Books and Ideas (21)

I read for ideas. Here are some of the ideas I have found in books.

Tales and Sketches. Parts One, Two, Three and Four. Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Continued)

“The Gray Champion.” “But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader’s step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come; for he is the type of New England’s hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge that New England’s sons will vindicate their ancestry.”

“My visit to Niagara.” “The eternal rainbow of Niagara….”

“Old News.” “…the idea that those same musty pages have been handled by people—once alive and bustling among the scenes there recorded, yet now in their graves beyond the memory of man.”

“Young Goodman Brown.” “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did he become from the night of that fearful dream.”

“Wakefield.” “The man, under pretense of going on a journey, took lodgings in the next street to his own house, and there, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment, dwelt upwards of twenty years.”

“The Ambitious Guest.” “But, this evening, a prophetic sympathy impelled the refined and educated youth to pour out his heart before the simple mountaineers, and constrained them to answer him with the same free confidence…. [The mountain home is destroyed by an avalanche.] “…his death and existence, equally a doubt.”

“A Rill from the Town-Pump.” Scene: The town pump talking through its nose: “And be the moral of my story, that, as this wasted and long-lost fountain is now known and prized again, so shall the virtues of cold water, too little valued since your fathers’ days, be recognized by all.”

“The White Old maid.” “She dwelt alone, and never came into the daylight except to follow funerals.”

“The Vision of the Fountain.” “Must the simple mystery be revealed, then, that Rachel was the daughter of the village squire and had left home for a boarding school, the morning I arrived, and returned the day before my departure?”

“The Devil in Manuscript.” Disgusted, the author burns his manuscripts in the fire place and those burning pages, in turn, burn down the town. “My brain has set the town on fire.”

“Sketches from Memory.” “Anon, a Virginia schoolmaster, too intent on a pocket Virgil to heed the helmsman’s warning—‘Bridge! Bridge!—was saluted by the said bridge on his knowledge box.”

“The Wedding-Knell.” “…a scholar, throughout life, though always an indolent one, because his studies had no definite object either of public advantage or personal ambition.”

“The May-Pole of Merry Mount.” “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.” And the Puritans won.

“The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable.” “Each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought.”