Hawthorne's mind was richly stored with "wild chimney-corner
legends," many of them no doubt gleaned from an old woman
mentioned in one of his _Tales and Sketches_. He takes over the
fantastic superstitions in which his ancestors had believed, and
uses them as the playthings of his fancy, picturing with
malicious mirth the grey shadows of his stern, dark-browed
forefathers sadly lamenting his lapse from grace and saying one
to the other:
"A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in
life, what manner of glorifying God, or being
serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may
that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have
been a fiddler."
The story of Alice Pyncheon, the maiden under the dreadful power
of a wizard, who, to wreak his revenge, compelled her to
surrender her will to his and to do whatsoever he list, the
legends of ghosts and spectres in the _Twice-Told Tales_, the
allusions to the elixir of life in his _Notebooks_, the
introduction of witches into _The Scarlet Letter_, of mesmerism
into _The Blithedale Romance_, show how often Hawthorne was
pre-occupied with the terrors of magic and of the invisible
world. He handles the supernatural in a half-credulous,
half-sportive spirit, neither affirming nor denying his belief.
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