The
house in which he dwelt was itself a little island of the past, standing
intact above the flood of events; all around was a mild, cultivated
country, broken into gentle variety of "hills to live with," and touched
with just enough wildness to keep him from tiring of it: the stream that
flowed by his orchard was for him an enchanted river. He renewed the
pleasant sports of boyhood with it, fishing and boating in summer, and
in winter whistling over its clear, black ice, on rapid skates. In the
more genial months, the garden gave him pleasant employment; and in his
journal-musings, the thought gratifies him that he has come into a
primitive relation with nature, and that the two occupants of the Manse
are in good faith a new Adam and Eve, so far as the happiness of that
immemorial pair remained unbroken. The charm of these experiences has
all been distilled into the descriptive chapter which prefaces the
"Mosses"; and such more personal aspects of it as could not be mixed in
that vintage have been gathered, like forgotten clusters of the harvest,
into the Note-Books. It remains to comment, here, on the contrast
between the peaceful character of these first years at Concord and the
increased sombreness of some of the visions there recorded.
The reason of this is, that Hawthorne's genius had now waxed to a
stature which made its emanations less immediately dependent on his
actual mood. I am far from assuming an exact autobiographical value for
the "Twice-Told Tales"; a theory which the writer himself condemned.
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