Every year
the recurrent changes of season filled him with untold pleasure; and in
the spring, Mrs. Hawthorne has been heard to say, he would walk with her
in continuous silence, his heart full of the awe and delight with which
the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him. Nothing could be more
accurate or sensitive than the brief descriptions of nature in his
works. But there is nothing sentimental about them; partly owing to the
Anglo-Saxon instinct which caused him to seek precise and detailed
statement first of all, and partly because of a certain classic,
awe-inspired reserve, like that of Horace and Virgil.
There was a commendable indolence in his character. It was not a
constitutional weakness, overcoming will, but the instinctive precaution
of a man whose errand it was to rise to great emergencies of exertion.
He always waited for an adequate mood, before writing. But these
intervals, of course, were richly productive of revery which afterward
entered into the creative moments. He would sometimes become deeply
abstracted in imagination; and while he was writing "The Scarlet Letter"
it is related by a trustworthy person that, sitting in the room where
his wife was doing some sewing, he unconsciously took up a part of the
work and cut it into minute fragments with the scissors, without being
aware that he had done so. At some previous time, he had in the same way
gradually chipped off with a knife portions of a table, until the entire
folding-leaf was worn away by the process.
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