- end_line
- 4273
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.879Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4223
- text
- in a piece entitled _Young Goodman Brown_?’ You would of course suppose
that it was a simple little tale, intended as a supplement to _Goody Two
Shoes_. Whereas, it is deep as Dante; nor can you finish it, without
addressing the author in his own words--‘It shall be yours to penetrate,
in every bosom, the deep mystery of sin.’... And with Young Goodman,
too, in allegorical pursuit of his Puritan wife, you cry out in your
anguish:--
‘“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and
desperation; and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying,
“Faith! Faith!” as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all
through the wilderness.’
Now this same piece entitled _Young Goodman Brown_, is one of the two
that I had not all read yesterday; and I allude to it now, because it
is, in itself, such a strong positive illustration of the blackness in
Hawthorne, which I had assumed from the mere occasional shadows of it,
as revealed in several of the other sketches. But had I previously
perused _Young Goodman Brown_, I should have been at no pains to draw
the conclusion, which I came to at a time when I was ignorant that the
book contained one such direct and unqualified manifestation of it.
The other piece of the two referred to, is entitled _A Select Party_,
which, in my first simplicity upon originally taking hold of the book, I
fancied must treat of some pumpkin-pie party in old Salem; or some
chowder party on Cape Cod. Whereas, by all the gods of Peedee, it is the
sweetest and sublimest thing that has been written since Spenser wrote.
Nay, there is nothing in Spenser that surpasses it, perhaps nothing that
equals it. And the test is this. Read any canto in _The Faerie Queene_
and then read _A Select Party_, and decide which pleases you most, that
is, if you are qualified to judge. Do not be frightened at this; for
when Spenser was alive, he was thought of very much as Hawthorne is
now,--was generally accounted just such a ‘gentle’ harmless man. It may
be, that to common eyes, the sublimity of Hawthorne seems lost in his
sweetness,--as perhaps in that same _Select Party_ of his; for whom he
has builded so august a dome of sunset clouds, and served them on richer
plate than Belshazzar when he banqueted his lords in Babylon.
But my chief business now, is to point out a particular page in this
piece, having reference to an honoured guest, who under the name of the
Master Genius, but in the guise ‘of a young man of poor attire, with no
insignia of rank or acknowledged eminence,’ is introduced to the Man of
Fancy, who is the giver of the feast. Now, the page having reference to
this Master Genius, so happily expresses much of what I yesterday wrote,
touching the coming of the literary Shiloh of America, that I cannot but
be charmed by the coincidence; especially, when it shows such a parity
of ideas, at least in this one point, between a man like Hawthorne and a
man like me.
- title
- Chunk 2