laughed, and that was quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with spirits, but lived in that respect
upon the total-abstinence principle ever afterward; and it was always
said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive
possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!
And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us every one!

VI. THE GREAT STONE FACE[*] (1850)

[* From "The Snow Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales." Used by permission
of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company,
publishers of Hawthorne's Works.]

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

[_Setting_. The Profile Mountain, a huge "work of Nature in her mood of
majestic playfulness," seems to have given the suggestion. The Profile
Mountain is a part of Cannon Mountain, which is one of the White
Mountains of New Hampshire. But the larger background is to be sought in
the interplay of the spiritual and physical forces which Hawthorne has
here staged in allegory. The mountain is the symbol of a lofty ideal
that blesses those that follow its beckoning and marks the degree of
failure of those that slight or ignore it.

_Plot_. The plan of the story is as simple and beautiful as the teaching
is profound and helpful. "Mr. Hawthorne," writes Mrs. Hawthorne, "says
he is rather ashamed of the mechanical structure of the story, the moral
being so plain and manifest." But what is the "plain and manifest" moral
that the structure of the story is designed to bring out? One
interpreter says, "That the last shall be first"; another, "That success
is not to be measured by human standards." The central thought seems to
me to be larger than either of these and to include both. It is rather
the assimilative power of a lofty ideal and is best phrased in 2
Corinthians iii, 18: "But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass
the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to
glory." By setting his ideal high and by looking and longing, Ernest
grew daily in spiritual stature and was saved from being the victim of
the popular and passing allurements of war, money, and politics,
allurements to which his neighbors succumbed because they did not live
in vital communion with the Great Stone Face. The poet, it is true, felt
the appeal of the Great Stone Face but only afar off, for his life did
not correspond with his thought. It is one of the finest touches in the
story that, though Erne