"Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my
regard," he says, in "The Custom-House." "I cared not at this period for
books; they were apart from me.... A gift, a faculty, if it had not
departed, was suspended and inanimate within me."
Readers of that charming sketch will remember the account of the
author's finding a veritable Puritan scarlet letter in an unfinished
upper room of the public building in which he labored at this time, and
how he was urged by the ghost of a former surveyor, who had written an
account of the badge and its wearer, to make the matter public. The
discovery of these materials is narrated with such reassuring accuracy,
that probably a large number of people still suppose this to have been
the origin of "The Scarlet Letter." But there is no knowledge among
those immediately connected with Hawthorne of any actual relic having
been found; nor, of course, is it likely that anything besides the
manuscript memorandum should have been preserved. But I do not know that
he saw even this. The papers of Mr. Poe were probably a pure invention
of the author's.
A strange coincidence came to light the year after the publication of
the romance. A letter from Leutze, the painter, was printed in the Art
Union Bulletin, running thus:--
"I was struck, when some years ago in the Schwarzwald (in an old
castle), with one picture in the portrait-gallery; it has haunted me
ever since. It was not the beauty or finish that charmed me; it was
something strange in the figures, the immense contrast between the child
and what was supposed to be her gouvernante in the garb of some severe
order; the child, a girl, was said to be the ancestress of the family, a
princess of some foreign land.
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