The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Great Stone Face, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Title: The Great Stone Face
And Other Tales Of The White Mountains

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Release Date: February 25, 2006 [EBook #1916]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT STONE FACE ***

Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger

THE GREAT STONE FACE AND OTHER TALES OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

1882

CONTENTS

Introduction
The Great Stone Face
The Ambitious Guest
The Great Carbuncle
Sketches From Memory

INTRODUCTION

THE first three numbers in this collection are tales of the White Hills
in New Hampshire. The passages from Sketches from Memory show that
Hawthorne had visited the mountains in one of his occasional rambles
from home, but there are no entries in his Note Books which give
accounts of such a visit. There is, however, among these notes
the following interesting paragraph, written in 1840 and clearly
foreshadowing The Great Stone Face:

'The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain,
or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturae [freak of
nature]. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries, and
by and by a boy is born whose features gradually assume the aspect of
that portrait. At some critical juncture the resemblance is found to be
perfect. A prophecy may be connected.'

It is not impossible that this conceit occurred to Hawthorne before he
had himself seen the Old Man of the Mountain, or the Profile, in the
Franconia Notch which is generally associated in the minds of readers
with The Great Stone Face.

In The Ambitious Guest he has made use of the incident still told to
travellers through the Notch, of the destruction of the Willey family
in August, 1826. The house occupied by the family was on the slope of
a mountain, and after a long drought there was a terrible tempest which
not only raised the river to a great height but loosened the surface of
the mountain so that a great landslide took place. The house was in
the track of the slide, and the famil