- end_line
- 3734
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 3685
- text
- believe that that animal decay before mentioned still befriended him to
the close, and that he fell asleep recalling through the haze of memory
many a far-off scene of the wide world’s beauty dreamily suggested by
the hazy waters before him.
He lies buried among other sailors, for whom also strangers performed
one last rite in a lonely plot overgrown with wild eglantine uncared for
by man.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 hill-side 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!
- title
- Chunk 4