Source identified1
Image design Botanical Sage
Read & copy
“It must be a spirit much unlike my own which can keep itself in health and vigor without sometimes stealing from the sultry sunshine of the world to plunge into the cool bath of solitude.”
Meaning & context
Hawthorne’s essayistic narrator describes periodic withdrawal into solitary nature as personally restorative, contrasting social heat with the cooling distance of forest and sea.
Source details
“Footprints on the Seashore,” represented in Twice-Told Tales, Project Gutenberg #13707. The narrator immediately says that forest and ocean summon him away from human haunts; “health and vigor” is literary self-description, not medical advice.