THE DOLIVER ROMANCE AND OTHER PIECES

TALES AND SKETCHES

By Nathaniel Hawthorne


DR. BULLIVANT



His person was not eminent enough, either by nature or circumstance, to
deserve a public memorial simply for his own sake, after the lapse of a
century and a half from the era in which he flourished. His character,
in the view which we propose to take of it, may give a species of
distinctness and point to some remarks on the tone and composition of
New England society, modified as it became by new ingredients from the
eastern world, and by the attrition of sixty or seventy years over the
rugged peculiarities of the original settlers. We are perhaps
accustomed to employ too sombre a pencil in picturing the earlier times
among the Puritans, because at our cold distance, we form our ideas
almost wholly from their severest features. It is like gazing on some
scenes in the land which we inherit from them; we see the mountains,
rising sternly and with frozen summits tip to heaven, and the forests,
waving in massy depths where sunshine seems a profanation, and we see
the gray mist, like the duskiness of years, shedding a chill obscurity
over the whole; but the green and pleasant spots in the hollow of the
hills, the warm places in the heart of what looks desolate, are hidden
from our eyes. Still, however, a prevailing characteristic of the age
was gloom, or something which cannot be more accurately expressed than