DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/inwardsky01 hoel THE MIND AND HEART OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Hubert H. Hoeltje DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham, North Carolina 1962 (C) 1962, Duke University Press Library of Congress Catalogue Card number 62-/0052 Cambridge University Press, London N.W. i, England Printed in the United States of America by the Seeman Printery, Inc., Durham, N. C. ^/ 3 . 3 3 To My Wife Pauline Marie Bushnell Hoeltje This book is published with the assistance of a grant to the Duke University Press by the Ford Foundation. Acknowledgments My indebtedness for aid in the writing of this book goes back a long way. In the beginnings of the project, at the University of Iowa, I had the help of President Virgil Hancher; of the late Carl E. Seashore, Dean of the Graduate College; and of Dean Harry Newburn of the College of Liberal Arts, now President of the Uni¬ versity of Montana. To these men I am especially obligated for their faith in my undertaking. More recently, at the University of Oregon, I was aided by various grants of time for research and writing. At both universities, for twenty years or so, an endless number of stu¬ dents were stimulating companions in my study of Hawthorne, and to them I am largely indebted for an experience which attains ex¬ pression in this volume and which will continue, I hope, in the company of future students. A number of librarians were memorably kind and gave assistance beyond the call of duty: Miss Sarah Bartlett, formerly Librarian of the Concord Free Public Library; Miss Florence Osborne and Mrs. Charles Potter of the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts; and Dr. E. B. Barnes of the University of Oregon. To my wife I am indebted for years of aid in research and for the heroic accomplishment of transforming my longhand hiero¬ glyphics into legible copy. I am, of course, indebted to numerous sources, which I have indi¬ cated in my footnotes, though here I wish to name especially the Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Old Manse Edition) as published by Houghton Mifflin Company, and the American Note¬ books and the English Notebooks of Hawthorne as edited by Professor Randall Stewart and published by the Harvard University Press and the Modern Language Association, respectively. Preface The point of view from which this book was written, and from which I hope it will be read, finds its source in a love letter written \y by Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody some months before J their very happy marriage. Eager, like many another lover, to reveal himself to his sweetheart, Hawthorne was troubled by the cloudy veil that stretched over the abyss of his nature. Still, it pleased him to think that God saw through his heart, and that any angel with the power to penetrate it was welcome to know everything that was there. So, too, was any mortal welcome to come into his depths—any mortal capable of full sympathy. Such a capability, and the willingness to apply it, Hawthorne of course quite rightly assumed that Sophia had when he invited her to look into his heart. When a writer presumes to explore the depths of character of such an honest and sensitive man as Hawthorne, he should be aban¬ doning his humanity if he did anything less than to accept Haw¬ thorne’s own terms—that is, exercise his fullest sympathy—and if he did not ask his reader to accompany him with corresponding feelings. Here, let me say at once, is no book of criticism in which the writer wishes to demonstrate how much more clever he is than his subject. Here is no surgeon’s dissecting knife, nor even the anteroom of the psychoanalyst. My reader will be content, I trust, with a modest at¬ tempt to lift that veil of which Hawthorne wrote, and to look, with the respect due such a privilege, into the recesses of a human mind and heart. I turn to another letter, too, to show more particularly the means whereby I have sought to reveal those depths which are the objects of our exploration—a letter written when Hawthorne was a humble measurer at the Boston Custom House, in which capacity, when he emerged from the holds of coal-carrying ships, he was often be- smudged and begrimed with dust, and hardly a romantic-looking lover. He had it in mind, he said, to write for his sweetheart’s eye a journal of all his doings and sufferings, his whole external life, from the time he awoke at dawn until he closed his eyes at night. Since such a journal might be but a dry, dull history, he proposed to write. also, another journal of his inward life throughout the self-same day— his fits of pleasant thought and those likewise which were shadowed by passing clouds. Nobody, he was sure, would think that the same man could live two such different lives simultaneously. Though Hawthorne never actually wrote such parallel journals, his proposal offers a suggestion which I seek to follow, and which I hope my reader will regard with approbation—not, indeed, that I aim to record Hawthorne’s every act and thought, but that I wish to recognize that every man, and especially the artist, lives in two worlds—the world of fact and the world of dream or imagination. These two lives, thus simultaneously lived, I shall try to represent, with emphasis on the inward life, though not forgetting that the external doings and sufferings filled many an hour and were often solely what the world saw. What I propose may not be quite the simplest matter conceivable. How far from simple the undertaking is, and yet how fascinating, is illustrated by an anecdote which Hawthorne himself told of an old Quaker who had been charmed by the introductions to Mosses from an Old Manse and The Scarlet Letter, and who wrote the author that after reading those autobiographical sketches, so intimate and revelatory, he felt he knew Hawthorne better than his best friend. Hawthorne himself, however, was sure that the extent of the intimacy was considerably overestimated, for in such sketches he had still kept his inmost me behind its veil. Such little preliminary talks about his external habits, his abode, and his casual associates really hid rather than displayed his true self. To discover his essential traits it would be necessary to look through the whole range of his fictitious char¬ acters—through the whole body of his fiction. To look through the whole range of Hawthorne’s writing (his letters, his journals, his fiction) in order to discover the pattern of the thought there, and to correlate this pattern with the facts of the out¬ ward life—to disclose, as far as possible, the whole man—is my en¬ deavor in this book. My hope is that the spiritual portrait so drawn is not only a true picture of a great literary artist, but that it suggests, likewise, the admirable possibilities of human character, and may thus contribute doubly to the livableness of life. I have, wherever possible, I may say parenthetically, employed a close paraphrase of the lan¬ guage of Hawthorne in an effort to convey that sense of repose which is the very essence of Hawthorne’s style and of the man himself. Union College Barbourville, Kentucky Hubert H. Hoeltje Contents [^e«J Salem, Massachusetts, at the turn of the nineteenth century, was already an old, old town, full of the ghosts of the Past. Almost two hundred years had elapsed since the first settlers had built their straw-covered huts between the dark, unknown forest and the vast sea which separated them from their old home. Once the great Squaw Sachem had ruled from Mystic to Agawam, and her priest and magician husband had affrighted the first white settlers with grisly phantoms, dancing and shrieking in the woods at midnight. The spring which had once bubbled out of the leaf-strewn earth beneath a darksome shadow of venerable boughs, and from which, on Sabbath days, whenever a babe was to be baptized, the sexton filled a basin to place on the com¬ munion table of the meeting house, had long vanished and given way to the Town Pump, whose handle was one day to be grasped by Genius, and from whose ancient spout there was then to gush forth a rill tasting pleasantly in every town and village of , our country, and giving to Salem and author a lasting im¬ mortality. , Whatever might lie to the westward, Salem itself, at the be- ■ ginning of the nineteenth century, was no longer a new world. Roger Conant and his wife, the first settlers, had long ceased to ; be the new Adam and Eve of their wild Paradise. If, however, , Salem was now an old haunt of men, where so many household fires had been kindled and burnt out that the very glow of hap- I piness had something dreary in it, the venerable town had wit¬ nessed stirring events changing and shaping the thoughts and lives of men in ways beyond the dreams of the founders, all these events, in their day, having the freshness and force of novelty. There, in the Town House Square, where the bloody head of a wolf just slain within the precincts of the town might be nailed to the porch of the meeting house, as evidence of a claim of bounty, had stood the bold John Endicott, as with his sword he had ripped the Red Cross from the banner of New England in defiance of the tyrannical King Charles and the bigoted and haughty Archbishop Laud. There, too, in the humble wooden meeting house, preached Roger Williams, whose debate with the orthodox Reverend John Cotton of Boston began the separation of state and church and initiated a concept of religious freedom new among English-speaking people, wider and more liberal even than that heralded by the great John Milto n’s contemporary Areopagitica. If what Cotton and the Mathers called Liberty was after all much like an iron cage, not so was the concept of Williams, Puritan of Puritans. Though he might be exiled into the wilderness, where, as he said, he preferred life among the Christian savages to life in the settlements with the savage Chris¬ tians, the current of events had unmistakably taken a new course as he spoke. The religious earnestness and moral idealism of Puritanism was thereafter to be broader and more sweeping in its effects than ever before. Salem, the Town House Square, and Main Street had wit¬ nessed also the scourging of the early Quakers. Through Main Street, tied to the tail of a cart, naked to the waist, walked Ann Coleman, glorying in the lashes which with his knotted whip the town constable applied with a right good will. It was the un¬ bridled fanaticism of early Quakerism contending with the un¬ comprising bigotry of Puritanism, for, if the Puritan was moved by his convictions to persecute the heretical Quaker, who held that the revelations of the Bible were no necessary avenue to salvation, the Quaker seemed to have an unrestrained compulsion to violate Puritan meeting houses in most alarming ways. But beneath these external events, in spite of apparently incompatible differences, worked deep if unseen powers of change. If the Puri¬ tan labored in closely reasoned sermons to prove the reasonable¬ ness of Revelation, something in his nature responded to the plea to put aside the prompting of reason, to allay one’s will. and to open one’s heart to influences older than the words of any book. By and by the son of the rigorous Puritan came to be¬ lieve that a perfect trust, however lacking what men call worldly wisdom, is proof of the deep and true wisdom that is in man, proof of something diviner than reason, and leading to a greater happiness. The thought was, of course, older than either Puri¬ tanism or Quakerism, as old as the admonition in Thessalonians: “Study to be quiet.” But it was the mission of the Quaker to reviv¬ ify the