hawthorne

"Oh, believe me, Miss Hepzibah," said the young man quietly, "these feelings will not trouble you any longer, after you are once fairly in the midst of your enterprise. They are unavoidable at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a child's story-book. I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substancee, the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible." (34)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Robert S. Levine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.