Evidence: |
'Your mention of Hawthorne puts me in mind to tell you what rabid [underlined] admirers we
are of his [...] There is no prose write of the present day I have half the interest in I have in
him, his style, in my mind is so beautifully refined and there is such exquisite pathos and
quaint humour, and such an awfully [underlined] deep knowledge of human nature, not that
hard unloving detestable, and, as it is purely one sided (or wrong [underlined] sided) false
reading of it that one finds in Thackeray. He reminds me in many things of Charles Lamb, and
of heaps of our rare old English humourists, with their deep pathetic nature--and one faculty
he possesses beyond any writer I remember (not dramatic, for then I would certainly
remember Shakespeare, and others on further though perhaps) viz. that of exciting you to the
highest pitch without on any [underlined] occasion that I am aware of making you feel by his
catastrophe ashamed of having been excited. What I mean is, if you have ever read it, such a
case as occurs in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" where your disgust is beyond all expression on
finding that all your fright about the ghostly creature that has haunted you throughout the
volumes has been caused by a pitiful wax image! [...] And no Author I know does [underlined]
try to work upon them [i.e. the passions] more, apparently with no [underlined] effort to
himself. I cannot satisfy myself as to whether I like his sort of Essays contained in the twice
told tales best, or his more finished works such as Blithedale romance. Every touch he adds to
any character gives a higher interest to it, so that I should like the longer ones best, but there
is a concentration of excellence in the shorter things and passages that strike, in force like
daggers, in their beauty and truth, so that I generally end in liking that best which I have read
last [...] There are beautiful passages in Longfellow, above all, as far as my knowledge goes
in the Golden Legend, some of which in a single reading impressed themselves on my
memory.' |