thought, and when that mission had been performed, I Main Street in Salem and elsewhere could never again be quite the same. Of all the shadows that had moved over Main Street, the darkest had been that of the dread witchcraft delusion. Time after time had the processions proceeded from the jail on St. Peter Street, thence to Main Street and Boston Street to the old high¬ way, and thence to the left up Gallows Hill to the fateful trees— the procession, after the Old World customs of the day, led by the officers and followed by the curious and horror-stricken multi¬ tude. Among these scenes, all pitiful, is the figure of the Rev¬ erend Mr. George Burrows, once pastor of the East Meeting House in Salem, who, as he approached his last moment, created wonder and consternation by reciting the Lord’s Prayer, as no witch, by all the learned rules, could supposedly do—not haltingly or mockingly either, as if, through him, the Devil were taunting his executioners, but calmly and movingly as his auditors had I often heard it said on the Sabbath, the grand and sacred words stirring their hearts and making them momentarily doubt the {righteousness of the dreadful execution. Quite otherwise was 'the rush into eternity of Mrs. Sarah Good, who, separated from iher husband, poor, forlorn, had begged a meager living for her children. Her last words, as she stood upon the ladder facing her accuser, were the words of wronged, puzzled, and angry inno¬ cence, and uttered, one can imagine, with a shriek and as an execration: “God will give you blood to drink!” They were to t become immortal words when used later by a great literary artist, 1 symbolizing, as they did, the fright and terror accompanying : an awful delusion, and awaking an undying humility and re- ( morse. 1 But even these hideous incidents were not without their [5] purging effects. The time was to come when the people of Saler were to realize that they had passed through an hour of Darl< ness and Temptation, a temptation to which they had yielded, fo which sin they publicly and humbly requested pardon of “th merciful God . . . who knoweth how to have Compassion on y ignorant.” From the Records of the First Meeting House wa erased and blotted out that dreadful Sentence of Excommunica tion which in the hour of Darkness had been placed upon thei unhappy fellow-members. But something more far-reaching though not more heart-moving, also followed, something affectin the very core of the Puritan outlook. The horror, fear, and dis trust; the look askance of friend at friend, and the husband a wife, and wife at husband, and even the mother at her littl child; the suspicion that every creature that God had made migh be a witch or an accuser—these were all a part of the curren concept of the wholly vicious nature of man as sung in lugubriou phrases in Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom. In the Grea Delusion this terrifying concept ceased to be an abstract specula tion, and revealed itself in all its revolting nature. It became amply clear that anyone truly looking at man and the work from such a view might well shrink from the bosom of Faith would have no hopeful verse carved upon his tombstone; for hi living hours, as well as his dying one, would indeed be an un speakable gloom. When the witchcraft delusion had truly died there had also passed a view of human nature. Thereafter the er lightened man could not but see the world anew. If, as the years of the Revolution came and went, Mai; Street ceased to be the focus of events, the town of Salem neve: theless actively participated in the incidents of that critical p< riod. It was remembered with local pride that at Salem’s ow North Bridge a determined resistance had been made to Britis military authority two months before Lexington and Concord. . characteristic feature of the times was the stoning of the windov of St. Peter’s Church as an expression of antagonism to its royali Church of England members, who, unsympathetic with tl changing attitudes toward state and church, chose exile rath» than to adopt new ways of thought. Most significant of tangib affairs, however, and reaching far beyond the matters of the ir mediate time, was the development of shipbuilding in Saler [ 6 ] most of the American navy originating in the harbor of this New England port. But more important than all these visible things, these out¬ ward symbols of inward ferment, were revolutionary modes of thought that were permeating the minds of men in Salem as elsewhere in changing America. There was the recognition, as Tom Paine said, that the circumstances of the world are contin¬ ually changing; that the opinions of men change also; and that government is for the living, not the dead. There was the con¬ viction, voiced by Jefferson, that men must look forward and not backward for the improvement of the human mind; and that to recur to the annals of one’s ancestors for what is most perfect in government, in religion, and in learning is worthy only of those bigots whose purpose it would answer. A reverence for the fixed had largely ceased, unless it could, at the moment, establish its right to hold its ground. John Hancock, in the fiction of Twice- Told Tales, was presently permitted to sum it all up: “We are no longer children of the Past.” If there was, in such thinking, a kind of recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man’s behalf, it was, nevertheless, representative of the times and hostile to the unexamined life. The shipbuilding which had loomed so important in the implementation of victory in the Revolution brought uncalcu¬ lated results to the one-time Puritan town. Ships larger and swifter than ever before sailing from American ports could not, by Yankees who had learned their power in the war, be per¬ mitted to remain idle. Salemites were soon sailing the seas in an exhilarating expansion of commerce such as the country had never witnessed. They visited not only the West Indies and South America, or the farthermost ports of the Mediterranean and European Russia; they sailed also to India, China, the Philip¬ pines, the East Indies, encountering harrowing dangers and en¬ during the loneliness of solitary seas wherein no ship might be spoken or land touched for month on month. And from these far journeys, many returned with fabulous wealth. Merchants and ship captains built mansions on Federal and Chestnut streets and on Washington Square, mansions which quite eclipsed the unpainted, many-gabled, chimney-clustered houses which had been the residences of gentility in late seven- [7] teenth-century Salem. Rich silks, beautiful chinaware, and the art of the Orient made their appearance. An ease and an ele¬ gance repellent to old-fashioned Puritan tastes were an accom¬ paniment of the new wealth. And what perhaps far more affected the coming generation than the novel ornaments of person and household was an acquaintance with foreign and hitherto un¬ familiar manners and customs and ideas. The captain and sailors who landed at Bourbon in the remote Indian Ocean saw, with an initial shock to their homespun standards, how French life was lived distant from centers of civilization; or, in the Philip¬ pines, they saw accepted casually such manners and morals as would have been anathema to the good Roger Williams or the noble Governor John Winthrop. In these strange lands, strange gods were worshiped, and yet the world stood. The heyday of Salem commerce brought home such cosmopolitan wares as to leave the old simplicity sometimes almost beyond recognition. When, therefore, the century had turned, and the 1800’s were beginning their course, Salem, with a population of 10,000 or so, was no longer a Puritan village. The character of the intellectual life was represented by a half-dozen men, all known to one another, and each burning with his own kind of zeal. A glance at their activities may indicate better than any abstractions the nature of the time and place. Now occupying the pulpit of the First Church, which the exiled Roger Williams had fled, and which Hugh Peter had left to join the forces of Oliver Cromwell, eventually to be hanged by the restored Monarchy—disemboweled, quartered, his head a grisly show on London Bridge—was the Reverend John Prince, benign, beloved, spending more hours, it was said, working in his laboratory with the wonders of physics than in his study in the preparation of sermons. Certainly one of the most ingenious of Salem men was Samuel McIntyre, an excellent judge of music, a capable performer, and a veritable wizard in the repair and improvement of musical instruments. As a wood-carver and sculptor he had no rival in iJew England, and as architect he left Salem such a patrimony if beauty as yet remains one of the wonders of America. He was man of fine figure, majestic appearance, calm countenance, great elf-command—amiable and modest, in character matching his Teat artistic skill. In outward form he was in conspicious con- rast to his contemporary Nathaniel Bowditch, a little man, seem- ngly all head—vain of his reputation, it was said, and destitute if manners and knowledge outside his field, but a mathematical enius nevertheless, whose Practical Navigator transformed travel in the ocean and gave its author an assured immortality. That Salem was no longer a pioneer community appears in he life of Dr. Edward A. Holyoke, who lived to be a hundred ears old, and kept a medical journal for no less than eighty years if that long life. But his true significance lay in quite other [uarters, for he was a prime mover in and first president of the 'hilosophical Society, the Salem Athenaeum, and the Essex His- orical Society. Salem had become aware of its Past, and had de- eloped intellectual interests quite apart from the compulsions if a life of action. It had become self-conscious and introspective. Salem was aware of its Past in terms of family lineage, too. rhe town was old enough now to have produced generations if distinguished men. Benjamin Lynde Oliver, bachelor, descen- iant of the Lyndes and Olivers, occupying the mansion house if the Lynde family and surrounded by the portraits of his an- estors, engaged in a leisurely combined practice of medicine nd law. He was a dilettante in music, playing much on keyed nstruments, and directing the building of a pipe organ disposed ■f to St. Peter’s Church, in which services had been resumed low that the issues of the Revolution had been settled. Like lis friend Dr. Prince, he was a student of nature also, grinding nd polishing mirrors for the telescope with which he amused limself. He was mild in his manners, irreproachable, sincere and nodest, and, like his father, a gentleman and scholar of the »elles-lettres, a man possessing characteristics far different from the trictness of the Puritan or the commercial aggressiveness of the lontemporary seaman-merchant. He typified family tradition, cul- ure, and leisure, though he seems to have left no visible evidence )f an earthly immortality except a rather amusing silhouette ■howing him in his old age, wearing a high, flat-topped hat, a long coat, and carrying a cane—one of the best-known silhouettes of Old Salem. His greatest service to his community, however, was to tutor for college a quiet boy whose literary genius was one day to carry the name of Salem to the ends of the world— the author of The Scarlet Letter. Most personally interesting, however, of all these men of ar¬ tistic, scientific, or general cultural penchants was the Reverend Doctor William Bentley, graduate of Harvard, minister of the Second, or East, Church—scholar, political writer, a keen ob¬ server of life, and the keeper of one of the most interesting of American