Whether
from lack of power or an inconquerable reserve, the
author's touches have often an effect of tameness. The
book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be
read in the clear, brown twilight atmosphere in which
it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to
look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages";
and in his _Notebook_ (1840) he confesses:
"I used to think I could imagine all the passions, all
feelings and states of the heart and mind, but how
little did I know! Indeed we are but shadows, we are
not endowed with real life, and all that seems most
real about us is but the thinnest shadow of a
dream--till the heart be touched."
Whether he is threading the labyrinths of his imagination or
watching the human shadows come and go, Hawthorne lingers longer
in the shadow than in the sunshine. He was not a man of morose
and gloomy temper, disenchanted with life and driven by distress
or thwarted passion to brood in solitude. An irresistible,
inexplicable impulse drives him towards the sombre and the
gloomy. The delicacy and wistful charm of the words in which
Hawthorne criticises his own work and character reveal how
impossible it would have been for him to force his wayward
genius.
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