And the little
Phoebe,--with her genial sympathies and cheerful tones,--I am not
altogether without hope that she may aid me to throw off some of the
morbid tendencies which have ever clung to my life (if, perchance,
this last moral lesson should not destroy the first); and these
sorrows once overcome, existence would not lose its corresponding
exquisiteness of enjoyment.
I once lived in the "Old Hawthorne house;" whether or not you, sir,
ever crossed the threshold tradition hath not deigned to inform me.
Possibly you lived there when a child. And if the spirit renew itself
once in seven years, as the body is said to do, the soul of those
younger hours may have remained, may have shared with us our more
ethereal pleasures, while it frowned on our prosaic sports. At least,
to some such fancy as this, united with the idea of second childhood
before alluded to, must be referred the folly of which I have been
guilty in addressing a person, who, so far as bodily presence is
concerned, is to me an entire stranger, and to whom I am utterly
unknown.
However, sir, humbly begging your pardon for this same folly, and
entreating that by no accident may the shades of the Salem witches
become aware of it,
I am yours with much esteem,
MARY A. PORTER.
Upon the envelope Hawthorne has written, "Answered, July 18th." The
letter has been preserved out of many thrown aside, and Mrs. Hawthorne
has spoken to me of Mary Porter as of a real friend. Her delicacy and
good sense of expression contrast well with the over-fanciful,
unliterary quality of the letters of persons who came prominently
forward as teachers of thought and literature, and who no doubt jarred
miserably in their letters, if not in their conversation, upon the
refined skill of Hawthorne and his wife.
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