THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (Illustrated). Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Golden Fleece

       The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces, Tales and Sketches (1864)

       Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man

       A Book of Autographs

       An Old Woman’s Tale

       Other Tales and Sketches

       I. My Visit to Niagara

       II. The Antique Ring

       III. Graves and Goblins

       Time’s Portraiture

       Dr. Bullivant

       The Story Teller

       An Ontario Steam-Boat

       The Ghost of Doctor Harris

       Apparitions

       Sketches in Magazines:

       Sir William Phips (1830)

       Mrs. Hutchinson (1830)

       The Haunted Quack (1831)

       Sir William Pepperell (1833)

       A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather (1836)

       Thomas Green Fessenden (1838)

       Jonathan Cilley (1838)

       A Good Man's Miracle (1844)

       Essays and Criticisms on Hawthorne and His Works:

       Review of Twice Told Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

       Hawthorne by Henry James Jr.

       Nathaniel Hawthorne by George E. Woodberry

       A Study of Hawthorne by George Parson Lathrop

       ‘Hawthorne’ and ‘The Works of Hawthorne’: Literary and Social Essays by George William Curtis

       Nathaniel Hawthorne: Hours in A Library by Leslie Stephen

       Passages on the Works of Hawthorne by William B. Cairns: Twice Told Tales

      Introduction

       Table of Contents

Biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop

       Table of Contents

       I.

       II.

       III.

       IV.

       V.

      I.

       Table of Contents

      The lives of great men are written gradually. It often takes as long to construct a true biography as it took the person who is the subject of it to complete his career; and when the work is done, it is found to consist of many volumes, produced by a variety of authors. We receive views from different observers, and by putting them together are able to form our own estimate. What the man really was not even himself could know; much less can we. Hence all that we accomplish, in any case, is to approximate to the reality. While we flatter ourselves that we have imprinted on our minds an exact image of the individual, we actually secure nothing but a typical likeness. This likeness, however, is amplified and strengthened by successive efforts to paint a correct portrait. If the faces of people belonging to several generations of a family be photographed upon one plate, they combine to form a single distinct countenance, which shows a general resemblance to them all: in somewhat the same way, every sketch of a distinguished man helps to fix the lines of that typical semblance of him which is all that the world can hope to preserve.

      This principle applies to the case of Hawthorne, notwithstanding that the details of his career are comparatively few, and must be marshalled in much the same way each time that it is attempted to review them. The veritable history of his life would be the history of his mental development, recording, like Wordsworth's "Prelude," the growth of a poet's mind; and on glancing back over it he too might have said, in Wordsworth's phrases:—

      "Wisdom and spirit of the universe!

       . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

       By day or star-light thus from my first dawn

       Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me

       The passions that build up the human soul;

       Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,

       But with high objects, with enduring things—

       With life and nature, purifying thus