Study Edition · Essay 48
The Haunted Mind
Source: The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1835); collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842). Text from Project Gutenberg #9209. Complete. Archaic verb forms modernized; vocabulary kept and glossed.
Before he wrote The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne spent years publishing short tales and sketches. This one has no plot. It follows a single hour of a winter night: you wake at two in the morning, half in and half out of a dream. Hawthorne writes it in the second person (“you”), so the reader becomes the sleeper. The mood moves from drowsy comfort, to a procession of ghostly figures (Sorrow, Disappointment, Fatality, Shame), to a gentle dream, and finally to a calm thought about death. Watch how the light changes in each section: star, ember, rainbow.
63 sentences: 12 simple, 24 moderate, 27 complex. Hover a number for its paraphrase; click it for the full note.
Key Vocabulary
- slumbersleep
- convocationa formal assembly or gathering
- precinctsthe area within the boundaries of a place
- irrevocablyin a way that cannot be undone
- firmamentthe sky; the heavens
- casementa window that opens on hinges
- receptaclea container; a place where things are kept
- sensibilitythe ability to feel or respond to impressions
- remorsedeep regret for a wrong one has done
- spectrea ghost
- sableblack (in poetic use)
- delusivemisleading; giving a false impression
- lineamentsthe features of a face
- desolationbleak emptiness and misery
- minutenessclose attention to tiny details
- assimilatedmade similar; absorbed into a whole
- gladsomenesscheerfulness
- vicissitudea change of fortune, often unwelcome
- knellthe sound of a bell rung for a death
The Essay
What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself after starting from midnight slumber!1 By unclosing your eyes so suddenly, you seem to have surprised the personages of your dream in full convocation round your bed, and catch one broad glance at them before they can flit into obscurity.2 Or, to vary the metaphor, you find yourself, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of illusions, whither sleep has been the passport, and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous scenery, with a perception of their strangeness, such as you never attain while the dream is undisturbed.3 The distant sound of a church-clock is borne faintly on the wind.4 You question with yourself, half seriously, whether it has stolen to your waking ear from some gray tower, that stood within the precincts of your dream.5 While yet in suspense, another clock flings its heavy clang over the slumbering town, with so full and distinct a sound, and such a long murmur in the neighboring air, that you are certain it must proceed from the steeple at the nearest corner.6 You count the strokes, one, two, and there they cease, with a booming sound, like the gathering of a third stroke within the bell.7
If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this.8 Since your sober bedtime, at eleven, you have had rest enough to take off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue; while before you, till the sun comes from “far Cathay” to brighten your window, there is almost the space of a summer night; one hour to be spent in thought, with the mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and two in that strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness alike of joy and woe.9 The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so distant, that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay.10 Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future.11 You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the wayside to take breath.12 O that he would fall asleep, and let mortals live on without growing older!13
Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion would dissipate the fragments of your slumber.14 Now, being irrevocably awake, you peep through the half-drawn window-curtain, and observe that the glass is ornamented with fanciful devices in frostwork, and that each pane presents something like a frozen dream.15 There will be time enough to trace out the analogy, while waiting the summons to breakfast.16 Seen through the clear portion of the glass, where the silvery mountain-peaks of the frost scenery do not ascend, the most conspicuous object is the steeple, the white spire of which directs you to the wintry lustre of the firmament.17 You may almost distinguish the figures on the clock that has just told the hour.18 Such a frosty sky, and the snow-covered roofs, and the long vista of the frozen street, all white, and the distant water hardened into rock, might make you shiver, even under four blankets and a woollen comforter.19 Yet look at that one glorious star!20 Its beams are distinguishable from all the rest, and actually cast the shadow of the casement on the bed, with a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate an outline.21
You sink down and muffle your head in the clothes, shivering all the while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar atmosphere.22 It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad.23 You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again.24 Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train.25 You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow is drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter blast howls against the door of the tomb.26 That gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.27
