Nathaniel Hawthorne

“ The passages from Sketches from Memory show that Hawthorne had visited the mountains in one of his occasional rambles from home, but there are no entries in his Note Books which give accounts of such a visit. There is however among these notes the following interesting paragraph, written in 1840 and clearly foreshadowing The Great Stone Face:
“The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturæ [freak of nature] . ”

“ The paper is interesting as showing what were the actual experiences out of which he formed his imaginative stories. In other parts of the same general collection of reminiscences he gives an account of his travel on the Erie Canal in a canal-boat, of Burlington, Vermont, and of Rochester, New York. ”