Five Notes from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Books

  1. To picture the predicament of worldly people, if admitted to paradise.
  2.  As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.
  3. “Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it,”–an extempore prayer by a New England divine.
  4. In old times it must have been much less customary than now to drink pure water. Walker emphatically mentions, among the sufferings of a clergyman’s wife and family in the Great Rebellion, that they were forced to drink water, with crab-apples stamped in it to relish it.
  5. Mr. Kirby, author of a work on the History, Habits, and Instincts of Animals, questions whether there may not be an abyss of waters within the globe, communicating with the ocean, and whether the huge animals of the Saurian tribe–great reptiles, supposed to be exclusively antediluvian, and now extinct–may not be inhabitants of it. He quotes a passage from Revelation, where the creatures under the earth are spoken of as distinct from those of the sea, and speaks of a Saurian fossil that has been found deep in the subterranean regions. He thinks, or suggests, that these may be the dragons of Scripture.

Notations from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books

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