Hawthorne on a moral in a tale:
"The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod,--or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,--thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude."
-Preface to The House of the Seven Gables
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