Sketches from Memory (From \ by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sketches from Memory (From \ Reviews

• 
  Bill Kerwin

  
  First published anonymously (“by a Pedestrian”) in New-England Magazine, IX (November and December 1835), These four fragments were originally part of Hawthorne’s first grand conception The Story Teller in which the stories of the eponymous hero—a young vagabond named Oberon—would be told within the context of a series of American scenes:

  With each specimen will be given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames, perhaps more valuable than the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and fertile fields, of our native land.

  "The Notch," and "Our Evening Party among the Mountains" are each part of a mountain context originally intended to frame “The Ambitious Guest” and “The Great Carbuncle”) and “The Canal Boat” chosen as a context for “A Rill from the Town Pump” and “Wakefield” (four stories later published in Twice-Told Tales.
  
  Although Hawthorne soon abandoned the grand project of The Story Teller as unwieldy, he couldn’t bring himself to reject these “sketches from memory,” and later published them under that title in Mosses from the Old Manse. I am glad he did so. Their prose possesses a narrative simplicity, a natural descriptive grace very different from the later, nuanced, allegorical Hawthorne, and it is pleasant to contemplate these early examples of a young literary giant at work.
  
  Here, for example is Hawthorne’s description of “the diversified panorama along the banks of the canal.”:

  Sometimes the scene was a forest, dark, dense, and impervious, breaking away occasionally and receding from a lonely tract, covered with dismal black stumps, where, on the verge of the canal, might be seen a log-cottage, and a sallow-faced woman at the window. Lean and aguish, she looked like Poverty personified, half clothed, half fed, and dwelling in a desert, while a tide of wealth was sweeping by her door. Two or three miles further would bring us to a lock, where the slight impediment to navigation had created a little mart of trade. Here would be found commodities of all sorts, enumerated in yellow letters on the window-shutters of a small grocery-store, the owner of which had set his soul to the gathering of coppers and small change, buying and selling through the week, and counting his gains on the blessed Sabbath. The next scene might be the dwellinghouses and stores of a thriving village, built of wood or small gray stones, a church-spire rising in the midst, and generally two taverns, bearing over their piazzas the pompous titles of "hotel," "exchange," "tontine," or "coffee-house." Passing on, we glide now into the unquiet heart of an inland city--of Utica, for instance--and find ourselves amid piles of brick, crowded docks and quays, rich warehouses and a busy population. We feel the eager and hurrying spirit of the place, like a stream and eddy whirling us along with it. Through the thickest of the tumult goes the canal, flowing between lofty rows of buildings and arched bridges of hewn stone. Onward, also, go we, till the hum and bustle of struggling enterprise die away behind us, and we are threading an avenue of the ancient woods again.