...I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

Hawthorne’s speaker treats “autumnal sunshine” as a finite, almost sacred resource—something too valuable to squander indoors. The line captures a Romantic-inflected attentiveness to season and light, where nature’s fleeting beauty becomes a moral prompt: to be present, to step outside, to live deliberately within time’s limits. Autumn, poised between fullness and decline, intensifies that urgency; the sunshine is precious precisely because it will not last. The statement also hints at a counterweight to Hawthorne’s frequent themes of inwardness and brooding introspection: here, health, clarity, and renewal are sought through immersion in the open air and daylight.