Tales and Sketches, Part Four. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Continued.

Tales and Sketches, Part Four
Nathaniel Hawthorne
New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982
[1830-1852]

"Fire Worship." "It is a great revolution in social and domestic life...this almost universal exchange of the open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove. In one way or another, here and there, and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic and the beautiful out of human life. Afar, the wayfarer discerns the flickering flame, as it dances upon the windows, and hails it as a beacon-light of humanity, reminding him, in his cold and lonely path, that the world is not all snow, and solitude, and desolation. It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it has been, now that we have subtracted from it so important and vivifying an element as firelight. Fight for your hearths? There will be none throughout the land; fight for your stoves? not I, in faith."

"The Christmas Banquet." "This misanthrope had employed himself in accumulating motives for hating and despising his race--such as murder, lust, treachery, ingratitude, faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive vices of children, impurity of women, hidden guilt in men of saint-like aspect--and, in short, all manner of black realities that sought to decorate themselves with outward grace or glory. The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral urn...its influence was not to cheer, but either to shrink the revelers into a deeper melancholy, or elevate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness. Of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode were by halter, knife, poison, drowning, gradual starvation, or the fumes of charcoal. As the hoar-frost began to gather on him, his wife went to her grave, and was doubtless warmer there."

"A Good Man's Miracle." "In every good action there is a divine quality, which does not end with the completion of that particular deed, but goes on to bring forth good works in an infinite series."

"The Intelligence Office." "Old people wished for the delights of youth; a fop, for a fashionable coat; an idle reader, for a new novel; a versifier, for a rhyme to some stubborn word; a painter, fir Titian's secret of coloring; a prince for a cottage; a republican, for a kingdom and a palace; a libertine, for his neighbor's wife...a poor man, for a crust of bread."

To be continued.