Let us
enter the solemn meeting house, hear the clergyman inveigh against the
Quakers, and sit petrified when, at the end of the sermon, that boy's
mother, like a Daniel entering the lion's den, ascends the pulpit, and
invokes woe upon the Puritans.
(3) We shall occasionally find in these volumes what eighteenth-century
readers of the _Spectator_ would have called a "paper," that is, a
delightful bit of mixed description and narration, "a narrative essay" or
"a sketch," as some prefer to call it. In this class we may include _The
Old Manse_, _The Old Apple-Dealer_, _Sights from a Steeple_, _A Rill from
the Town Pump_, and the masterly _Introduction to The Scarlet Letter_.
_The Old Manse_, the first paper in _Mosses from an Old Manse_, is
excellent. Hawthorne succeeds in taking his readers with him up the
Assabeth River, in a boat made by Thoreau. We agree with Hawthorne that a
lovelier river "never flowed on earth,--nowhere indeed except to lave the
interior regions of a poet's imagination." When we return with him at the
end of that day's excursion, we are almost tempted to say that we can never
again be enslaved as before. We feel that we can say with him:--
"We were so free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again
tomorrow.
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