By this means we are enabled to live through the whole
immortal future which he projects for himself, though he never in
reality achieves any of it. This forcing of the infinite into the
finite, we are again indebted to Mr. Higginson for emphasizing as "one
of the very greatest triumphs in all literature." "A hundred separate
tragedies," he says, "would be easier to depict than this which combines
so many in one."
But notice the growth of the romance in Hawthorne's mind. "Dr.
Heidegger's Experiment," in which several people are restored to youth
for an hour by a life-elixir, was published before 1837. In 1840 we have
this entry in the journal: "If a man were sure of living forever here,
he would not care about his offspring." A few years afterward, in "A
Virtuoso's Collection," the elixir vitae is introduced, "in an antique
sepulchral urn," but the narrator refuses to quaff it. "'No; I desire
not an earthly immortality,' said I. 'Were man to live longer on the
earth, the spiritual would die out of him.... There is a celestial
something within us, that requires, after a certain time, the atmosphere
of heaven to preserve it from ruin.'" But the revolt against death, and
then the reactionary meditation upon it, and final reverence for it,
must, from the circumstances of his youngest years, have been very early
familiar to Hawthorne; and in the course of these meditations, the
conception of deathlessness must often have floated before him. The
tradition as to the former owner of the Wayside, who had thought he
should never die (alluded to in the letter to Curtis, in 1852 [Footnote:
See ante, p.
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