diaries. In his second-story bachelor quarters on Main Street, where he could look across Washington Square or down the short narrow lanes of Union and Herbert Streets, below which lay the old wharfs of Salem, he kept one of the best private libraries of his time. No contemporary of his, in all probability, had wider interests or more catholic tastes in reading. He was doubtless one of the most learned men in America, though Harvard, as later in the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson, made a very tardy recognition of his renown. Trained as a theologian, in his learning he went far beyond the bounds of theology. Friend and correspondent of such men as Thomas Jefferson and a reader of Tom Paine, he was tinged by the rationalism of the eighteenth century. Though he knew the -^vritings of John Locke and Dugald Stewart, he had also read Plato, Jamblicus, Spinoza, and Kant; he was acquainted with such diverse tvritings as the Letters of Chesterfield and The Compleat Angler of Izaak Walton; though he was a minister, he read widely in fiction—in the novels of Richardson, DeFoe, Field¬ ing, Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith; he was familiar with the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare^^Mlffo^Samuel Butler, Young, Thomp son. Pope, Cowley, Drymen,^Ossian, The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Southey, Thomas Moore; he read a dozen Ian guages and more, and was at home with Rabelais, Montaigne Moliere, Fenelon, and the opposite poles of Rousseau and Vol taire; he read Klopstock and Goethe and Schiller; he studied tht writings of the profound English scholar Sir William Jones, anc had thus opened to him the grand vistas of Oriental literature anc philosophy which were to charm, at a later day, Emerson, Tho reau, Alcott, and other transcendentalists. In short. Dr. Bentley was the compeer of his great contemporaries, Franklin and Jeff¬ erson. In him, Salem attained an intellectual scope and depth unsurpassed in America’s Age of Reason. The doctor’s right to fame now rests upon his voluminous diary, in which he recorded his observations for the period of almost forty years while he was minister of the East Church. If his lens shows a slight distortion in his prejudices, all the more does it reveal his essential humanity. Hardly a facet of life escaped his lively interest. He watched the events of his time and place with no tired or morbid eye. His diary is enriched with thumb¬ nail characterizations which show his love for man, whether of high or of low degree. The life of Salem as the nineteenth cen¬ tury began lives once more in his diary. Dr. Bentley saw old customs lingering and new ones emerging in the seemingly endless flux. At Town House Square the thief .was still condemned to sit on the gallows one hour with a rope around his neck and to be whipped ten stripes before his long confinement at hard labor. The flames which shot up from Marblehead one March evening, reflecting themselves in the I waters of Salem harbor and alarming the doctor, proved to be from a public burning of scurrilous pamphlets attacking the Selectmen, a burning ordered by the Selectmen and approved unanimously in Town Meeting—much as Robert Calef’s More Wonders of the Invisible World had been burned in Harvard I Yard during the Mather dynasty a century or so before. The drinking of tea, which once had seemed so important in social and I political Colonial life, was almost displaced, the doctor observed, by the drinking of coffee, even among women. He noticed, with ■ some misgivings, that his friend Dr. Holyoke had placed himself at the head of a committee of thirty-six to enforce the town law against the smoking of cigars in public because of the fire hazard. I He was astonished to see that the observance of May Day (once to be witnessed in New England only in the colony of Thomas Morton and his gay sinners at Merry Mount) had become so I general in Salem. He noticed, also, the vogue of travel as a great change. Once few ever traveled except for business, but now people were driving even as far as Portland in Maine, Newport, or Albany in New York, apparently merely for pleasure. He thought it fit to record that Mrs. Tucker had her arm broken in an up¬ set in the wild sport of carriage riding. He was aware, too, of the improvements and physical changes in the town. At Town Meeting was presented a petition to widen Chestnut Street to eighty feet, a petition granted upon condition that the widening would cost the Town no more than four hun¬ dred dollars—Chestnut Street, where there were presently to arise homes that were to be the pride of Salem, and of America. He took his last view of the mansion of the late eminent merchant, Elias Hasket Derby, the most elegant house in Salem, when it was to be razed to make way for a public building. Derby had been the richest merchant in Salem, and there was no buyer for the grand house on the plans for which Samuel McIntyre had exer¬ cised his genius. As the doctor watched, the front was demolished, and the once pretentious house was in ruins. It was an affecting sight, as the doctor recorded in his diary: “Sic transit gloria.” But elsewhere in the town there were evidences of a forward movement. Washington Common underwent many improve¬ ments. Gates and fences were repaired and painted, the marshes filled in and some of the adjoining streets graveled for the first time and made passable in all weather. Sumptuous homes were rising about Washington Common. Captain John Andrews raised four large columns on the south side of his home—the largest ever built in Salem—a house of beautiful and splendid propor¬ tions. At the same time, across the comer of the Common, the great new house of Captain John Forrester was soon to be ready. At the head of Derby wharf the white Corinthian pillars and the long flight of granite steps of the Custom House, newly erected, were now looking down upon a still busy harbor, though the doctor noted with apprehension the signs of a threatening decay in the very midst of these grand preparations for increasing customs. Though there is in Dr. Bentley’s diary no prim piety, there is a recurring concern for the increasing changes in religious views and practices. Once, when church and state had been more closely knit. Fast Day, with its political ties, had brought large [ 72 ] (numbers to church; but now congregations were slim indeed; even the fasting had ceased, so that the day had become merely a formal occasion for humiliation and prayer. Much more alarm¬ ing to him, however, were the swarms of itinerant preachers who were appearing in the community—uneducated, ignorant, in¬ tolerant, their harangues full of what he regarded as licentious in¬ vectives. He noted the inroads of the Baptists, the Methodists, the Universalists, and he saw in their arrival a weakening of the old firm texture of Christianity. The appearance of numerous little sects, the boundless eccentricities of camp meetings, the actual revival of claims of witchcraft as in 1692—all these seemed to him a part of the fanaticism of the time. He noted with mingled irritation and amusement that the Universalists were celebrating Christmas with the singing of psalms, and St. Peter’s with a display af pine boughs, practices which he thought of as relics of Euro¬ pean superstitition. It was a ludicrous sight, he thought, when, Dne December, a little girl was baptized in the North River, though the minister had taken the precaution of tying her in a leather sack before he gave her to the December wave. When Sunday School was first begun in the South Meeting House, Dr. Bentley had misgivings. The practice seemed to indicate a dis- j integration of the New England Sabbath, a loss of the domestic association with the exclusive devotion of the day, once held J50 strictly that people hardly looked out of their windows. How¬ ever, he was not averse to the use of the Meeting House for polit¬ ical purposes on Election Day. So long as the House had originally been built by the whole Town, he did not think that, though state and church had separated, the appearance of numerous sects should alienate its use for their joint interest. Nevertheless, J though he had long been regarded as a radical, he was uneasy about some of the changes occurring. The religious complexion of Salem was no longer what it was when he had arrived as a oung man in 1783. Nor were the political changes less numerous or, sometimes, less disturbing. Less than a decade within the new century came ,j(^a stagnation of business, and, uncertainly at first, a question of war ,(j|Or peace. In Boston there were open expressions of attachment ,jto Great Britain, and censure of things American. With the news f Jefferson’s Embargo, came protests—a parade with a flag at half nji mast in Boston; in Beverly, a boat full of stones carried througl the streets, the firing of guns, and other signs of disapproval; ir Marblehead, a threat to hang Jefferson in effigy—all of which th< doctor, an ardent Jeffersonian, thought nigh the paths of sedi tion and rebellion. Fortunately, at Salem, at the North Bridge where the first bold resistance had been made to English arms the English Union was hung under the American flag as a symbo of its inferiority in the Salem view. Presently, with the cessation o: commerce following the Embargo, came soup lines and hungei and dissatisfaction, even with the gifts of food and provisions sup plied by local philanthropists—a new scene in Salem. Then came war with England, with threats of violent op position, even to the dissolution of the Union. But with th( fitting out of privateers, and the capture of rich prizes—twc hundred in the port of Salem at one time—the opposition di minished, though the zeal of some Congregational minister; against the war with England did not abate. The wharfs wer( very busy; troops passed through Salem for nearby stations; th( frigate Constitution was pursued by British warships to Marble head and sought refuge in Salem’s protected waters, all Salen rushing to the scene with cannons pulled along. Then came rumors of an intended invasion of Salem, and a near-panic oJ evacuation, which the doctor quietly resisted. Einally, news oi peace arrived, greeted by the ringing of bells, the shooting oJ guns, parades, the illumination of windows, and fireworks during the whole week. It was in the aftermath of the war that the changes in society became most prominent. Even shortly before the war, when hf had noted the fury of sects, it had seemed to the doctor that sui cides had increased, as had bankruptcies, vices, and enormitie; of all kinds. Now, after the war, after the violences of privateer¬ ing, there was a marked decline in public morals, Salem expe¬ riencing a danger of thievery at night such as it had not kno^vn. Merchants, accustomed to the quick wealth acquired from the capture of prizes during the war, were dissatisfied with the slowei tempo of commerce and profits in peace time. The Avar, too, brought an influx of indolent strangers, eager for easy earnings. There Avere other harbingers of change, the significance ol which perhaps escaped the doctor’s eye, so slight they may haA^e eemed. He recorded his pleasure, after thirty years in Salem, of ieing for the first time a flying shuttle at work, a happy inven- on, he thought. He noted, also, the arrival of the first steam- oat—at White’s wharf, which was fenced off to prevent the inter- .