Then he would brood over
this suggestion till it became a reality, a person, to his mind; and
thus his characters were conceived independently in a region somewhere
between himself and the people who had awakened speculation in his mind.
He had a very sure instinct as to when a piece of reality might be
transferred to his fiction with advantage. Mr. Curtis has told the story
of a young woman of Concord, a farmer's daughter, who had had her
aspirations roused by education until the conflict between these and the
hard and barren life she was born to, made her thoroughly miserable and
morbid; and one summer's evening she sought relief in the quiet, homely
stream that flowed by the Old Manse, and found the end of earthly
troubles in its oozy depths. Hawthorne was roused by Curtis himself
coming beneath his window (precisely as Coverdale comes to summon
Hollingsworth), and with one other they went out on the river, to find
the poor girl's body. "The man," writes his friend, "whom the villagers
had only seen at morning as a musing spectre in the garden, now appeared
among them at night to devote his strong arm and steady heart to their
service."
By this dark memory is the powerful climax of "The Blithedale Romance"
bound to the sphere of a reality as dread.
VI.
THE OLD MANSE.
1842-1846.
There is a Providence in the lives of men who act sincerely, which makes
each step lead, with the best result, to the next phase of their
careers. By his participation in the excellent endeavor at Brook Farm,
Hawthorne had prepared himself to enjoy to the full his idyllic
retirement at the Old Manse, in Concord.
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