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- And whatever lady doubts this story, my daughters will be happy to show
her both the bug and the table, and point out to her, in the repaired
slab of the latter, the two sealing-wax drops designating the exact
place of the two holes made by the two bugs, something in the same way
in which are marked the spots where the cannon balls struck Brattle
Street church.
HAWTHORNE AND HIS MOSSES
_BY A VIRGINIAN SPENDING JULY IN VERMONT_
A papered chamber in a fine old farmhouse, a mile from any other
dwelling, and dipped to the eaves in foliage--surrounded by mountains,
old woods, and Indian pools,--this surely, is the place to write of
Hawthorne. Some charm is in this northern air, for love and duty seem
both impelling to the task. A man of a deep and noble nature has seized
me in this seclusion. His wild, witch-voice rings through me; or, in
softer cadences, I seem to hear it in the songs of the hillside birds
that sing in the larch trees at my window.
Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or
mother, that so it might be we could glorify them, without including
their ostensible authors! Nor would any true man take exception to
this; least of all, he who writes, "When the artist rises high enough
to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible
to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit
possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality."
But more than this. I know not what would be the right name to put on
the title-page of an excellent book; but this I feel, that the names
of all fine authors are fictitious ones, far more so than that of
Junius; simply standing, as they do, for the mystical ever-eluding
spirit of all beauty, which ubiquitously possesses men of genius.
Purely imaginative as this fancy may appear, it nevertheless seems to
receive some warranty from the fact, that on a personal interview no
great author has ever come up to the idea of his reader. But that dust
of which our bodies are composed, how can it fitly express the nobler
intelligences among us? With reverence be it spoken, that not even in
the case of one deemed more than man, not even in our Saviour, did his
visible frame betoken anything of the augustness of the nature within.
Else, how could those Jewish eyewitnesses fail to see heaven in his
glance!
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