Tales of the White Hills, and sketches (1889)/Introduction

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

INTRODUCTION.

The first three numbers in this collection are tales of the White Hills in New Hampshire. The passages from Sketches from Memory show that Hawthorne had visited the mountains in one of his occasional rambles from home, but there are no entries in his Note Books which give accounts of such a visit. There is however among these notes the following interesting paragraph, written in 1840 and clearly foreshadowing The Great Stone Face:

“The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturæ [freak of nature]. The face is an object of curiosity for, years or centuries, and by and by a boy is born whose features gradually assume the aspect of that portrait. At some critical juncture the resemblance is found to be perfect. A prophecy may be connected.”

It is not impossible that this conceit occurred to Hawthorne before he had himself seen the Old Man of the Mountain, or the Profile, in the Franconia Notch which is generally associated in the minds of readers with The Great Stone Face.

In The Ambitious Guest he has made use of the incident still told to travellers through the Notch, of the destruction of the Willey family in August, 1826. The house occupied by the family was on the slope of a mountain, and after a long drought there was a terrible tempest which not only raised the river to a great height but loosened the surface of the mountain so that a great land slide took place. The house was in the track of the slide, and the family rushed out of doors. Had they remained within they would have been safe, for a boulder above the house parted the avalanche so that it was diverted into two paths and swept past the house on either side. Mr. and Mrs. Willey, their five children, and two hired men were crushed under the weight of earth, rocks, and trees.

In the Sketches from Memory Hawthorne gives an intimation of the tale which he might write and did afterward write of The Great Carbuncle. The paper is interesting as showing what were the actual experiences out of which he formed his imaginative stories. In other parts of the same general collection of reminiscences he gives an account of his travel on the Erie Canal in a canal-boat, of Burlington, Vermont, and of Rochester, New York. The sketch of My Visit to Niagara is taken from the twelfth volume of Hawthorne’s collected works, and gives a picture of the place as it was about 1830.

Old Ticonderoga gives a capital opportunity for the student to trace from Hawthorne’s hints the several historical events which suggested the pictures to his mind.

The Sister Years as the reader will discover, was originally published as a Carrier’s Address in connection with the Salem Gazette, New Year’s Day, 1839. It was quite common at one time to issue little souvenirs of this sort, but more often in poetry than in prose. They were used by those who made a business of carrying the local paper to subscribers before the custom of newsboys and news-stands sprang up.