...blandness that Nathaniel Hawthorne, looking for materials for his novels, complained of his country: "there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no...common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight. . . ,"18 The most recent scholarship places beside that plaint a sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century...

...in the lack of materials'. James quotes him to this effect: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...daylight as is happily the case with my dear native land. James was determined to avoid that 'lack'. He had, after all, only recently decided to settle in London...

...without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country [New England] where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery,...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. Preceding and during the Civil War, New England writers such as abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison...

...complex layering of past and present and of moral ambiguity in Europe to the clean slate of America, "where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery,...common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight" (3). But of course Hawthorne set much of his best work in America, exploring shadows and gloom and...

...Hawthorne. The latter had written, in preface to The Marble Faun: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, not anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with...

...to a foreign country ; for he gives as reason for this, that " no man, without a trial, can conceive the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque or gloomy wrong." Of course not ; there is no picturesque or gloomy wrong, when that wrong is the suffering...

...Hawthorne puts it in his preface to The Marble Faun (1860), "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land" (3). While Hawthorne complains about the lack of gothic materials in America, he turns this lack into...

...response to Go Down, Moses, received almost no negative comments in Britain. No author can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, as is happily the case with my dear native land. Hawthorne need not have worried: it did not remain...

...ever emerged. James notes that even Hawthorne himself had lamented in his preface to The Marble Faun "the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiq37 uity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity,...

...of primitive being and modern man. 'In our country,' says the American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 'there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.' For an original primitive like Whitman his innate inclination is to do more or less primitive reading;...