" She grows more vigorous with
every life-giving breath inhaled from the west wind. She extends her hands
to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these
children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of
Aladdin's lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his
unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children.
Like Nathan the prophet, Hawthorne wished to say, "Thou art the man," to
some tens of thousands of stupid destroyers of those ideals which bring
something of Eden back to our everyday lives. This story, like so many of
the others, was written with a moral purpose. There are to-day people who
measure their acquaintances by their estimates of this allegorical story.
(2) Another type of Hawthorne's stories illustrates the history of New
England. Such are _The Gentle Boy_, _The Maypole of Merry Mount_,
_Endicotts Red Cross_, and _Lady Eleanore's Mantle_. We may even include in
this list _Young Goodman Brown_, in one sense an unreal and fantastic tale,
but in another, historically true to the Puritanic idea of the orgies of
witches in a forest. If we wish, for instance, to supplement the cold page
of history with a tale that breathes the very atmosphere of the Quaker
persecution of New England, let us open _The Twice-Told Tales_ and read the
story of _The Gentle Boy_, a Quaker child of six, found sobbing on his
father's newly-made grave beside the scaffold under the fir tree.
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