The Life and Genius of Nathaniel HawthorneStearns, Frank Preston
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The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Stearns, Frank Preston
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
The question now was, what next? As it happened, the next important
event in the Hawthorne family was the advent of their younger daughter,
born like Agassiz, “in the lovely month of May,” and amid scenery as
beautiful as the Pays de Vaud. Her father named her Rose, in defiance of
Hillard’s objection to idyllic nomenclature; and as a child she
seemed much like the spirit of that almost fabulous flower, the wild
orange-rose. Ten years later, she was the most graceful girl in the
Concord dancing-school, and resembled her elder sister so closely that
they could not have been mistaken for anything but sisters. As she grew
older she came more and more to resemble her mother.
It was said that Hawthorne’s “Wonder Book” originated in his telling
free versions of the Greek myths to his children on winter evenings; and
also that Horace Mann’s boys, who were almost exactly of the same age
as Una and Julian, participated in the entertainment. This may have
happened the following winter at Newton, but could hardly have taken
place at Lenox; and otherwise it is quite impossible to identify all the
children with botanical names in Hawthorne’s introduction. Julian
once remarked, at school, that he believed that he was the original of
Squash-blossom, and that is as near as we can get to it. Some of them
may have been as imaginary as the ingenious Mr. Eustace Bright, and
might serve as well to represent one group of children as another.
The book was written very rapidly, at an average of ten pages a day, and
it has Hawthorne’s grace and purity of style, but it does not belong
to the legitimate series of his works. It is an excellent book for the
young, for they learn from it much that every one ought to know; but
to mature minds the original fables, even in a translation, are more
satisfactory than these Anglo-Saxon versions in the “Wonder Book.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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