‘rence of the curious crowds which the novelty collected. Every- ody appeared to be more interested in the possible profits of the ivention than in the ingenuity of the inventor, which seemed to *r. Bentley the more interesting. Briefly, also, he recorded that . shipload of Irish emigrants had been allowed to enter the town, le added only that they were Catholic and generally of humble ondition. The observant Doctor Bentley did not live to see the trans- Drmation which these events were to bring. But great changes ere on the way: the industrialization of Salem had arrived; the .eath-knell of Salem shipping had been rung; and the racial and sligious character of New England had begun a momentous ’•ansformation. Children born in the one-time Puritan town ’ould no longer be children of the Past. 1 In this physical and spiritual milieu of Old Salem, as the Cnturies moved fonvard, the family of Hawthornes played their 'iverse roles. The Hawthornes were a various lot. Some were :ern and vigorous men, prominent citizens who made their adelible mark on their times; others moved through their years ;most unseen in a mist of gray though blameless mediocrity; chers were oddities, eccentric men and women, tottering on le verge of respectability and sometimes plunging beneath it. "he tides of family fortune rose and fell with the undulating ■;ars. It would be difficult to distinguish family characteristics i so large a mosaic of marriages and intermarriages extending ver so long a period of time, except, perhaps, that there seemed ) be a tendency toward violent family quarrels, together '^vith a xurring pride of ancestry, even among those lowest in public n a memorable August day in i8i8, when he went fishing with ' party of men in Muddy River where it enters Sebago, his com- anion was Enoch White, a boy of his own age from not very dis- mt Windham village, whom he tried to outfish, with uncertain ssults. His favorite haunt, the flat rock at the outlet of Thomas iond, he shared with William Symmes, an illegitimate mulatto loy whose eccentric and humorous foster father was an occas- Dnal visitor in the home of Uncle Richard, not always to Uncle Lichard’s comfort, it seems. On the outskirts of his associations, D the obscure record would indicate, were his relations with a loy with whom he was later to attend college. Though as a youth, b it was said, his general bearing was bitter and repellent, per- aps because, like Symmes, he knew that he was illegitimate, Villiam Pitt Fessenden became a distinguished United States senator from Maine, one of the noblest products of his college !nd his state. i' Here the thought intrudes spontaneously that in little Pearl [ 57 ] I of The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne drew, in American literatui perhaps the very first picture of an illegitimate child who attaine not only a respectable position in society, but a character mark( by normal and healthy affections as well as other qualities word of esteem—something quite different, for instance, from the twisu unfortunates in Shakespeare’s plays. The thought may be id! and is certainly beyond proof, but it may be that Hawthorne, choosing such an outcome for Pearl, was led thereto by some wa dering by-paths of memory of a period—endeared by associatic with waters and woods under summer sun or wintry sky—when 1 played with boys bearing such dark stigmas, though they native possessed, or by dint of effort acquired, the characteristics admin by good men. Incidents, too, are a considerable part of the diary—accour of fishing, sailing, shooting, the drowning of Henry Jackson i in Crooked River, the freezing to death of the Tarboxes, husbai and wife, in the winter of 1819—and such matters of boyish i terest as the building of a nest by the kingbirds, and their remai able display of courage in the face of larger birds. In these pag a young girl, Polly Maxfield, comes riding astride her horse on h way to the mill, a daring and graceful rider whose skill the b heartily envies. At the hitching post and feed-trough she is greet( by Old Captain Dingley, the miller, whose hands shake with pal as he lifts from her horse the sack of grain which Polly has broug to be ground. In years to come Polly was to know the hardships being a pioneer farmer’s wife, the keeping of a country inn, ai the care of five children; but here, in her girlhood, a ray of ii mortality fell upon her bloom. The boy diarist seems to have had a lively interest in sup< stitions—with tales of the supernatural—which had currency this lonely country where the Indian had so recently lived. Fro Pulpit Rock, a mile down the road to Portland, so the tale wei the Devil himself once preached to the Indians, and when, wi a hundred Indians gathered round, a chief laughed, the Dei stamped his foot, the ground sank, and every Indian went out sight, though, upon occasion, their shouts might still be hea emanating from their swampy graves. Once, in Uncle Richarc store, a local pedlar by the name of Dominicus Jordan told a sto of a haunted house, the garret window of which could not I kept closed, however thoroughly nailed. One starlight night, as he was passing the house, so Dominicus said, he saw a phantom come out of the garret, cane in hand, as if on solid earth, walking away on nothing six yards up in the air. It was strange, the boy reflected, that almost all persons, old and young, seemed fond of hearing about the supernatural. Though he himself did not believe a word of such stories, he loved to tell them again. Once, in the fragment of the diary that has come down to us, he tried his hand at telling an original story—about an old horse compelled to stand shivering and hungry while his worthless master drank rum in Uncle Richard’s store. It is a simple story in which the horse talks. There are settings, characters, conversa¬ tion, and a turn of events, with a bit of humor, though the boyish 1 tale may have no significance save to indicate an early interest in narrative, the first of his stories to be preserved. Even earlier, however, as his sister Elizabeth said, he had liked to tell stories of himself going to sea, with the oft repeated ending, “And I’ll never come back again.” Surely Uncle Richard’s gift, together with the accompanying admonition, was a propitious one. Though it may not be said that without the gift Hawthorne would never have kept a jour¬ nal, still the habit of journal-keeping may well have been begun when he was twelve. His notebooks were to be continued for many years—place descriptions, characterizations, the germs of many tales and sketches—often written with consummate skill, and frequently lifted almost bodily into the fiction. To write out his thoughts in as good words as he could find as the best means of securing command of thought and language for mature years—had : been the uncle’s counsel, a counsel attaining a rich fruition. Only the long years of his apprenticeship, when he scribbled and I burned almost without end, could have had an equal value in the acquisition of the mastery of his literary art. One could, of course, search this early diary for more partic¬ ular consequences. Is it altogether futile, for instance, to speculate on the possible significance of the boy’s interest in the super¬ natural? The Indians who disappeared with the stamping of the Devil’s foot never, of course, reappear in the mature fiction; nor does the ghost seen by the superstitious Dominicus Jordan ever iwalk the empty air again. Nevertheless, often, as in “Young Good- man Brown,” the atmosphere is vibrant with a fearful assurance of the supernatural—on the part of young Goodman Brown. How evasive—relative to his own belief—is the author in such matters is manifest, for example, in The House of the Seven Gables or in The Scarlet Letter, wherein the reader may choose as he wishes among the reasons offered for the death of Colonel Pyncheon, or what it was that actually appeared, in the climactic scaffold scene, upon the breast of the repentant Arthur Dimmesdale. The super¬ natural may have played a part in such events, though the author does not really say. If the historian wishes to seek the origins of the so-called Gothic elements in Hawthorne’s writings, he may search learnedly in the author’s readings, or he may content him¬ self with a picture of a boy in his uncle’s country store, apparently not interested but intently listening all the while to the tale of Dominicus Jordan as he earnestly tells of a specter that dis¬ appeared in a great flash of light accompanying an explosion as of twenty fieldpieces. No wonder that the pedlar Dominicus Jordan was one day to be resurrected from the depths of boyhood recol¬ lections, rejuvenated, refurbished, as the brisk, inquisitive Yankee Dominicus Pike, amusing but dubious hero of one of our best tales of mystery—“Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.” [/H Of the letters from this early period a considerable number are extant—letters to his mother, his sisters, Elizabeth and Mary Louise, and his uncles, Richard and Robert Manning. They are written from Raymond to Salem, or from Salem to Raymond, as the boy moved back and forth between his two homes. Matters of family interest of course bulk large, though the boy’s own activities and interests predominate. In spite of his complaint that Grandmother Manning scolded him, and was stingy with oranges and guava jelly, and that Aunt Mary Manning officiously ordered him about, somewhat to the injury of his growing sense of inde¬ pendence, the letters show a warm affection for his family, es¬ pecially for his mother and sisters. He confessed that he quarreled with Louise, but generously admitted that the fault was usually his. As for Aunt Mary, she had to put up with a good deal from the young humorist, who particularly loved to tease her about suitors and marriage. Aunt Mary being a confirmed spinster with no visible prospects. Indeed, the letters contain a good deal of lilting banter which is rather astonishing when one remembers the boy’s reputation for reticence outside the family circle. Somewhat, in these letters, he says of his schooling—how busy it keeps him, especially his Latin and Greek. He tells of his read¬ ing, and of his great interest in the novels of William Godwin md Sir Walter Scott—ample evidence that his imagination was being sustained by a fare of Romanticism as well as of Puritanism. In one startling remark he says that he thinks it best to continue lis dancing lessons for a time rather than to return to Raymond. Prevailingly, however, he is faithful to Raymond, a subject to ivhich he recurs again and again with the most apparent nostalgia. How happy he was there! Never again, he fears, will he be so lappy. If only he could return, once more to run wild, to have lothing to do but to go agunning, and to “savagize” with his sis- ;ers! Once he dreamed that he was walking by Sebago, and when le awoke to find his dream but a delusion, he was so angry that he jave his Uncle Robert (who slept with him), a most horrible tick. In a more serious mood, when certain members of the iamily were urging his mother to return to Salem from Raymond, le wrote that he hoped that she would not be tempted by such mtreaties. She could never have so much comfort as in Raymond, vhere she was mistress of her own household, quite free from the luthority of any other members of the family. How delightfully ;he time would pass, with her children around her in the Ray- nond home, shut out from all the world, and with nothing to dis- urb them. It would be a second Garden of Eden. The question of college and vocation brought forth some of :he most serious reflections expressed in the letters. Once having ietermined to attend college—at Brunswick, Maine, where the ihort distance from Raymond would make it possible to spend his i^acations at home—there remained the unresolved problem of /ocation. What should he do after college? Being