intellectual apprehension of fate and its influence upon imagination
and life? Whatever it is, it is the mystery of the fascination of
these tales. They converse with that dreadful realm as with our real
world. The light of our sun is poured by genius upon the phantoms we
did not dare to contemplate, and lo! they are ourselves, unmasked, and
playing our many parts. An unutterable sadness seizes the reader as
the inevitable black thread appears. For here genius assures us what
we trembled to suspect, but could not avoid suspecting, that the black
thread is inwoven with all forms of life, with all development of
character.

It is for this peculiarity, which harmonizes so well with ancient
places, whose pensive silence seems the trance of memory musing over
the young and lovely life that illuminated its lost years--that
Hawthorne is so intimately associated with the Old Manse. Yet that was
but the tent of a night for him. Already, with the _Blithedale
Romance_, which is dated from Concord, a new interest begins to
cluster around "The Wayside".

I know not how I can more fitly conclude these reminiscences of
Concord and Hawthorne, whose own stories have always a saddening
close, than by relating an occurrence which blighted to many hearts
the beauty of the quiet Concord river, and seemed not inconsistent
with its lonely landscape. It has the further fitness of typifying the
operation of our author's imagination: a tranquil stream, clear and
bright with sunny gleams, crowned with lilies and graceful with
swaying grass, yet doing terrible deeds inexorably, and therefore
forever after of a shadowed beauty.

Martha was the daughter of a plain Concord farmer, a girl of delicate