfluous and excessive, but I think they are just right. Not only do they reflect the attitude of young Henry—28 years old at the time this novella was published—but they also embody the passionate attachment the ailing Clement feels for this English world he fears he will never be able to possess.
In this passage, Clement and his companion approach Lackley for the first time:
Within the range of these numerous acres the declining spurs of the hills continued to undulate and subside. A long avenue wound and circled from the outermost gate through an untrimmed woodland, whence you glanced at further slopes and glades and copses and bosky recesses — at everything except the limits of the place … The weather had just become perfect; it was one of the dozen exquisite days of the English year — days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap. It was as if the mellow brightness, as tender as that of the primroses which starred the dark waysides like petals wind-scattered over beds of moss, had been meted out to us by the cubic foot — distilled from an alchemist’s crucible. From this pastoral abundance we moved upon the more composed scene, the park proper — passed through a second lodge-gate, with weather-worn gilding on its twisted bars, to the smooth slopes where the great trees stood singly and the tame deer browsed along the bed of a woodland stream. Here before us rose the gabled grey front of the Tudor-time, developed and terraced and gardened to some later loss, as we were afterwards to know, of type.
“Here you can wander all day,” I said to Searle, “like an exiled prince who has come back on tiptoe and hovers about the dominion of the usurper.”
“To think of ‘others’ having hugged this all these years!” he answered. “I know what I am, but what might I have been? What do such places make of a man?”
Printed in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (January 14, 1832), this is the first tale Poe published under his own name, and it marks a propitious st Printed in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier (January 14, 1832), this is the first tale Poe published under his own name, and it marks a propitious start to the twenty-three-year-old prose writer’s career. It is no masterpiece, but still, it is a fine exciting tale, filled with Germanic atmosphere, gothic imagery, and romantic rhetoric, continually teetering atop the precipice of parody, but never falling over the edge.
It tells the story of the reckless young Baron Frederick Metzengerstein and his feud with the Berlifitzing family. Soon after Frederick inherits his estate, the Berlifitzing stables catch fire and Wilhelm Von Berlifitzing perishes in the blaze. That evening Frederick’s servants bring him a magnificent stallion discovered in his own stables. The young lord claims the horse as his own—with fateful and tragic consequences.
I like the story both for what it remembers, and what it presages. In its treatment of doomed dynasties and unavoidable curses, it draws on Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, but its imagery—filled with fire and monumental destruction, alternating the brooding and vague with the unsettlingly precise, looks forward to The Fall of the House of Usher to come.
This passage will give some idea of what I mean. Here Baron Frederick, the stables blazing, contemplates a tapestry showing his Metzengerstein ancestor assassinating a Saracen forefather of the Berlifitzings:
But as the Baron listened, or affected to listen, to the gradually increasing uproar in the stables of Berlifitzing- or perhaps pondered upon some more novel, some more decided act of audacity- his eyes became unwittingly rivetted to the figure of an enormous, and unnaturally colored horse, represented in the tapestry as belonging to a Saracen ancestor of the family of his rival. The horse itself, in the foreground of the design, stood motionless and statue-like- while farther back, its discomfited rider perished by the dagger of a Metzengerstein ...
[H]e could by no means account for the overwhelming anxiety which appeared falling like a pall upon his senses. It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake. The longer he gazed the more absorbing became the spell- the more impossible did it appear that he could ever withdraw his glance from the fascination of that tapestry. But the tumult without becoming suddenly more violent, with a compulsory exertion he diverted his attention to the glare of ruddy light thrown full by the flaming stables upon the windows of the apartment.
The action, however, was but momentary, his gaze returned mechanically to the wall. To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its position. The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended, at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his gigantic and disgusting teeth.