a minister, he ivrote to his mother, was of course out of the question. He was lot born, he was convinced, to vegetate forever in one place, and io he would not choose so dull a way of life as a minister must (ead. Since more than half the lawyers seemed to be in a state of actual starvation, he would have none of the profession of law Among the professions, then, there remained only that of medi cine, though he should not like to live by the diseases and in firmities of his fellow-creatures. And how it would weigh upoi his conscience, he wrote, with a turn of humor in the midst of hi serious meditation, if he should chance to send some unluck' patient to the realm below! If only he were rich enough to livi without a profession! Perhaps he might become an author and depend upon hi pen for his support. The illegibility of his handwriting, hi thought, was very author-like. How proud his mother would hi to see his works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudes productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull. But authors wer always poor devils, and so Satan might take them. With such bravado and simulated gaiety did he try to vei the gnawings of the immemorial perplexities of youth—youth which must choose among apparent imponderables and the un known. And so, by way of concluding his reflections, he quoted with scarce-concealed anxiety, / am an Englishman, and naked I stand here, A-musing in my mind what garment I shall wear. When one considers the vicissitudes likely to beset the writtei records of a family with no scholarly or literary backgrounds, i is nothing less than extraordinary that so much of the origina writings of Hawthorne’s boyhood has been preserved. Was it thi widowed mother, who, having so early lost her husband, and pouring her affections upon her only boy, treasured his handi work among her keepsakes, though unhappily dying before sh could hear his writings praised as equal to the proudest produc tions of the scribbling sons of John Bull? Perhaps the sisters, whi were scribblers, too, and who deferred much to him, tucked thes things away in family bureau drawers to be read and admire again and again with sisterly affection for the petted and talente brother. That Uncle Robert so early was solicitous for the boy [ 4 ^] education may be evidence that in the family was the hope that in their midst was a rare gift indeed. Seemingly the earliest of Hawthorne’s boyhood literary efforts is a bit of verse entitled—prophetically—“Moderate Views,’’ and, if one can judge from so brief a product, possessing a peculiarly eighteenth-century as well as a more generally moralistic flavor. With passions unruffled, untainted by pride By reason my life let me square The wants of my nature are cheaply supplied And the rest are but folly and care. How vainly through infinite trouble and strife The many their labours employ Since all, that is truly delightful in life. Is what all if they please may enjoy. The world knows no great literary artistry in the writings of boys of thirteen, nor is there such artistry in these verses; but in looking backward upon these boyish lines from an acquaintance with the mature writings, one may be justified in finding in the thoughts here expressed a curious interest. One remembers Lady Eleanore seeking to place herself above the sympathies of our common nature, with such dire results, or the cold and withering pride of old Hepzibah Pyncheon before she opened the door of her cent-shop and let in the warmth of common human inter¬ course. When Dorothy Pearson contended with the mother for the spirit of the Gentle Boy, it was Dorothy’s rational piety which jOpposcd unbridled fanaticism and which made her mild features |Suggest a verse of fireside poetry. The splendor of the Great Car¬ buncle waned when two mortals had shown themselves so simply wise as to reject a jewel which would have dimmed all earthly things—when they determined that never again would they desire more light than all the world might share with them. Who can guess the means by which the mind and heart of genius unfold? The interest in poetry continued throughout boyhood. As he himself said, he was full of scraps of poetry, and could not keep it out of his brain. I saw where in the lowly grave Departed Genius lay: And mournful yew-trees o’er it wave, To hide it from the day. If the melancholy of such eighteenth-century-graveyard verse seems prominent, the edge is somewhat removed by his accom¬ panying remark that he could vomit up a dozen pages more if he were of a mind to turn over—as if he were writing after a mode, without himself being affected by the sentiments of his verse. Once, after offering some lines in a letter to his sister, he re¬ marks that these are his words but not exactly his own thoughts, once more as if merely toying with poetic expression. By the time that he was fifteen, he had already published some of his verse, apparently in Salem or Boston newspapers, as had his sister Eliza¬ beth, and as Mary Louise was presently to do also. It was a verse- writing family living in a day when newspapers extended a friendly if not always discriminating welcome to local poets. The sixteen-year-old boy’s taste in poetry is revealed in some lines— not his own—which he regarded as the most beautiful he had ever seen: She’s gone to dwell in Heaven, my Lassie She’s gone to dwell in Heaven: Ye’re ower pure quo’ a voice aboon. For dwelling out of Heaven. But, he hastened to say, it was the thoughts and not the words which charmed him. It may, however, be difficult to foresee, in this boyish judgment, the discrimination evidenced in his mature review of Longfellow’s Evangeline, surely one of the most dis¬ cerning and beautifully written reviews in the history of Amer¬ ican literature. The writing of poetry, it became clear, was not Hawthorne’s forte. In a practically forgotten volume published by Rufus W. Griswold in 1845, Scenes in the Life of the Savior: by the Poets and Painters are two poems attributed to Hawthorne, “Walking on the Sea’’ and “The Star of Calvary’’; but otherwise from his mature years there seems to be no verse save a stray limerick or two satirizing some of the idiosyncrasies of his philosophical neigh¬ bor, Amos Bronson Alcott. Why the poetic vein did not receive further exploration, or why the ore was not of quality equal to that of the later prose, is a question that must simply be dropped as an insoluble mystery. [44] Of the boy’s creative writing, nothing is more engaging than The Spectator, a hand-written journal obviously inspired, at least in its title, by the very famous eighteenth-century product of Ad¬ dison and Steele. It pretended to be a weekly publication and ran for seven numbers, single copies of all seven still being preserved, these probably being the only copies made. Strangely, there are two Number Ones, one undated and, as would appear from one or two items, written at Raymond. All the other numbers were issued from “the Spectator Printing Office, No. 2, Herbert Street, up two pair of stairs’’—an indication that young Hawthorne was occupying the third-story room in which he was to write many of his early short stories, and of which he was one day to say in his notebook, “In this dismal chamber fame was won.” A number of features distinguish the undated and presumably earlier Number One. A “Prospectus” states the aims of the writer, and is so well written and so well reflects the aims of serious pub¬ lications of the period—including its earlier namesake—that it might well have served a real and a mature journal. The pub¬ lishers will not be guided solely by disinterested motives, yet they will be motivated mainly by a desire to reform the morals and instruct and amuse the minds of their readers, advance the cause of religion, and give truth and justice a wide sway. Furthermore, they will try to accommodate themselves to all men, and to en¬ deavor to please all except the vicious. Although in all this there may be a suggestion of satire, a tongue-in-cheek humor, a suspicion which gains some credence from the unquestionable humor scattered throughout the fol¬ lowing numbers, patently serious elements throughout lead one back to the conviction that the tone of the “Prospectus” is serious and, furthermore, perhaps prophetic of some of the literary aims of the mature author. Of undoubted seriousness, however, is a little essay entitled “On Solitude,” a piece of writing so charming in itself, and so indicative of the boy’s reading and training and future develop¬ ment, that one must be very thankful for its preservation. “Man,” begins this essay, “is naturally a sociable being; not formed for himself alone, but designed to bear a part in the great scheme of [45] nature. All his pleasures are heightened, and all his griefs are lessened, by participation. It is only in Society that the full energy of his mind is aroused, and all its powers drawn forth.” Though it is tempting to dwell upon the origins of thought encompassed in this phrase, “the great scheme of nature,” it is perhaps of more importance to emphasize the main idea of the passage. Secondarily it is of interest that these sentiments con¬ cerning solitude were the subject of the boy’s reflections apparently at the very time when he was most enjoying the sweets of solitude in his carefree ramblings in the woods of Raymond. Primarily these thoughts on solitude are significant because they seem to presage a host of sketches and tales—as well as some longer works —in which solitude, or isolation in some form, is the recurring theme—no theme more occupying the examination of the mature author, when, perhaps, he was paying his respects to a trend of thought which expanded into the limits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, expressing itself in the volumes of Zimmer¬ man’s Solitude, in the verse of Wordsworth and Byron and, in America, in the works of Emerson and Thoreau—perhaps an irreducible residuum or the inescapable shadow of Individualism. But for him the question may have remained what it was for Emerson, a coin with two sides. It was good, sometimes, to steal from the sultry sunshine of the world and to plunge into the cool bath of solitude, there to let the infinite idea of eternity per¬ vade his soul; though it was good, also, to feel and know that there were men and women in the world. In the scattered verse as in the prose of The Spectator, grave religious and moral meditations overtop such items as tell that Mrs. Hathome’s cat has given birth to kittens, or that Mary Manning, Spinstress, is advertising for a husband. Oh I have roam’d in rapture wild begins a poem which concludes, Ahd all my soul in transport own’d There is a God, in Heaven enthroned. “Must we slumber to awake no more?” begins an essay entitled “Autumnal.” “No, if we can believe the Scriptures, if we can believe the instinctive feeling which tells us that this life is not the end of our existence, the soul can never die. What a glorious bought. . . . This thought alone can cheer us as we travel to- vards the Grave.” ‘‘What then is Benevolence?” asks the young vriter. ‘‘It is to seek out the habitation of Distress, and to cont¬ ort the afflicted inmates. It is to protect the fatherless, and to nake the Widow’s heart to sing for joy. . . .” ‘‘True courage,” the eader learns from still another essay, is not ‘‘that insensibility o danger, which is oftener met with in brutes than in men. . . . ’erhaps the noblest species of courage is in a good cause, to brave he bad opinion of the world.” Though in a superficial glance such remarks may appear o be mere homilies, their enduring quality in the mind of Haw- horne the man gives them no