Nine Figments from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Notebook

1. An ancient wineglass (Miss Ingersol’s), long-stalked, with a small, cup-like bowl, round which is wreathed a branch of grape-vine, with a rich cluster of grapes, and leaves spread out. There is also some kind of a bird flying. The whole is excellently cut or engraved.
2. In the Duke of Buckingham’s comedy, “The Chances,” Don Frederic says of Don John (they are two noble Spanish gentlemen), “One bed contains us ever.”
3. A person, while awake and in the business of life, to think highly of another, and place perfect confidence in him, but to be troubled with dreams in which this seeming friend appears to act the part of a most deadly enemy. Finally it is discovered that the dream-character is the true one. The explanation would be–the soul’s instinctive perception.
4. Pandora’s box for a child’s story.
5. Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.
6. “A person to look back on a long life ill-spent, and to picture forth a beautiful life which he would live, if he could be permitted to begin his life over again. Finally to discover that he had only been dreaming of old age,–that he was really young, and could live such a life as he had pictured.”
7. A newspaper, purporting to be published in a family, and satirizing the political and general world by advertisements, remarks on domestic affairs,–advertisement of a lady’s lost thimble, etc.
8. L. H—-. She was unwilling to die, because she had no friends to meet her in the other world. Her little son F. being very ill, on his recovery she confessed a feeling of disappointment, having supposed that he would have gone before, and welcomed her into heaven!
9. H. L. C—- heard from a French Canadian a story of a young couple in Acadie. On their marriage day, all the men of the Province were summoned to assemble in the church to hear a proclamation. When assembled, they were all seized and shipped off to be distributed through New England,–among them the new bridegroom. His bride set off in search of him,–wandered about New England all her lifetime, and at last, when she was old, she found her bridegroom on his death-bed. The shock was so great that it killed her likewise.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Note-Books.