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The quote below is from 'The Blithedale Romance' by the famous author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is near the end of the 24th Chapter, The Masqueraders. The narrator is going to see a crowd inside the forest. I just could not understand what he meant by the sentence below. Therefore, I wanted to ask you about it. Maybe you could help me by paraphrasing it?

Not a voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own; not a laugh, but its cadences were familiar.

The paragraph that it belongs to is as follows:

Skirting farther round the pasture, I heard voices and much laughter proceeding from the interior of the wood. Voices, male and feminine ; laughter, not only of fresh young throats, but the bass of grown people, as if solemn organ-pipes should pour out airs of merriment. Not a voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own; not a laugh, but its cadences were familiar. The wood, in this portion of it, seemed as full of jollity as if Comus and his crew were holding their revels in one of its usually lonesome glades.

KillingTime
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John Doe
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1 Answers1

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The narrator is returning to a place he used to live, where people he has known in the past still reside. However, he is approaching on foot, without announcing himself in advance, and is uneasy about it.

I felt an invincible reluctance, nevertheless, at the idea of presenting myself before my old associates, without first ascertaining the state in which they were... Had it been evening, I would have stolen softly to some lighted window of the old farm-house, and peeped darkling in, to see all their well-known faces round the supper-board... Being one of them again, the knowledge of what had happened would come to me, without a shock.

The narrator's friends are very dear to him. He has been away for along time. They are outside in the woods, doing some sort of charade or perhaps a play. That is why, upon hearing them again, he thinks to himself,

Not a voice spoke, but I knew it better than my own;

In other words, every person's voice that he hears from his hiding place is familiar to him. From the context, he didn't seem sure that that would be the case. So he uses a metaphor to express the intensity of his thoughts. He doesn't really know their voices better than his own voice. It is a bit overwrought but typical for the time, and for Hawthorne. He published his Blithedale Romance novel in the mid-1850s.

The second part of the phrase,

not a laugh, but its cadences were familiar

has a more literal meaning than metaphorical. He is saying that he recognizes the various laughs of his friends, their particular, distinctive cadences.

To summarize, and answer the question, the sentence is a stylized and emotional way of saying that he hears the familiar sounds of his friends as they talk and laugh, and that it makes him feel happy.

*It isn't necessarily archaic to use the "not...but" construction (whether once or twice; Hawthorne does the latter) in a modern novel, but it would be rather dramatic!

Ellie Kesselman
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