slight significance. One remembers he hour when he stood in his home at the bedside of his dying DOther, watching through a crevice of the window-curtain his ittle daughter Una playing in the yard—a child so full of life he seemed life itself. The whole of existence, in the contrast, eemed to be revealed to him at once. What a mockery if this were 11 of life, whatever the measure of happiness between the ex- remes. There must be a better state of being! Or one may reflect »n the final paragraphs of The Scarlet Letter, wherein the benev- lence of Hester has won her at least an earthly redemption in he eyes of her once unforgiving critics. When there were those /ho frowned upon Hawthorne in later years for expressing his riendship for Franklin Pierce by delicating to him Our Old iome, the man had not forgotten what the boy had said, that to •rave the opinion of the world may be the true courage, for fierce’s political views, as Hawthorne remembered if others did ot, had had nothing to do with a friendship begun in the fresh nd idealistic years of young manhood when the demands of xpediency were as yet no part of their concept of the world. While reading The Spectator one comes with startling effect pon an item redolent of impressions of present and future im- ort in the young writer’s remark: ‘‘Nathaniel Hathome pro- oses to publish by Subscription a new edition of the miseries F AUTHORS^ to which will be added a sequel containg (sic) ACTcs (sic) and remarks drawn from his own experience.” A fight fragrance of humor seems to emanate from this remark, in art because at first it seems naturally ludicrous that such a proj- ct should occur to so inexperienced a writer. Besides, the remarks [47] may seem to catch and reflect some of the humor obviously mad^ an intended part of The Spectator. But when one calls to mind th later “Devil in Manuscript,” with its humorous but disceminj comments on the experiences of writing, or such a masterpiece a “The Artist of the Beautiful,” with its profound insight into th problems and pains of the artist, one sees how early such trend of thought began to engage the mind of the young author. Not th least significant aspect of the young Hawthorne’s comment is th simple truth that he does think of himself as an author, a ch cumstance which becomes more and more luminous as retrc spection unfolds, whatever its initial impact. J When the years of his childhood had ended—the fragmentar and irregular schooling in the early days at Salem, the years o unrestrained freedom in the woods of Maine, and the period o somewhat more disciplined preparation for college—much hai seemingly shaped itself in the character of young Nathaniel Hav thorne that is recognizable in the mature man, though he wa only seventeen when he set off to college. The convictions cor ceming God and immortality attained in the early years wer never fundamentally altered, though in his maturity they ma have taken on a coloring and a range unknotvn to the striplinc The delight which he took as a boy in nature—in its beauty an( freedom—never deserted him, but expressed itself in many a pa< sage of unexcelled artistry. If in the enjoyment of this beaut and freedom he acquired what he came to think of as his curse( habits of solitude, those habits gave to the world manifold bles; ings. The pain of isolation which he himself felt in his solitud was miraculously transformed into a literary art picturing hot warm, how dear, and how sacred are the possibilities of humai companionship—so that as the reader reads he is grateful for hi humanity, whatever its limitations or fetters. In “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Walt Whitman ha told of his aesthetic awakening and his early dedication to poetr) and Wordsworth, in The Prelude, has written of a similar e? perience, when, after a gay party, in his homeward tvalk on mmmer dawn, though he made no promises, promises were made Eor him of a like dedication. In the life of Hawthorne one finds recorded no such ecstatic moments. On the contrary, if one is to believe his own statement, he became a writer in a process so ^adual as to be almost imperceptible. Year after year, he said, be kept on considering what he was fit for, until time and destiny decided that he was to be a writer; it was only in the dearth of 3ther employment that he early began to scribble sketches and itories, most of which he burned. So it may have seemed to him ;vhen he was fifty; or so he, one of the most modest and self- effacing of geniuses, may have chosen to mask his long years of aainful but determined literary apprenticeship. The Spectator Item concerning the “Miseries of Authors,” and the hint in the etter to his mother of an ambition to equal some day the proudest production of the scribbling sons of John Bull suggest another cind of explanation. Moreover, the boy was already writing, verse md prose, with much expedition. In a backward look, it might well seem that his life-course had been chosen. The evidence pffered by his college years, as we shall see, brings one even nearer ;o such a conclusion. ^-tifi-nAeo-f-c^^ Maine, where Hawthorne was t( attend college, was, cross-country-wise, hardly thirty miles fror Raymond, where Widow Hathorne made her home. Indeed, th nearness to Raymond, and the prospect of vacations to be enjoyei there, in part overcame the youth’s reluctance to spend four year in academic study. But the circuitous woodland roads, and th slowness of horse and chaise over ever-deepening sands, made th journey require a day and a half, with a night’s lodging at som farmhouse-inn along the way. Still seemingly endless forests of towering pines covered th plains of Brunswick town, though saw and ax were already mat ring the native beauty of the landscape at the same time that the brought industry and employment to the scanty population There were miles and miles of these pine solitudes, carpeted witl the slippery needles fallen and undisturbed during countless years a brown and yielding carpet made more colorful, at certain sea sons, by the herbage and fruit of the blueberry and the spic wintergreen. There were oak groves, too, where many wil pigeons fed, the winnowing sound of their wings blending tvit the sough of the wind in the adjacent pines. On a sandy plain, surrounded by the ever-verdant wall of th forest, lay the village of Brunswick, its scattered houses sprawlin without charm along streets and lanes unadorned by tree or shru [50] —a lumber town still too new and raw to have attained the shelter¬ ing shadows of elm or maple or the simple beauty and unosten¬ tatious architectural dignity of the long-settled New England vil¬ lage. Here, moreover, were no such mansions as raised themselves magnificently along Chestnut and Federal Streets or commanded Washington Common in Salem. Here was no grand Custom House with its fluted Greek columns overlooking the Atlantic. Here were no busy wharfs bringing ships from the far ports of the world -ships and such wealth and such cosmopolitanism as only a busy ieacoast city could know. Here, rather, there were few houses iave on Maine and Federal Streets, with only one or two of out- itanding pretension in the whole hamlet. Here the mall, which [ay along Maine Street, was an unreclaimed bog from whence is- iued Mere Brook, an unhurried stream which, as it entered the Dines to the east, lent one grace to the prevailing dullness. Pleasant street, hopefully named, was only a lane, unsightly as the mall it- ielf. Northward, where Mill Street entered Maine Street, was the allage post office and store. Thence Maine led across a bridge to Jie still smaller village of Topsham. It was above this bridge that Brunswick knew its one feature of natural grandeur, for here the \ndroscoggin River, in the course of a third of a mile, dropped :orty feet in tumultuous falls and rapids that echoed incessantly Trough the village day and night. True, the picturesqueness of :he scene was disfigured by the presence of lumber mills and their disarray, but on moonlight nights the discordances made by man were softened and subdued, and the spot was then favored by meditative and dreaming youth. The campus of the infant Bowdoin College—its first class, con- ■isting of seven members, graduated in 1806—adjoined Maine Street where it turned somewhat westward at the Congregational :hurch south of the mall, and where, with Harpswell Street, it ‘ormed the top of a Y. An old print labeled “Bowdoin in 1820” though the date should be 1822 or later) pictures the grounds ind buildings as Hawthorne knew them from his sophomore :ear onward. The sandy level of the yard is encompassed by an tnpainted board fence, outside which, in what appears to be a ^)asture but what may be a street without pavement or sidewalk, i dog is worrying a cow, and a man (a village character who sold weetmeats and root beer to the boys) is trundling a wheelbarrow. [5^] Outside the fence, a few trees relieve the bareness of the grounds but without hiding the four buildings which, on three sides of a rectangle, stand baldly against the sky. To the rear of the build¬ ings, on the far or eastern side of the campus, the pine forest and the wilderness begin. Maine and Winthrop Halls, devoted to dormitory and class¬ room use, were four-story buildings of red brick, rectangular, without decoration, but in their simplicity not unpleasing to the eye. Massachusetts Hall, the oldest of the structures, likewise ol red brick, stood at the north of the grounds, its cupola rising from the center of its three stories and square roof, and sur¬ rounded by four chimneys. It faced, to the south, the college chapel, a small two-storied wooden building with tower and bel¬ fry, the whole, in disregard of all laws of harmony or canons of taste, painted a straw color. There were, apparently, no walks leading from building to building—only the barren sandy ground, In its immediate environs the college campus was enveloped in an atmosphere of rural plainness. The president’s home was within the college grounds; and just beyond the boundary, on the village side, stood the Congregational church. But contiguous to the northern boundary was the unpainted one-story home of the college sweep, “Aunt Nelly,” and so was the cabinet shop of the church sexton and undertaker. Close to the campus was Wards- worth’s tavern, forbidden to students by college rules, but sur¬ reptitiously haunted by the more adventuresome. On Maine Street, in front of the college grounds, among a handful of mis¬ cellaneous buildings, stood the shop of the village blacksmith, the sound of whose ringing anvil must often have mingled with the peal of the chapel bell. In its externals, at least, Bowdoin Col¬ lege, in the early 1820’s, was surely what Hawthorne was one day retrospectively to call it—a country college. In its course of study Bowdoin followed the model of Harvard. Candidates for admission were asked to be well versed in geog¬ raphy and arithmetic, and to produce a certificate of their good moral character, but the emphasis was clearly on their familiariq with Greek and Latin, languages which were pursued through the junior year, as was the study of mathematics in its varioui branches through all four years. Though Murray’s English Gram mar and Blair’s Rhetoric were texts in the freshman and soph Dmore years, respectively, the modern languages and literatures were conspicuously absent, though it appears that French might be studied under a private tutor off the campus. Nor is there any evidence that the boys were exposed to any courses in modern listory, much less American history. One recalls the satirical aoyish protest of Lord Byron, a decade or so earlier, against the Dfferings at Cambridge University: What though he knows not how his fathers bled, When civil discord piled the fields with dead, When Edward bade his conquering bands advance. Or Henry trampled on the crest of France; Though marvelling at the name of Magna Carta, Yet well he recollects the laws of Sparta. . . . Some slight attention was paid to modern European history in foseph Priestly’s Lectures on History, in which, incidentally, me chapter was devoted to the Constitution of the United States. Fhat text, however, which the Bowdoin student studied in the bird quarter of his junior year, was largely devoted to theories )f history and government. It was, for instance, the author’s be- ief that history strengthens the sentiment of virtue by showing the weakness or strength of human nature and by exhibiting the con¬ duct of Divine Providence. Such a philosophical or religious cast of thought made its ippearance also in the dominant courses of the junior and senior (fears, when the student read Locke’s Essay on the Human Under¬ standing, Dugald Stewart’s Philosophy of the Mind, William Paley’s Evidences of Chrisitianity, and Joseph Butler’s Analogy 3/ Religion. Whatever the Bowdoin college boy garnered from ;hese various authors, he found them in agreement on certain najor principles: that Reason is essential to human happiness, as .s Revelation, a leading function of the former being to support ;he latter. Nor were these philosophical principles presented in :he college courses without some sense of alarm and a feeling of i need to defend them, and on two scores. The skepticism of David Hume had denied the dependability of Reason, and so ;iad already raised the threatening question that was to become :he basic theme of modern philosophy—namely, the picture of a neaningless world, and a meaningless human life. And from an- [55] other direction seemed to come an equally dangerous threat. If as Immanuel Kant maintained in his refutation of Hume, science and its laws cannot be regarded as a final statement of the world the needs of the spiritual life having a right to determine oui philosophy, this view of Kant, however apparently consoling ai first glance, showed no regard for Revelation, and so, after all seemed to lead only to infidelity. So fearful of the teachings o; Kant were the college authorities, it was said, that one professoi was employed at Bowdoin mainly because of his supposed abiliq to refute Kant. In their practical essence, the courses in philosophy in th( Bowdoin of the 1820’s could perhaps be resolved in the well known eighteenth-century dictum of Paley—namely, that virtu( is “the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of Got and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” If any Bowdoin boi believed otherwise, his unbelief was not acquired from his colleg( courses. Or if such a boy, prompted to “look within,” or led bi some Quaker, some Rousseau or Fenelon or Pascal, came to be lieve that the heart has its reasons which reason does not know, h( must have realized with something of a shock how foreign wa; such a thought to the hard and sure reason imbibed from hii college textbooks. Such short stories, for instance, as Hawthome’i “The Gentle Boy” or “Browne’s Wooden Image,” and man^ another, could hardly have had their origin in the Lockear philosophy in the boy’s classes at Bowdoin. It was not only in the classroom, of course, that the colleg( sought to exercise its influence on the student; rather, it sought tc govern his conduct wherever he was during the school term The Laws of Bowdoin outlined the student’s permitted campus life with considerable clarity, though how frequent were the in fractions will presently appear. Perhaps no other evidence shows so clearly how circumscribed was the social life of the Bowdoir student in the 1820’s. No student shall eat or drink in any tavern unless in company with his parent or guardian, nor attend any the¬ atrical entertainment or any idle show in Brunswick or Topsham, nor frequent any tavern nor any house or shop after being forbidden by the President or other Instructor [54] . . . nor play at cards, billiards, or any game whatever for money or other things of value nor without permission keep a gun or pistol, nor discharge one nor go shooting or fishing. No student shall he concerned in loud and disorderly singing in College, in shouting or clapping of hands, nor in any Bacchanalien [5ic] conduct disturbing the quietness and dishonorable to the character of a literary institution. No student may go out of town except into Topsham nor be absent a night except by leave—upon request of parent or guardian. Students must be in their rooms Saturday and Sunday evenings and abstain from diversions of every kind. They who profane the Sabbath by unnecessary business, visiting or receiving visits, or by walking abroad, or by any amuse¬ ment, or in other ways, may be admonished or suspended. Nor were these prohibitions, equally critical of bacchanalian Dnduct, fishing, and unnecessary walking on the Sabbath, the nly effort of the college to govern the conduct of the student, t sought to lead him to walk in Christian ways through the in- ulcation of Christian ideas as interpreted by orthodox Congre- ationalism, though the Unitarian movement was already making s inroads upon New England. Every Sunday evening there were ible lessons attended by the whole student body and conducted y the president of the college himself. Eurthermore, regular ^tendance at Sunday church services was required, the Congrega- onal church at the edge of the campus being the one chosen by le faculty, though the rights of conscience were recognized by le granting of permission to attend elsewhere in Brunswick or 'opsham; but church attendance somewhere was exacted. Twice /ery weekday, also, there was compulsory attendance at chapel at six in the morning and at five in the afternoon when the days ere long, or at sunrise and at sunset in the winter season when le days were short. Outward compulsions, however, did not always penetrate to le inner boy. While the body was present, the spirit, if not holly asleep, often went a-blackberrying. Once, at Sunday morn- ig services. Parson Mead was convinced that he detected a stu- [55] dent, alas, under the influence of liquor. When the young culpr was led by his companions from the church, ill and vomiting, tf minister altered his sermon to condemn the sin of drunkennes at which the unregenerate students present shuffled their feet an by other noises expressed their disapprobation. More disturbanci resulted, climaxed by the hanging of Parson Mead in effigy. Nor was conduct at chapel exercises always exemplary. Som times the youthful flesh rebelled at the sunrise devotions whic preceded the first recitation before breakfast. Since the chapel w; entirely without heat, and since Maine winters are often vei cold, there was little eagerness to arrive ahead of the ringing ( the last bell. On the contrary, there was often a last minui stampede from the dormitories or private homes, and a rus through the chapel door as disheveled hair and clothing in di array revealed hasty or uncompleted dressing. In spite of sue scenes, it was long, says one college historian, before the faculi recognized that early prayers on a winter morning were a vei slight means of grace, and so permitted devotions at a later hou But even when zero temperatures were no deterrent to religioi reflections, or no incentive to cut chapel for a few more minut( in bed, there remained other obstacles to the youth’s devotioi There was, for one thing, a wish to continue the sleep interrupte by the unwelcome ringing of the first chapel bell, so that tl head involuntarily fell back upon the seat as the youth snoozec or there was, contrariwise, the exuberance which induced the bo for no apparent reason whatever, to throw his cap across the chape or there was the fearful need to cram for a lesson neglected tf night before, lest the student should have to “take a dead” in tf recitation that followed chapel; or, perhaps at afternoon exercise the vanity and daring of some senior might tempt him to can his cane into the very chapel itself. Though there is ample ev dence that there were boys who tried to honor at once the spir and the forms of religion, it seems that the decorum of Coloni; Puritanism had lost somewhat of its strictness on the Bowdoi campus of the 1820’s, whatever the official rules. Apart from the required class work and religious exercisf there were certain activities permitted by the faculty and partic pated in by many of the students. Fraternities were as yet u known, as were organized or intercollegiate sports, or even cours [5^] I physical education. The boys found vent for their group in¬ rests mainly in the literary societies, the Peucinian and the thenaean, which engaged in lively rivalry for membership, their miversary celebrations being, next to Commencement, the most nportant events of the college year. The Athenaean had the ;putation of being more democratic than the Peucinian, though lembership on the whole seems to have been fairly evenly di- ded. “The respectable conservative, and the progressive or demo- atic parties,” one of their members was to say later, were typified 'f the two societies. One great advantage offered by each group as its library, which, since it was chosen by the boys themselves, ore nearly represented their spontaneous interests than did the ore formal college library. The Athenaean library, in the 1820’s, is said, contained some eight hundred volumes. In these li- raries, as in the debates and other literary activities of the so- eties, the boys found such contact with contemporary literature id historical events as the secluded nature of their lives per- itted. In these literary societies, then, the boys mainly expressed leir permitted extracurricular interests. Of formal exercises in aysical education or sports, the college offered nothing. There ere sporadic occasions when the boys took to playing ball, when le end and aim of life seemed to be to play ball during every free Dur; but these caprices were not long-lived, and the boys were ion left to their own individual devices to find such physical [versions as they could—chiefly in walking, or in the forbidden 5 hing and gunning—the adjacent wilderness, with its trout and ild pigeons, offering at once temptation and security from faculty iscipline. An occasional student, favored by parents of means, ^pt his own horse. In the spring of 1823, inspired by Lord Byron’s espousal of le Greeks in their struggle against the Holy Alliance, and rompted by various other motives, including a wish for novelty id a desire to give outlet to their pentup energy, the boys or- inized the Bowdoin Cadets, a military company without arms resumably, which drilled and maneuvered on the college campus, uch to the ire of the president, past whose residence the com- iny marched, and whose orders to desist the young culprits ig- ored. It would be interesting to know the repercussions when a [57] veteran professor, perceiving the value of such an outlet of anim spirits, sent a particular request that the marchers parade past h house. On militia days, when the state required all able-bodie men to appear equipped for inspection and drill, the Bowdoi Cadets had a mock May training of their own. An old print shot their commander on horseback, with plumed cocked hat ar drawn sword, his followers in ludicrous costume—an Indian wii hatchet, clowns in number carrying brooms for rifles, some i exaggeratedly high hats, one boy carrying a banner representir a grotesque face and the words “Bowdoin Cadets.” But no objective sketch of this student