One of his artful devices is wilfully to cast doubt upon his
fancies, and so to pique us into the desire to be momentarily at
least one of the foolish and imaginative.
After writing _The Blithedale Romance_, in which he embodied his
experiences at Brook Farm, and his Italian romance,
_Transformation, or The Marble Faun_, Hawthorne, when his health
was failing, strove to find expression for the theme of
immortality, which had always exercised a strange fascination
upon him. In August, 1855, during his consulate in Liverpool, he
visited Smithell's Hall, near Bolton, and heard the legend of the
Bloody Footstep. He thought of uniting this story with that of
the elixir of life, but ultimately decided to treat the story of
the footstep in _Dr. Grimshawe's Secret_, of which only a
fragment was written, and to embody the elixir idea in a separate
work, _Septimius Felton_, of which two unfinished versions exist.
Septimius Felton, a young man living in Concord at the time of
the war of the Revolution, tries to brew the potion of eternity
by adding to a recipe, which his aunt has derived from the
Indians, the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom he
has slain. In _Dr. Dolliver's Romance_, Hawthorne, so far as we
may judge from the fragment which remains, seems to be working
out an idea jotted down in his notebook several years earlier:
"A man arriving at the extreme point of old age grows
young again at the same pace at which he had grown old,
returning upon his path throughout the whole of life,
and thus taking the reverse view of matters.
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