Mrs. Bullfrog – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864)
Hawthorne was born at Salem, Mass., in 1804. He came of an old Puritan family, and to the end of his life was influenced by his early environment and his New England temperamental heritage. Before he went abroad as consul for the American government he had written a number of stories and sketches of New England life, and in 1850 had won many readers and considerable fame with his novel, The Scarlet Letter.
Mrs Bullfrog – Hawthorne’s stories, which are essentially American in subject matter, are among the masterpieces of our literature of fiction. Hawthorne understood, as few others have done, the limitations and the possibilities of the form.
Mrs. Bullfrog is one of his most delightful tales. It is reprinted from Mosses from an Old Manse, 1837, by permission of Houghton Mifflin & Company.
Mrs. Bullfrog
From Mosses from an Old Manse
It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their judgments by a most undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance; habits, disposition. And other trifles which concern nobody but the lady herself. An unhappy gentleman resolving to wed nothing short of perfection keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them. Now, this is the very height of absurdity.
Eventually, A kind Providence has so skillfully adapted sex to sex and the mass of individuals to each other that, with certain obvious exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married state.
So, the true rule is to ascertain that the match is fundamentally a good one, and then to take it for granted that all minor objections; should there be such, will vanish if you let them alone. Only put yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matrimonial bliss; and it is scarcely to be imagined what miracles in the way of reconciling smaller incongruities connubial love will effect.