One final note. “Metzengerstein” was one of the stories Poe submitted to a contest held by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, deadline December 1st 1831. Delia Bacon won the contest with her story “Love’s Martyr,” and Poe’s consolation prize was to see his story printed one week after the winner’s. I wonder: how many times did Delia Bacon—who outlived Poe by ten years—tell this story in the decades to come?...more
There was an eclipse on February 12, 1831. Six months later, on August 13, 1831, a short piece entitled “A Dream” was published by an author (identifi There was an eclipse on February 12, 1831. Six months later, on August 13, 1831, a short piece entitled “A Dream” was published by an author (identified as “P.”) in the Saturday Evening Post, a journal then edited by E. A. Poe’s friend, Lambert A. Wilmer. In it, the unnamed narrator tells us of falling asleep during his bedtime bible reading—that passage in Matthew where Christ dies on the cross, the sky darkens with an eclipse, the earth shakes, and the graves yield up their dead—and then relates a dream fantasy in which he imagines himself to be one of the Pharisees on that fateful Jerusalem day.
Poe—who would have been twenty-two at the time—never acknowledged authorship of “A Dream,” but Thomas Ollive Mabbott, editor of the authoritative Tales and Sketches (1978) includes the piece, stating that “I too have read much in the old periodicals, and have found nothing else that impresses me so strongly as being possibly Poe’s as this tale.”
It is obviously the work of a young writer learning his craft, but it contains more than a few passages that suggest the dark imagination of the young Poe. My favorite passage—and what convinced me that it is the work of the master—is this description of a dead King of Israel rising from his grave:
I turned to see whither I had wandered. I had come to the burial ground of the monarch of Israel. I gazed with trembling, as I saw the clods which covered the mouldering bones of some tyrant begin to move. I looked at where the last monarch had been laid, in all the splendour and pageantry of death, and the sculptured monument began to tremble. Soon it was overturned, and from it issued the tenant of the grave. ’Twas a hideous, unearthly form, such as Dante, in his wildest flights of terrified fancy, ne’er conjured up. I could not move, for terror had tied up volition. It approached me. I saw the grave-worm twining itself amongst the matted locks which in part covered the rotten scull. The bones creaked on each other as they moved on the hinges, for its flesh was gone. I listened to their horrid music, as this parody on poor mortality stalked along. He came up to me; and, as he passed, he breathed the cold damps of the lonely, narrow house directly in my face. The chasm in the heavens closed….
By the time Hawthornes’s final collection of short fiction, The Snow Image, and Other, and Other Twice Told Tales (1852) was published, the author had By the time Hawthornes’s final collection of short fiction, The Snow Image, and Other, and Other Twice Told Tales (1852) was published, the author had already turned his full attention to novels. (The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables had been published in the two previous years, and Hawthorne had already begun work on The Blithedale Romance.) In fact, only three works included here—”Main-Street,” “The Snow-Image,” and “The Great Stone Face,” “Ethan Brand”—had been written since the publication of Hawthorne’s previous collection, Mosses from the Old Manse (1846), the other twelve being previously uncollected pieces, some written twenty years before. Apparently Hawthorne’s audience had moved on too: The Snow Image was the authors least profitable book.
Still, everything here is worthy a reader’s attention. “Old News” (1835), “Old Ticonderoga” (1836) “A Bell’s Biography” (1837), and “Main Street” (1849) are fact-filled meditations in which Hawthorne uses an old place or artifact existing in the present—a hoard of ancient newspapers, a ruined fort, a local church bell, a diorama of Salem) to summon up the atmosphere of the colonial and revolutionary past. A few others are essentially successful tales slightly marred by their brevity or incompleteness—“The Wives of the Dead” (1832), “The Devil in Manuscript”(1838), “Sylph Etherege” (1838), “John Inglefield’s Thanksgiving” (1840)—but each emanating from the center of Hawthorne’s dark vision. Add to these “Little Daffydowndilly” (1843), a child’s allegorical parable about the nature of work, and “The Canterbury Pilgrims” (1833), a typical Hawthorne piece in which a group of desperate, down-on-their luck people decide whether to take refuge in the celibate Shaker Community of Canterbury, New Hampshire, and you have the core of a diverse and diverting college.
