The Great Stone Face, and Other Tales of the White Mountains
1889
The Great Stone Face, and Other Tales of the White Mountains
1889
The most famous story in this collection poses a question that remains urgent over a century later: what does it really mean to be great? In the shadow of New Hampshire's Great Stone Face, a rock formation bearing an uncanny resemblance to a human countenance, a prophecy holds sway over a small valley. A child named Ernest grows up watching the mountain's serene features, waiting for the noble figure the old tale promises. But when wealthy merchants, stern soldiers, and smooth-tongued politicians return to the valley each claiming to fulfill the ancient prediction, something feels deeply wrong. Through decades of patient labor and quiet wisdom, Ernest comes to understand what the prophecy truly meant - and what it means to live a good life. These tales explore the relationship between landscape and character, the gap between ambition and virtue, and the quiet revolution of a principled existence.
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“Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“In the whole story of the world, bananas have never once been a special treat.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Thus the world assumed another and a better aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had bestowed him, as the last best touch to his own handiwork. Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The sympathies of these two men instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor distinguished his own share from the other’s. They led one another, as it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and hitherto so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so beautiful that they desired to be there always.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
“. . . the boy’s tender and confiding simplicity discerned what other people could not see; and thus the love, which was meant for all, became his peculiar portion.””
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
