The Vision of the Fountain

The Vision of the Fountain is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in 1835 and later collected in his Twice Told Tales collection. The story is one of his more directly atmospheric and supernatural shorter pieces, with the central premise involving a young man’s encounter with a vision that appears to him at a particular fountain in the woods.

The young narrator describes his discovery of a hidden spring or fountain in the New England woods near his home, and the strange vision of a beautiful young woman that he sees in the reflection of the water at a particular moment. The vision haunts him for years afterward, and the wider story develops his ongoing attempts to understand what he saw and what the vision actually was.

Hawthorne uses the supernatural premise to develop the kind of romantic and reflective material that distinguishes his shorter fiction. The vision functions as both literal mysterious occurrence and as symbolic representation of the kind of imaginative and emotional experience that shapes a young person’s understanding of the world. The closing section of the story turns toward the eventual resolution of what the vision actually represented in the narrator’s life.

For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, The Vision of the Fountain is one of the more atmospheric of his shorter pieces.