Ps 1850 Copyright, 1851, BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Copyright, 1879, BY ROSE HAWTHORNE LATHROP. Copyright, 1883, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. INTRODUCTORY NOTE. THE SNOW-IMAGE. THE summer of 1851, spent at Lenox, was a busy one for Hawthorne; and he closed it by bringing out "The SnowImage, and Other Twice-Told Tales," in the autumn. The tale which gave this volume its name most probably sprang from some simple episode in the life of his two elder children, then at the ages of about six and eight; and there plays over its pages a soft light of domesticity, transient as the flicker of an open wood-fire, like all the irradiations of actuality upon Hawthorne's fiction, — but characteristic of its origin. One little coincidence I observe which, though trifling, it is perhaps worth while to mention. When the supposed child playmate, whom Violet and Peony have brought into the house, melts away before the fire by which the matter-of-fact Mr. Lindsey has placed her, he exclaims: "Look what a quantity of snow the children have brought in on their feet! It has made quite a puddle here before the stove. Pray tell Dora to bring some towels and sop it up! Dora was the name of a woman of rather remarka\ble character, who had been the attendant of Hawthorne's children in Salem. Far back in 1836, too, the "American Note-Books" show that he entertained the scheme of writing a story about boys battling with snowballs, and the victorious leader being honored with a statue of himself in snow; the purpose, to satirize fame. This interesting key also gives approximately the date when Hawthorne formed his design for "The Great Stone Face," which comes second in the present volume. Between January 4, 1839, and the year 1840, there occurs this paragraph: "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. The face is an object of curiosity for years or for 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 might be connected." A curious incident in the later history of "The Great Stone Face" is that, a few years ago, it was found by some one in a German translation, re-translated into English of an inferior sort, and published in an American periodical of good standing before the mistake or imposition, whichever it may have been, was detected. This spurious version served as indirect testimony to the extreme importance of style, and in especial the subtlety with which Hawthorne's peculiar genius penetrated and impressed itself upon his language; for here the story was the same, yet, by the use of a commonplace style, the beauty of the original was destroyed, and its force lost. "The Canterbury Pilgrims 99 was derived from Hawthorne's impressions of the Shaker community at Canterbury, N. H., which he visited in 1830; writing thence to one of his sisters: "I spoke to them about becoming a member of their community, but have come to no decision on that point." Later, in 1838, he took a trip through western Massachusetts, by way of enlarging his horizon. In the Note-Books are somewhat extended accounts of the people he encountered there, or of other matters which struck him; and it is very instructive to notice how he has transferred sundry objects and persons bodily with but few changes from the wording of his journals — into the romantic fabric of "Ethan Brand." Such are the broken-down and crippled lawyer who has taken to soap-boiling; the travelling Ger man peep-show proprietor; and even an old dog who had a whimsical habit of pursuing his own tail. He had seen them in the neighborhood of Pittsfield, only a few miles from Lenox; and on coming to Lenox, after an interval of thirteen years since his former stay in the Berkshire Valley, his interest in this old "material" may have been revived. The circumstances that Hawthorne was known in college as "Oberon," and that he burned the manuscript of his first book, indicate clearly on what foundation the sketch entitled "The Devil in Manuscript," in the present series, was based. It refers, obviously, to his own experience. G. P. L. PREFACE. to TO HORATIO BRIDGE, ESQ., U. S. N. Y DEAR BRIDGE: -Some of the more crab. bed of my critics, I understand, have pronounced your friend egotistical, indiscreet, and even impertinent, on account of the Prefaces and Introductions with which, on several occasions, he has seen fit pave the reader's way into the interior edifice of a book. In the justice of this censure I do not exactly concur, for the reasons, on the one hand, that the public generally has negatived the idea of undue freedom on the author's part, by evincing, it seems to me, rather more interest in those aforesaid Introductions than in the stories which followed; and that, on the other hand,-with whatever appearance of confidential intimacy, I have been especially careful to make no disclosures respecting myself which the most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and which I was not perfectly willing that my worst enemy should know. I might further justify myself, on the plea that, ever since my youth, I have been addressing a very limited circle of friendly readers, |