In addition, Hawthorne offers us five masterpieces, three of which are newer works. “The Snow-Image,” a chilling children’s story, demonstrates—like “The Birthmark,” “Rappacini’s Daughter,” and “The Artist of the Beautiful” before it—how a sensible, well-meaning man can destroy an irreplaceable, precious thing, “The Great Stone Face” (1850), a melancholy allegory, present a few images of human greatness, and “Ethan Brand” embodies the classic Hawthorne theme of a passionate man grown cold through a clinical search for perfection. The other two tales, though, are much earlier, and are just as good as the previous three. The Man of Adamant” (1837), as its title indicates, shares a theme with “Ethan Brand,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832)—written when Hawthorne was in his late twenties—is a tale of youthful disillusionment is as fine as anything Hawthorne has written, right up there with “Young Goodman Brown.”
Short version: not as good as “Twice-Told” or “Manse,” but well worth a look....more
Sometimes genius gives a preview of itself; Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux” is a fine example of this. Published in The Token and Atlantic Sou Sometimes genius gives a preview of itself; Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux” is a fine example of this. Published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1832), when Hawthorne was twenty-eight, it possesses the symbolic resonance, the use of gothic imagery adapted to a vivid colonial atmosphere that characterizes the best of his short fiction to come. Moreover, it expresses a sharp sense of evil and a disillusionment with moral authority that Hawthorne would later bring to perfection—in his mid-forties—in his novel The Scarlet Letter. And yet it is a realistic coming-of age tale too, written by a man young still young enough to empathize with his naive hero and mourn his own loss of innocence, yet mature enough to control a plot and sustain a mood of ludicrous, almost comic menace throughout a narrative of more than seven thousand words, crowded with incident
The naive hero in question is a young man named Robin, who has just arrived by ferry in the city of Boston. He has come from the country to seek his fortune in the great city, and he knows where to start; he was promised employment by an important man: his kinsman, a Major Molineux. He asks those he meets about Molineux’s whereabouts, but is almost universally abused for his pains. A rich old man menaces him with a cane, a tavern-owner accuses him of being an escaped bondservant, and the night watchman threatens him with a night in the stocks for vagrancy. He encounters other people in his journey—including a pretty woman claiming to be Molineux’s housekeeper and a man with a fiery complexion and horn-like protuberances on his brow—but eventually he meets up with Major Molineux. And the laughter that results from this encounter echoes in the readers memory long after the story is done. Is this a rite of passage for Robin. Or a moral failure? Or both.
I’ll end this review with one of my favorite passages, showing young Hawthorne’s gothic impulse combined—as would often be the case—with spiritual meditation. Here Robin, while sitting on the steps of a church and waiting for the coming of Molineux, examines the house directly opposite, wondering if it could belong to the major:
[H]e took a minute survey of an edifice which stood on the opposite side of the street, directly in front of the church-door, where he was stationed. It was a large, square mansion, distinguished from its neighbors by a balcony, which rested on tall pillars, and by an elaborate Gothic window, communicating therewith.
Perhaps this is the very house I have been seeking,” thought Robin.
Then he strove to speed away the time, by listening to a murmur which swept continually along the street, yet was scarcely audible, except to an unaccustomed ear like his; it was a low, dull, dreamy sound, compounded of many noises, each of which was at too great a distance to be separately heard. Robin marvelled at this snore of a sleeping town, and marvelled more whenever its continuity was broken by now and then a distant shout, apparently loud where it originated. But altogether it was a sleep-inspiring sound, and, to shake off its drowsy influence, Robin arose, and climbed a window-frame, that he might view the interior of the church. There the moonbeams came trembling in, and fell down upon the deserted pews, and extended along the quiet aisles. A fainter yet more awful radiance was hovering around the pulpit, and one solitary ray had dared to rest upon the open page of the great Bible. Had nature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the house which man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the visible sanctity of the place, — visible because no earthly and impure feet were within the walls? The scene made Robin’s heart shiver with a sensation of loneliness stronger than he had ever felt in the remotest depths of his native woods; so he turned away and sat down again before the door. There were graves around the church, and now an uneasy thought obtruded into Robin’s breast. What if the object of his search, which had been so often and so strangely thwarted, were all the time mouldering in his shroud? What if his kinsman should glide through yonder gate, and nod and smile to him in dimly passing by?
