Nathaniel Hawthorne 
Mosses from an Old Manse, and Other Stories 

Mosses from an Old Manse is a short story collection by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in 1846.

Many of the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse are allegories and, typical of Hawthorne, focus on the negative side of human nature. Hawthorne’s friend Herman Melville noted this aspect in his review ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses’:

This black conceit pervades him through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight, —transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you; but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe and play upon the edges of thunder-clouds.

William Henry Channing noted in his review of the collection, in The Harbinger, its author ‘had been baptized in the deep waters of Tragedy’, and his work was dark with only brief moments of ‘serene brightness’ which was never brighter than ‘dusky twilight’.

Contents

The birthmark — Young Goodman Brown — Rappaccini’s daughter — Mrs. Bullfrog — The celestial railroad — The procession of life — Feathertop: a moralized legend — Egotism; or, the bosom serpent — Drowne’s wooden image — Roger Malvin’s burial — The artist of the beautiful.