The Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. HawthorneHarcourt, Brace, 1927 - 367 pages |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
acquaintance admired Alcott appointment arrival aware beauty became began Boston Bridge Bridge's Brook Farm character Cilley Concord Conolly considered consul Custom House death delight dream Elizabeth Peabody Emerson engaged England experience feel felt Franklin Pierce friends Goodrich happy Hawthorne Hawthorne's heart Herbert Street Herman Melville Hillard hope Horatio Bridge husband intimate John Hathorne John O'Sullivan Justice Hathorne knew later literary live looked Louisa Manse Margaret Fuller Melville Melville's ment mind months mother Nathaniel and Sophia NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Nathaniel recorded Nathaniel wrote nature never notebook novel once Pierce publication published realized REBELLIOUS PURITAN replied residence Ripley Ripley's Salem Scarlet Letter seclusion seemed sister society solitude soul spent spirit story talk thaniel things Thoreau thou thought Ticknor tion told Sophia tom House took Transcendental Club Twice-Told Tales walks weary Whigs writing
Popular passages
Page 112 - Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by .... Here I have written many tales, many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world.
Page 27 - From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.
Page 258 - It looks upon slavery as one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream.
Page 113 - And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars ; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart...
Page 248 - A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and I feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome's Pantheon. It is a strange feeling — no hopefulness is in it, no despair. Content — that is it; and irresponsibility; but without licentious inclination.
Page 140 - I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me.
Page 317 - This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story, with all sorts of fun and pathos in it...
Page 229 - ... these men of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the world — how little time has it required to disconnect me from them all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land...
Page 56 - Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world, unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.
Page 225 - Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it to my emotions when I read the last scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it — tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm.