The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

Hawthorne’s image casts history not as a neutral record but as a heavy, inert weight pressing down on living experience. The “giant’s dead body” suggests something once powerful—tradition, inherited guilt, old institutions—that remains massive even after its animating spirit has gone. The present is thus constrained by what precedes it: memory, ancestry, and collective wrongdoing can immobilize action and imagination. The metaphor also implies a moral and psychological dimension typical of Hawthorne: the past is not safely buried; it occupies space, demands reckoning, and can suffocate renewal until it is confronted or reinterpreted.