In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide.28 But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, these dark receptacles are flung wide open.29 In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your griefs may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.30 It is too late!31 A funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion and Feeling assume bodily shape, and things of the mind become dire spectres to the eye.32 There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, wearing a sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, with a hallowed sweetness in her melancholy features, and grace in the flow of her sable robe.33 Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust among her golden hair, and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing from your glance with drooping head, as fearful of reproach; she was your fondest Hope, but a delusive one; so call her Disappointment now.34 A sterner form succeeds, with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of iron authority; there is no name for him unless it be Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that rules your fortunes; a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error at the outset of life, and were bound his slave forever, by once obeying him.35 See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart!36 Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth?37 Then recognize your Shame.38
Pass, wretched band!39 Well for the wakeful one, if, riotously miserable, a fiercer tribe do not surround him, the devils of a guilty heart, that holds its hell within itself.40 What if Remorse should assume the features of an injured friend?41 What if the fiend should come in woman's garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down by your side?42 What if he should stand at your bed's foot, in the likeness of a corpse, with a bloody stain upon the shroud?43 Sufficient without such guilt is this nightmare of the soul; this heavy, heavy sinking of the spirits; this wintry gloom about the heart; this indistinct horror of the mind, blending itself with the darkness of the chamber.44
By a desperate effort, you start upright, breaking from a sort of conscious sleep, and gazing wildly round the bed, as if the fiends were anywhere but in your haunted mind.45 At the same moment, the slumbering embers on the hearth send forth a gleam which palely illuminates the whole outer room, and flickers through the door of the bedchamber, but cannot quite dispel its obscurity.46 Your eye searches for whatever may remind you of the living world.47 With eager minuteness, you take note of the table near the fireplace, the book with an ivory knife between its leaves, the unfolded letter, the hat, and the fallen glove.48 Soon the flame vanishes, and with it the whole scene is gone, though its image remains an instant in your mind's eye, when darkness has swallowed the reality.49 Throughout the chamber, there is the same obscurity as before, but not the same gloom within your breast.50 As your head falls back upon the pillow, you think, in a whisper be it spoken, how pleasant in these night solitudes would be the rise and fall of a softer breathing than your own, the slight pressure of a tenderer bosom, the quiet throb of a purer heart, imparting its peacefulness to your troubled one, as if the fond sleeper were involving you in her dream.51
Her influence is over you, though she have no existence but in that momentary image.52 You sink down in a flowery spot, on the borders of sleep and wakefulness, while your thoughts rise before you in pictures, all disconnected, yet all assimilated by a pervading gladsomeness and beauty.53 The wheeling of gorgeous squadrons, that glitter in the sun, is succeeded by the merriment of children round the door of a school-house, beneath the glimmering shadow of old trees, at the corner of a rustic lane.54 You stand in the sunny rain of a summer shower, and wander among the sunny trees of an autumnal wood, and look upward at the brightest of all rainbows, overarching the unbroken sheet of snow, on the American side of Niagara.55 Your mind struggles pleasantly between the dancing radiance round the hearth of a young man and his recent bride, and the twittering flight of birds in spring, about their new-made nest.56 You feel the merry bounding of a ship before the breeze; and watch the tuneful feet of rosy girls, as they twine their last and merriest dance in a splendid ballroom; and find yourself in the brilliant circle of a crowded theatre, as the curtain falls over a light and airy scene.57
With an involuntary start, you seize hold on consciousness, and prove yourself but half awake, by running a doubtful parallel between human life and the hour which has now elapsed.58 In both you emerge from mystery, pass through a vicissitude that you can but imperfectly control, and are borne onward to another mystery.59 Now comes the peal of the distant clock, with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge further into the wilderness of sleep.60 It is the knell of a temporary death.61 Your spirit has departed, and strays like a free citizen, among the people of a shadowy world, beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay.62 So calm, perhaps, will be the final change; so undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the entrance of the soul to its Eternal home!63
Sentence Notes
In plain English: What a strange moment it is, that first moment after you jolt awake at midnight, when you've barely begun to gather your wits!
