



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 <DW72> 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 family rushed out of doors. Had they
remained within they would have been safe, for a ledge above the house
parted the avalanche so that it was diverted into two paths and swept
past the house on either side. Mr. and Mrs. Willey, their five children,
and two hired men were crushed under the weight of earth, rocks, and
trees.

In the Sketches from Memory Hawthorne gives an intimation of the tale
which he might write and did afterward write of The Great Carbuncle. The
paper is interesting as showing what were the actual experiences out of
which he formed his imaginative stories.





THE GREAT STONE FACE and Other Tales Of The White Mountains




THE GREAT STONE FACE

One afternoon, when the sun was going down, a mother and her little boy
sat at the door of their cottage, talking about the Great Stone Face.
They had but to lift their eyes, and there it was plainly to be seen,
though miles away, with the sunshine brightening all its features.
And what was the Great Stone Face? Embosomed amongst a family of
lofty mountains, there was a valley so spacious that it contained many
thousand inhabitants. Some of these good people dwelt in log-huts, with
the black forest all around them, on the steep and difficult hillsides.
Others had their homes in comfortable farm-houses, and cultivated the
rich soil on the gentle <DW72>s or level surfaces of the valley. Others,
again, were congregated into populous villages, where some wild,
highland rivulet, tumbling down from its birthplace in the upper
mountain region, had been caught and tamed by human cunning, and
compelled to turn the machinery of cotton-factories. The inhabitants of
this valley, in short, were numerous, and of many modes of life. But all
of them, grown people and children, had a kind of familiarity with the
Great Stone Face, although some possessed the gift of distinguishing
this grand natural phenomenon more perfectly than many of their
neighbors.

The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of majestie
playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a mountain by some
immense rocks, which had been thrown together in such a position as,
when viewed at a proper distance, precisely to resemble the features of
the human countenance. It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan,
had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice. There was the broad
arch of the forehead, a hundred feet in height; the nose, with its long
bridge; and the vast lips, which, if they could have spoken, would have
rolled their thunder accents from one end of the valley to the other.
True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the
outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of
ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.
Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen;
and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face, with
all its original divinity intact, did they appear; until, as it grew dim
in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains
clustering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed positively to be alive.

It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or womanhood with
the Great Stone Face before their eyes, for all the features were noble,
and the expression was at once grand and sweet, as if it were the glow
of a vast, warm heart, that embraced all mankind in its affections, and
had room for more. It was an education only to look at it. According to
the