THE DOLIVER ROMANCE AND OTHER PIECES

TALES AND SKETCHES

By Nathaniel Hawthorne


FRAGMENTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF A SOLITARY MAN




I.

My poor friend "Oberon"--[See the sketch or story entitled "The Devil in
Manuscript," in "The Snow-Image, and other Twice-Told Tales."]--for let
me be allowed to distinguish him by so quaint a name--sleeps with the
silent ages. He died calmly. Though his disease was pulmonary, his life
did not flicker out like a wasted lamp, sometimes shooting up into a
strange temporary brightness; but the tide of being ebbed away, and the
noon of his existence waned till, in the simple phraseology of
Scripture, "he was not." The last words he said to me were, "Burn my
papers,--all that you can find in yonder escritoire; for I fear there
are some there which you may be betrayed into publishing. I have
published enough; as for the old disconnected journal in your
possession--" But here my poor friend was checked in his utterance by
that same hollow cough which would never let him alone. So he coughed
himself tired, and sank to slumber. I watched from that midnight hour
till high noon on the morrow for his waking. The chamber was dark;
till, longing for light, I opened the window-shutter, and the broad day