In plain English: Opening your eyes so suddenly, you seem to have caught the people in your dream all gathered around your bed, and you get one good look at them before they can slip away into the dark.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The dream figures are imagined as real visitors caught in the act.
In plain English: Or, to put it another way, for one instant you are wide awake inside the land of illusions that sleep gave you a passport to, and you see its ghostly inhabitants and amazing landscapes with an awareness of how strange they are that you never have while the dream goes on undisturbed.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Sleep as a passport to another country: a fresh way to describe dreaming.
Reference & context: “Whither” (old): “to which place.”
In plain English: The far-off sound of a church clock is carried faintly on the wind.
In plain English: Half seriously, you wonder whether it has crept into your waking ear from some grey tower that stood inside your dream.
In plain English: While you're still unsure, another clock throws its heavy clang over the sleeping town, so full and clear, with such a long hum lingering in the nearby air, that you're sure it must come from the steeple on the nearest corner.
In plain English: You count the strokes: one, two, and then they stop, with a lingering boom that sounds like a third stroke building up inside the bell.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The hum after the last stroke is pictured as a stroke that never quite arrives.
In plain English: If you could pick one hour of the whole night to be awake, it would be this one.
In plain English: Since your sensible bedtime at eleven you've rested enough to shake off yesterday's tiredness, and ahead of you, until the sun rises from far-off China to light up your window, lies almost a whole summer night's worth of time: one hour for thinking with your mind's eye half closed, two for pleasant dreams, and two for that strangest of pleasures, forgetting both happiness and sorrow.
Reference & context: “Cathay” is an old name for China, in the distant East where the sun rises. Hawthorne puts it in quotation marks as a familiar poetic phrase.
In plain English: The time for getting up belongs to another part of time altogether and seems so far off that you can't yet dread jumping out of a warm bed into the icy air.
In plain English: Yesterday has already faded into the shadows of the past; tomorrow hasn't yet come out of the future.
In plain English: You have found an in-between place where the busy business of life can't get in, where the passing moment stays a while and becomes truly the present: a spot where Father Time, thinking no one is looking, sits down by the roadside to catch his breath.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Time personified as a tired old traveller resting in secret.
In plain English: If only he would fall asleep and let us mortals go on living without getting older!
In plain English: Until now you've lain perfectly still, because the slightest movement would scatter the remaining bits of your sleep.
In plain English: Now that you're awake for good, you peek through the half-open curtain and see that the glass is decorated with fanciful frost patterns, and that each pane looks like a frozen dream.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The frost pictures on the window link back to the dreams just lost.
In plain English: There'll be plenty of time to work out that comparison while you wait to be called to breakfast.
In plain English: Through the clear part of the glass, above where the silvery mountain shapes of frost reach, the most noticeable thing is the church steeple, whose white spire points you up to the cold brightness of the sky.
In plain English: You can almost make out the numbers on the clock that has just struck the hour.
In plain English: Such a frosty sky, the snowy roofs, the long view down the frozen street, all white, and the far-off water frozen as hard as rock, could make you shiver even under four blankets and a wool quilt.
In plain English: But look at that one magnificent star!
In plain English: Its light stands out from all the others and actually throws the shadow of the window frame onto the bed, with a glow of a richer colour than moonlight, though with a fuzzier outline.
Reference & context: Probably Venus or Jupiter, which can be bright enough to cast faint shadows on a clear night.
In plain English: You sink down and cover your head with the bedclothes, shivering the whole time, though less from actual cold than from the mere idea of arctic air.
In plain English: It's too cold even for your thoughts to go outside.