“Oh that any breathing thing were here with me!” said Robin.
“Little Daffydowndilly,” first published in Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine (1843) is a short allegory intended for children, and is definitely one of Hawth “Little Daffydowndilly,” first published in Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine (1843) is a short allegory intended for children, and is definitely one of Hawthorne’s lesser works. It is straightforward, and without nuance, and therefore essentially uninteresting. In fact, the only interesting thing I see about it is that he chooses for the subject of his tale a young man much like the idle 21-year-old Nathaniel Hawthorne of eight years before, who—after he had matriculated from Bowdoin—cultivated idleness for a few years, as a fertile ground for literary production:
[W]hile Daffydowndilly was yet a little boy, his mother sent him away from his pleasant home, and put him under the care of a very strict schoolmaster, who went by the name of Mr. Toil. Those who knew him best affirmed that this Mr. Toil was a very worthy character; and that he had done more good, both to children and grown people, than anybody else in the world….Nevertheless, Mr. Toil had a severe and ugly countenance, especially for such little boys or big men as were inclined to be idle; his voice, too, was harsh; and all his ways and customs seemed very disagreeable to our friend Daffydowndilly. The whole day long, this terrible old schoolmaster sat at his desk overlooking the scholars, or stalked about the school-room with a certain awful birch rod in his hand….“I can’t bear it any longer,” said Daffydowndilly to himself, when he had been at school about a week. “I’ll run away, and try to find my dear mother; and, at any rate, I shall never find anybody half so disagreeable as this old Mr. Toil!”
Hawthorne follows Daffydowndilly—and an older stranger he acts as his companion—and shows us how, whenever the pair encounter an attractive “idle” activity—haymaking, house-building, soldiering, fiddle-playing—he finds, somewhere lurking in the background, someone who looks a lot like Mr. Toil:
Well, thus the stranger and little Daffydowndilly went wandering along the highway, and in shady lanes, and through pleasant villages; and whithersoever they went, behold! there was the image of old Mr. Toil. He stood like a scarecrow in the cornfields. If they entered a house, he sat in the parlor; if they peeped into the kitchen, he was there. He made himself at home in every cottage, and stole, under one disguise or another, into the most splendid mansions. Everywhere there was sure to be somebody wearing the likeness of Mr. Toil, and who, as the stranger affirmed, was one of the old schoolmaster’s innumerable brethren.
Eventually, of course (you guessed it!), Little Daffydowndilly returns to school....more
First published in The Token (1832). this little story—in appearance little more than a sketch—gains richness and complexity with each reading. It tel First published in The Token (1832). this little story—in appearance little more than a sketch—gains richness and complexity with each reading. It tells us of two young widows bereaved by the deaths of the two brothers—one a sailor, one a soldier—whom they have married. Each retires to bed, each is awakened by a knock, and each received welcome information. But did both of them—or one of them—sleep through the night? And was it two actual visits—or two dream visits—that filled the widows hearts with joy?
I’ve read this brief piece three times now, yet I am not sure of the answers. Who is sleeping? Who has awakened? What is the nature of these two visitations?
I am puzzled--yet intrigued--by the ambiguity. I think I’ll go read this again....more
This is definitely minor Hawthorne, but then I always find Hawthorne—even of the minor sort—worth my time and attention. In this piece, the narrator—w This is definitely minor Hawthorne, but then I always find Hawthorne—even of the minor sort—worth my time and attention. In this piece, the narrator—who sounds a lot like the author—visits the ruin of the historic fort “Old Ticonderoga.” First he describes the ruin, and then indulges himself in a daydream about the three separate armies that once occupied the fort.
