These stories are like the simple but well-devised
theme which a musician prepares as the basis of a whole composition:
they show the several tendencies which underlie all the subsequent
works. First, there are the scenes from New England history,--"Endicott
and the Red Cross," "The Maypole of Merry Mount," "The Gray Champion,"
the "Tales of the Province House."
Then we have the psychological vein, in "The Prophetic Pictures," "The
Minister's Black Veil," "Dr. Heidegger," "Fancy's Show-Box"; and along
with this the current of delicate essay-writing, as in "The Haunted
Mind," and "Sunday at Home." "Little Annie's Ramble," again, foreshadows
his charming children's tales. It is rather remarkable that he should
thus have sounded, though faintly, the whole diapason in his first
works. Moreover, he had already at this time attained a style at once
flowing and large in its outline, and masterly in its minuteness.
But this maturity was not won without deep suffering and long-deferred
hope.
If actual contact with men resulted in such grave and sorrowful
reflection as we have traced, how drearily trying must have been the
climaxes of solitary thought after a long session of seclusion! And much
the larger portion of his time was consumed amid an absolute silence, a
privacy unbroken by intimate confidences and rife with exhausting and
depressing reactions from intense imagination and other severe
intellectual exercise. Not only must the repression of this period have
amounted at times to positive anguish, but there was also the perplexing
perception that his life's fairest possibilities were still barren.
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