The Old Homestead

The Old Homestead

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Our Old Home, by Nathaniel
Hawthorne #25 in our series by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: Our Old Home A Series of English Sketches
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8090] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on June 13, 2003]
Edition: 10

Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR OLD
HOME ***

Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger


OUR OLD HOME
A Series of English Sketches
by
Nathaniel Hawthorne

To Franklin Pierce,
As a Slight Memorial of a College Friendship, prolonged through
Manhood, and retaining all its Vitality in our Autumnal Years,
This Volume is inscribed by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

TO A FRIEND.
I have not asked your consent, my dear General, to the foregoing
inscription, because it would have been no inconsiderable
disappointment to me had you withheld it; for I have long desired to
connect your name with some book of mine, in commemoration of an
early friendship that has grown old between two individuals of widely
dissimilar pursuits and fortunes. I only wish that the offering were a
worthier one than this volume of sketches, which certainly are not of a
kind likely to prove interesting to a statesman in retirement, inasmuch
as they meddle with no matters of policy or government, and have very
little to say about the deeper traits of national character. In their humble
way, they belong entirely to aesthetic literature, and can achieve no
higher success than to represent to the American reader a few of the
external aspects of English scenery and life, especially those that are
touched with the antique charm to which our countrymen are more

susceptible than are the people among whom it is of native growth.
I once hoped, indeed, that so slight a volume would not be all that I
might write. These and other sketches, with which, in a somewhat
rougher form than I have given them here, my journal was copiously
filled, were intended for the side-scenes and backgrounds and exterior
adornment of a work of fiction of which the plan had imperfectly
developed itself in my mind, and into which I ambitiously proposed to
convey more of various modes of truth than I could have grasped by a
direct effort. Of course, I should not mention this abortive project, only
that it has been utterly thrown aside and will never now be
accomplished. The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has proved too
potent for me. It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my
desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly content to
scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that is
sweeping us all along with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our nation
and its polity may be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as
my unwritten Romance. But I have far better hopes for our dear country;
and for my individual share of the catastrophe, I afflict myself little, or
not at all, and shall easily find room for the abortive work on a certain
ideal shelf, where are reposited many other shadowy volumes of mine,
more in number, and very much superior in quality, to those which I
have succeeded in rendering actual.
To return to these poor Sketches; some of my friends have told me that
they evince an asperity of sentiment towards the English people which
I ought not to feel, and which it is highly inexpedient to express. The
charge surprises me, because, if it be true, I have written from a
shallower mood than I supposed. I seldom came into personal relations
with an Englishman without beginning to like him, and feeling my
favorable impression wax stronger with the progress of the
acquaintance. I never stood in an English crowd without being
conscious of hereditary sympathies. Nevertheless,