The portion of the ruin he describes in detail is the the inside of the old roofless barracks where he sits down to rest himself:
The exterior walls were nearly entire, constructed of gray, flat, unpicked stones, the aged strength of which promised long to resist the elements, if no other violence should precipitate their fall. — The roof, floors, partitions, and the rest of the wood-work had probably been burnt, except some bars of stanch old oak, which were blackened with fire, but still remained imbedded into the window-sills and over the doors. There were a few particles of plastering near the chimney, scratched with rude figures, perhaps by a soldier’s hand. A most luxuriant crop of weeds had sprung up within the edifice, and hid the scattered fragments of the wall. Grass and weeds grew in the windows, and in all the crevices of the stone, climbing, step by step, till a tuft of yellow flowers was waving on the highest peak of the gable.
Then our narrator begins a reverie about the various battles and occupying armies, ending with Ethan Allen’s motley crew being chased from the fort by British artillery:
Next came the hurried muster of the soldiers of liberty, when the cannon of Burgoyne, pointing down upon their stronghold from the brow of Mount Defiance, announced a new conqueror of Ticonderoga. No virgin fortress, this! Forth rushed the motley throng from the barracks, one man wearing the blue and buff of the Union, another the red coat of Britain, a third a dragoon’s jacket, and a fourth a cotton frock; here was a pair of leather breeches, and striped trousers there; a grenadier’s cap on one head, and a broad-brimmed hat, with a tall feather, on the next; this fellow shouldering a king’s arm, that might throw a bullet to Crown Point, and his comrade a long fowling-piece, admirable to shoot ducks on the lake. In the midst of the bustle, when the fortress was all alive with its last warlike scene, the ringing of a bell on the lake made me suddenly unclose my eyes, and behold only the gray and weed-grown ruins. They were as peaceful in the sun as a warrior’s grave.
As all those addicted to weird tales have known for years, The King in Yellow is one of the seminal books of modern horror fiction. It inspires, and c As all those addicted to weird tales have known for years, The King in Yellow is one of the seminal books of modern horror fiction. It inspires, and continues to inspire. It prompted H.P. Lovecraft to create the Cthulhu mythos almost ninety years ago, and a mere five years ago it became a major reference point for HBO’s superb first season of True Detective.
Chambers conception is simple but powerful: what if there were a literary work which could—at a specific point in the perusal of the text—drive each of its readers insane? Chambers called this work –a play to be precise—The King in Yellow. Although its first act seems harmless enough . . . everyone who begins reading the second act goes hopelessly, irrevocably mad. Chambers influential idea was to write four otherwise unrelated stories of madness and the occult and then—almost casually, parenthetically—mention The King in Yellow and a few startling image from it in every one. Each of these well-crafted stories would have delivered a thrill or two on its own, but—once the mention of this sinister plays had been added—the overall effect of the four tales taken together was chilling. (Clearly, Lovecraft learned from Chambers, using The Necronomicon and the mythos itself in much the same fashion.
Chambers published these four stories in a collection called The King in Yellow in 1895, but, as they were not quite enough by themselves to comprise a substantial collection, he added six others tales, a few of which were bohemian romance tales without even a touch of the occult, and none of which mentioned The Yellow King at all. This was a mistake, for the additional stories dissipated the extraordinary effect of the four “King in Yellow” tales taken together.
Pushkin Press has now made things right, by including only those four original tales in a small attractive book of only 154 pages. If you have the time, read it in one sitting, or at least during a couple of sittings on one long winter night. You may find that The King in Yellow touches you with his madness too:
I raised my seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.
And now, far away, over the leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon.
. . . And now I heard the voice, rising, swelling, thunder through the blaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame . . . I head the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”
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