Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/232

 and his reading became continuous and melodious as a softly purling stream. And thus has he afforded me many good, quiet evenings, in the reading of the biography of Washington, of the President of Cambridge, Jared Sparks, Emerson's Essays, or other works. Mr. Charles Sumner has also enabled me to spend some most agreeable hours, whilst he has read to me various things, in particular some of Longfellow's poems. One day he read a story to me, in itself a poem in prose, by Nathaniel Hawthorn, which gave me so much pleasure that I beg leave to tell it you with the greatest possible brevity. N. B. Hawthorn is one of the latest of the prose writers of North America, and has acquired a great reputation. His works have been sent to me by some anonymous female friend, whom I hope yet to be able to discover, that I may thank her. He treats national subjects with much earnestness and freshness; and that mystical, gloomy sentiment, which forms, as it were, the back-ground of this picture, like a nocturnal sky, from which the stars shine forth, exercises a magical influence on the mind of the New World, perhaps because it is so unlike their every-day life. The piece which Sumner read to me is called “The Great Stone Face,” and the idea seems to be taken from the actual large rock countenance, which it is said may be seen at one place among the mountains of New Hampshire—the White Mountains, as they are called—and which is known under the name of “the Old Man of the Mountain.” “In one of the valleys of New Hampshire,” says Hawthorn, “there lived in a mean cottage a young lad, the child of poor parents. From his home and from the whole valley might be seen in one of the lofty distant mountains a large human profile, as if hewn out in the rock, and this was known under the name of ‘the Great Stone Face.’ There was an old tradition in the valley, that there should some day come a man to the valley