THE GREAT STONE FACE

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

NOTE. Before beginning this selection, turn to p. 281, and read the Introduction to "Tributes to Abraham Lincoln."

This story is from Hawthorne's "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales." In the mountains of New Hampshire there is a Great Stone Face called "The Old Man of the Mountain." It is only the rocky top of a mountain outlined against the sky; but as we look, we are startled to see the heap of rocks taking the shape of a human face with long nose, deep eyes, and high forehead. There is no doubt that it suggested this story.

With the setting sun shining on it, the Face is beautiful and benign in its expression. An old tradition of the valley said that sometime a great man, who had been born in the valley, would return and that he would be the very image of the Great Stone Face. For long years the inhabitants of the valley had waited for his coming.

In this famous story of "The Great Stone Face," Nathaniel Hawthorne tells of four men who did wonderful things, a rich man, a soldier, a statesman, and a poet, and of how the rich man, the soldier, the statesman, and the poet, each in turn, came back to the valley, and how and why each failed to be the truly great man, the true image of the Great Stone Face.

Each one, in doing his great deeds, had had some thought of himself, and this thought had so tinged his features that there was something missing in his face that the Great Stone Face had. So each man failed to be the truly great man of the tradition. He lacked the "king-becoming grace" of utter unselfishness, without which no man can be truly great.

But the truly great man, the image of the Great Stone Face, finally does appear in the story, in a most unexpected way. We shall not tell you what he is called in the story, but leave you to find out. We also leave you to find out why, in the story, he is given the name by which he is known.

that we

We become like

We shall find out in the story a very great truth, become like that on which our hearts are fixed. that which we earnestly love.

So, as you read the story, note closely that the boy who was always earnestly watching the Great Stone Face, gradually and without knowing it, came to look like that on which his heart was fixed. While the others, who fixed their hearts on other and more selfish things, came also to resemble the various things on which their hearts were fixed.

This is the great truth, the great lesson, in the story.

WHAT WAS THE GREAT STONE FACE?

PART I

Read over carefully the meanings of the following words before reading Part I:

spacious: large; broad and visage: face.

purport: meaning.

discerned (di-zûrnd'): saw very
clearly.

his peculiar portion: something which he alone received or possessed.

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 5 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 10 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 farmhouses, and cultivated the rich soil on the gentle slopes or level surfaces of 15 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 cotton20 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 seeing it more perfectly than 25 many of their neighbors.

The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature

in her mood of majestic 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. It5 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 10 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. 15 Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen; and the farther he withdrew from them, the more like a human face did they appear; until, as it grew dim in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains clustering about 20 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 25 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.

As we began with saying, a mother and her little