Article August 10, 1907 Issue

REALIZATION

M. G. KAINS

Perhaps no story in American literature so beautifully and clearly reveals the effects of pure and noble thoughts as Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of the White Hills, entitled "The Great Stone Face." In this story, it will be remembered, a mother tells her little boy a legend current among the mountain folk, prophesying the advent of a son of the valley, a great man whose features would bear a living likeness to the great stone face formed by a group of rocks high up on a neighboring mountain.

Because of the deep impression this tale makes, the boy reflects constantly, soliloquizes, pictures in his mind the nobility, the strength, the calmness, the love,—all the virtues he believes he sees typified in the granite visage. He tries again and again to see resemblances in men, natives of the hills, who having achieved greatness in the busy world come to visit their birthplace, but finds none that seems to him to portray the virtues with which he endows his "Old Man of the Mountain." Their sordid, harsh, selfish thoughts have chiseled upon their faces lines characteristic of such thoughts, and he turns again to his rocky model assured that the man will come as prophesied. His search continues with the faith of one who "hopeth all things, believeth all things;" it never wavers.

Though but a country lad, his constant reflection upon the beauties and character of his ideal distinguish him from his less thoughtful comrades, and little by little his lofty yet simple thoughts command attention far beyond his mountain home; for his neighbors spread his fame beyond the confines of the valley. At length, when the boy has become an old man, the sublimity of his expressed ideas attracts a poet, who visits him and in the golden sunset recognizes in the man himself the incarnation of the ideals he has since early childhood woven about the Great Stone Face. Yet even then, with the nobility and modesty of true greatness, he deprecates the thought and believes that a more worthy than he must be the man foretold.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

REALIZATION

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access