In plain English: You imagine the luxury of spending your whole life in bed, like an oyster in its shell, happy with the lazy bliss of doing nothing, sleepily aware of nothing but delicious warmth, like the warmth you feel again now.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: “Sluggish ecstasy” is a paradox: an intense pleasure in doing nothing at all.
In plain English: Ah! That thought has dragged a horrible one in behind it.
In plain English: You think of the dead lying in their cold burial cloths and narrow coffins through the dreary winter of the grave, and you can't convince your imagination that they don't cringe and shiver as the snow drifts over their little mounds and the bitter wind howls against the door of the tomb.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The comfort of being snug in bed turns, by a natural link, into the horror of being shut in a coffin.
In plain English: That dark thought will gather a crowd of other dark thoughts and colour your whole waking hour.
In plain English: Deep in every heart there is a tomb and a prison cell, though the lights, music and parties above may make us forget they exist, and forget the buried dead and the prisoners they hold.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The central image of the essay: the heart as a house with a cheerful upstairs and a crypt below.
In plain English: But sometimes, most often at midnight, these dark chambers are thrown wide open.
In plain English: At an hour like this, when the mind can feel but has no strength to act, when the imagination is like a mirror that makes every idea vivid but cannot choose or control them, then pray that your sorrows stay asleep and that the band of regrets doesn't break its chains.
Reference & context: Hawthorne often explored guilt and secret sin, the themes of The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown.”
In plain English: Too late!
In plain English: A funeral procession glides past your bed, in which passions and feelings take on bodies, and things that live only in the mind become terrible ghosts you can see.
Reference & context: Hawthorne uses allegory here: each figure stands for an emotion, as in Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, books he loved.
In plain English: There is your first Sorrow, a pale young mourner who looks like a sister of your first love, sadly beautiful, with a holy sweetness in her sad face and grace in the flow of her black robe.
Reference & context: Hawthorne's father, a sea captain, died when Nathaniel was four; some readers connect the “earliest Sorrow” to such early losses.
In plain English: Next comes the ghost of a ruined beauty, with dust in her golden hair and her bright clothes all faded and spoiled, slipping away from your gaze with her head bowed as if afraid of being blamed. She was your dearest Hope, but a false one, so now call her Disappointment.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: One figure carries two names: the same hope, seen before and after it failed.
In plain English: A harsher figure follows, with a wrinkled forehead and an expression and gestures of iron authority. The only name for him is Fatality, a symbol of the evil power that controls your fate: a demon you gave yourself to through some mistake at the start of your life, and whose slave you became for ever by obeying him once.
In plain English: Look! Those devilish features carved into the darkness: the twisted, scornful lip, the mocking living eye, the pointing finger that touches the sore spot in your heart!
In plain English: Do you remember some hugely foolish act that would make you blush even if you were alone in the deepest cave on earth?
In plain English: Then you recognize your Shame.
In plain English: Go on past, miserable crew!
In plain English: The sleepless man is lucky if, in his wild misery, an even fiercer gang doesn't surround him: the devils of a guilty heart that carries its own hell inside it.
Reference & context: Compare Milton's Satan, Paradise Lost IV.75: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.”
In plain English: What if Remorse took on the face of a friend you had wronged?
In plain English: What if the devil came dressed as a woman, pale and beautiful amid sin and ruin, and lay down beside you?
In plain English: What if he stood at the foot of your bed looking like a corpse, with a bloodstain on its burial cloth?
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Three rising “What if” questions hint at worse and worse secret crimes without naming them.
In plain English: Even without such guilt, this is bad enough: this nightmare of the soul, this heavy, heavy sinking feeling, this wintry gloom around the heart, this vague horror of the mind that blends into the darkness of the bedroom.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The repeated “this… this… this” builds a feeling of depression that has no single cause.
In plain English: With a desperate effort you sit bolt upright, breaking out of a kind of waking sleep, and stare wildly around the bed, as if the demons could be anywhere except in your own haunted mind.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The title phrase arrives here: the ghosts were inside you all along.
