Old News: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")Hawthorne, Nathaniel
General
Old News: (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Historical fiction, American; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
The present volume of newspapers contains fewer characteristic traits
than any which we have looked over. Except for the peculiarities
attendant on the passing struggle, manners seem to have taken a modern
cast. Whatever antique fashions lingered into the War of the
Revolution, or beyond it, they were not so strongly marked as to leave
their traces in the public journals. Moreover, the old newspapers had
an indescribable picturesqueness, not to be found in the later ones.
Whether it be something in the literary execution, or the ancient print
and paper, and the idea that those same musty pages have been handled
by people once alive and bustling amid the scenes there recorded, yet
now in their graves beyond the memory of man; so it is, that in those
elder volumes we seem to find the life of a past age preserved between
the leaves, like a dry specimen of foliage. It is so difficult to
discover what touches are really picturesque, that we doubt whether our
attempts have produced any similar effect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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