Excerpt from Main-Street IT was one of the early literary projects of Nathaniel Hawthorne to put life into the dead body of New England historical annals. How lifeless those annals were we may discover by hunting them up on the dust-covered shelves of antiquarian libraries; and the enterprise of endowing them with bloom and fragrance would seem as hopeless an one as could be proposed to a literary man. But Hawthorne possessed creative genius, and that made all the difference. He himself was able to see through the veil of the printed page of the old annalist, and to behold rising before his imaginative vision, the world and the personages that had been, warm with life and glowing With color and passion. This Vision he aimed to communicate, by the art of lucid and vivid portrayal and suggestion, in Which he has had no superior, to his fellow citizens; by this beneficent spell he wrought upon them to make the acquaintance of their own past. It was in work of this kind, having this tendency, that the foundation of his genius first declared itself; and it is not unlikely that, for several years, Hawthorne cher. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.