In plain English: At that very moment the sleeping embers in the fireplace flare up and send a pale glow over the whole outer room, flickering through the bedroom door, but they can't quite chase away the darkness in there.
In plain English: Your eyes look for anything that might remind you of the living world.
In plain English: Eagerly and in detail you notice the table by the fireplace, the book with an ivory paper knife between its pages, the opened letter, the hat and the dropped glove.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Ordinary objects become a lifeline back to the everyday world.
Reference & context: Books were often sold with their pages uncut; readers slit them open with a paper knife as they read.
In plain English: Soon the flame dies, and the whole scene goes with it, though its picture stays a moment in your mind after darkness has swallowed the real thing.
In plain English: The room is just as dark as before, but your heart is no longer as dark.
In plain English: As your head sinks back onto the pillow, you think (let it be said only in a whisper) how lovely it would be, in these lonely nights, to hear softer breathing than your own, to feel the light touch of a gentler body, the quiet beat of a purer heart passing its peace to your troubled one, as if a loving sleeper were drawing you into her dream.
Reference & context: Hawthorne was unmarried and living a quiet, secluded life in Salem when he wrote this; he married Sophia Peabody in 1842.
In plain English: You feel her calming effect, even though she exists only in that passing image.
Reference & context: “Though she have” is the old subjunctive mood, used for something imagined or uncertain.
In plain English: You sink into a flowery place on the border between sleep and waking, while your thoughts appear to you as pictures, all unconnected but all blended together by an overall feeling of happiness and beauty.
In plain English: The wheeling of splendid troops of cavalry glittering in the sun gives way to children playing happily around a schoolhouse door, under the flickering shade of old trees at the corner of a country lane.
In plain English: You stand in the sunlit rain of a summer shower, wander through the sunny trees of an autumn wood, and look up at the brightest rainbow of all, arching over the solid white sheet of falling water on the American side of Niagara Falls.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: After the dark procession, a burst of colour and light.
Reference & context: Hawthorne visited Niagara Falls in 1832 and wrote a sketch about it, “My Visit to Niagara.” The “snow” is the white water of the falls.
In plain English: Your mind drifts happily back and forth between the dancing firelight around the hearth of a young man and his new wife, and birds twittering and flying in spring around their newly built nest.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: Two images of new homes, human and bird, echo the wish for companionship.
In plain English: You feel a ship leaping happily before the wind; you watch the light-footed, rosy-cheeked girls weaving the last and gayest dance in a grand ballroom; and you find yourself among the glittering crowd of a full theatre as the curtain falls on a light, cheerful scene.
Reference & context: The falling curtain prepares for the end of the essay, as the dream show closes.
In plain English: With a sudden, involuntary jerk you grab hold of consciousness again, and show that you're only half awake by drawing a shaky comparison between human life and the hour that has just gone by.
In plain English: In both, you come out of a mystery, go through changes you can only partly control, and are carried on to another mystery.
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The whole essay becomes a small model of a human life.
In plain English: Now the distant clock rings out, its strokes fainter and fainter as you sink deeper into the wild country of sleep.
Reference & context: The clock frames the essay: it struck two at the beginning, and now presumably strikes three.
In plain English: It is the funeral bell for a temporary death: sleep.
In plain English: Your spirit has gone away and wanders like a free citizen among the people of a shadowy world, seeing strange sights but without amazement or fear.
In plain English: Perhaps the final change, death, will be just as calm; perhaps the soul will enter its eternal home just as peacefully, as if among familiar things!
Why this phrase is worth keeping: The essay ends by turning fear of death into a hope of peace.
Fun Fact
After college Hawthorne spent about twelve years living almost as a recluse in his mother's house in Salem, writing in a small room under the eaves. He burned many of his early stories. He also added the “w” to his surname himself, partly to distance himself from his ancestor John Hathorne, one of the judges at the Salem witch trials of 1692.