life, however detailt or realistic, can do much more than suggest the external outline Our protagonists were youths, and youth is full of “illusions, a pirations, dreams.” When the Bowdoin Cadets maneuvered i front of the home of President Allen, much to that good man irritation, they must have cut a grotesque figure as seen by eyi fixed only on exteriors—such eyes as those with which the pres dent saw when he brusquely ordered the drillers away. They wei only a group of boys, probably dressed in their old clothes, carr ing sticks instead of guns, keeping irregular lines and not alwa; in step, and hesitatingly obeying commands imperfectly know and given. But for the stripling officer, Franklin Pierce, one da to be General Pierce in the Mexican War—and later, as Preside: of the United States, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Na\ —the situation must have seemed far different. He was probabl leading his army to a gallant attack for high ends, and, in defyin the impotent President Allen, was winning a great victory ove the enemy. And with what play of his imagination did Privai Henry Wadsworth Longfellow try to keep step with his schoo mates and endeavor to obey the commands of Captain Pierc( Since he was already ambitious to be a poet, did he, for the tin being, imagine himself the great soldier-poet of his country, ai other Sir Philip Sidney, wounded mortally on the battlefield, bi devoting his last efforts to a dying common soldier? And thoug Private Nathaniel Hawthorne had entered military service wit ttle of the earnestness of his captain, he must nevertheless have lared some of the enthusiasm of the commander, with whom e had already begun what was to be a friendship that was to be ided only by death. With little doubt, the boys saw themselves irough the rainbow hues of illusion. They were all experienced )ldiers, accoutered in the best military fashion. They were all ord Byrons, all willing to sacrifice for Greece, or for any great id noble cause. Furthermore, though these same boys occasionally gathered a the campus in unlawful assemblage, armed with clubs and laking a tumultuous noise to the dishonor of the college and the isturbance of the citizens of Brunswick, or exploded torpedoes in le college entries, or, against all rules, shot fireworks from dormi- )ry windows—still, they were dreamers and idealists, too. Though le campus was sandy and without adornment, and the classrooms are and plain, with only a small leap of their imaginations the luntry college became for the boys an Academy of Attica. In le seclusion and repose of these halls rose “phantoms of fame, ke exhalations.” Whatever the prosy realities of their college ays, these days were such as to permit retrospect to see them as a eriod of innocent pleasures—“gathering blueberries, in study ours, under those tall academic pines; or watching the great >gs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or looting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in le summer twilight; or catching trout in that shadowy little ream”—Mere Brook. There had been some thought that Dr. Oliver, Hawthorne’s ^lem tutor, was to accompany the youth to Brunswick; but finally r. Oliver wrote a letter recommending the scholastic accomplish- lents of his pupil, a letter to be given to the president of Bow- oin; and so the matter was settled. It was, after all. Uncle Robert ho accompanied the boy to college. It was Uncle Robert, too, ho had undertaken to pay his nephew’s college expenses. Instead of going directly to Brunswick, uncle and nephew rst drove to Raymond, a journey extending from Friday to Sunday morning. There was one last day at Raymond with 1 family before young Hawthorne ventured into the novelties ai uncertainties of four years of college life. After arriving in Brunswick shortly before noon on Tuesdt Uncle Robert and Nathaniel called on one of the trustees of t! college, Ebenezer Everett, who accompanied them to see Pre dent William Allen, who appointed the hour of two for tl required entrance examination. All the way from Raymond t] youth had been doubtful of his ability to pass his examinatio and now, as the dreaded hour approached, he was so sure that ] would fail that he requested Uncle Robert to be ready to ta! him back home. But within an hour he had returned from his c deal, having in that short time been examined, passed, and roommate or “chum” selected for him. Dr. Oliver’s letter probab having done much to convince the authorities that the boy w of college caliber, if, indeed, the requirements were very exactin Whether young Hawthorne wrote home more frequently as freshman than later in his college years, or whether by chan more of his first letters were preserved than was later the ca< the fact is that the dozen letters remaining from his freshm; year constitute the largest group extant from his life at colleg They are distinctly boyish letters, actually revealing less of t] character of the writer than did the earlier letters, the entries the first diary, or the essays in “The Spectator,” Fortunately, t] manuscript records of Bowdoin College, the “Minutes of tl Executive Government,” supplement the information througho the first three years of Hawthorne’s enrollment, so that one a learn somewhat of his external activities, and thereby surmise little regarding the drift of his thought. In a letter to his Uncle William Manning he tries to assu his family that he is quite contented at Bowdoin and does n wish to return to Salem for some time, though he does wi: that his sister Elizabeth would write. He is boarding wi three other boys at Professor Newman’s, and he does not find f studies hard—not so hard as at Salem under Dr. Oliver’s tutelag< nor the college rules too strict. He complains, however, that will be absolutely necessary for him to make as good an appearan as his roomate, the son of a distinguished lawyer and therefo from a family of means. Now and for thirty years to come Ha lorne was to know the want of money. No note recurs through s college letters, certainly, more frequently than does his need r money, a common enough experience among college boys, irely, but uncommonly pressing in Hawthorne’s case since, in s senior year, the want of money to pay the barest expenses me near bringing about his dismissal from college. But in this )nnection it may reveal something in his temperament or family aining to note that whereas it was not uncommon practice for owdoin students to earn a part of their college expenses by aching in the rural districts during the longer vacations, Haw- lorne apparently never tried to help himself in this manner, ne might wonder why. Long before the first term came to an end, however, he was oking forward toward the winter vacation, when he might be home in Raymond six weeks or so. He wished that his sister • mother would write at least once a week, and he longed to see mebody from home. He was obviously homesick, though he rote that he and his chum lived together in the greatest har- ony. Indeed, next to the frequent complaints in his college tters of a want of money is the recurring note of homesickness, ven in his most sophisticated phase the longing for home re- -> ained. It was an emotion of lifelong duration, and may in part '.plain some puzzling years following college. Certainly the hap- est years of his maturity were those when he had a home of his_ yn. . At some undetermined time in the first quarter he took to laying cards, and seemingly for small stakes of one kind or an- her, and was later revealed, though at first he may have played ily occasionally and without notice by the faculty (who were course averse to such practices) or without harm to his studies; at he had begun a course which was to militate against his stand- g as a student and, like his want of money, seems almost to have suited in his dismissal or withdrawal from college. In a letter written in mid-April, well in the second term, he Id his sister that his occupations were much the same as in the St term, except that he had in great measure given up playing f.rds, prompted by the fact that one student had recently been ispended for playing, and two of his class had been fined. For lie future he planned to be more careful. What he did not tell his [ 5 /] sister about his “occupations” was that he had begun to cut classi as well as chapel and Sunday evening prayers, though, since statement of the fines for such infractions of college rules w; mailed by the faculty to parent or guardian, his secret could n( be long kept. Indeed, he was presently brought before the execi tive government of the faculty and reprimanded for neglect ( recitation. And though he had thought to be more careful whi playing cards—to keep from being detected—his wariness seen not to have been equal to the alertness of some member of tl faculty-detective body, for, together with six other boys, he wi caught at playing cards and fined fifty cents, while, at the san time, a letter from the president was dispatched to his mothe Three other culprits, also caught, did not escape so easily. Since President Allen’s letter to Mrs. Hathome has been pr served, as well as a number of Hawthorne’s letters pertaining i the incident, since the event was one of the more exciting poin in Hawthorne’s “extra-curricular” life at college, and since Hai thorne’s reflections on the matter show somewhat of his struggli to adjust himself to his new little world, the situation is not wit] out considerable interest. The president’s letter, dated May 29, 1821, though it made tl case clear, was gentle and polite. Doubtless the writer had ha much experience in writing similar letters: Madam:— vote of the Executive Government of this college, it is made my duty to request your cooperation with us in the attempt to induce your son faithfully to ob¬ serve the laws of this institution. He was this day fined fifty cents for playing cards for money the last term. He played at different times. Perhaps he might not have gamed, were it not for the influence of a student, whom we have dismissed from college. It does not appear that your son has very recently played cards; yet your advice may be bene¬ ficial to him. I am. Madam, Very respectfully Your Obedient, humble servant, William Allen, President Of course young Hawthorne knew that his mother would I told of his transgressions; consequently, when he was inform! [62] the faculty action, he hastened to reveal to his mother what id happened. He was aware that, according to faculty rules, ; was now on dangerous ground, with the threat of suspension an imminent probability, and the withdrawal of Uncle Robert’s pport a likelihood. Incidentally, the letter indicates that Mrs. athorne had removed from Raymond to Salem, so that the family :e at Raymond had now apparently come to an end. Brunswick, May 30 th, 1822 My Dear Mother, I hope you have arrived safely in Salem. I have noth¬ ing particular to inform you of, except that all the Card Players in college have been found out, and my unfortu¬ nate self among the number. One has been dismissed from college, two suspended, and the rest, with myself, have been fined 50 cents each. I believe the President intends to write to the friends of all the delinquents. Should that be the case you must show the letter to nobody. If I am again detected, I shall have the honor of being suspended. When the President asked what we played for, I thought it proper to inform him it was 50 cts. although it happened to be a quart of wine, but if I had told him of that he would probably have fined me for having a blow. There was no untruth in the case, as the wine cost 50 cts. I have not played at all this term. I have not drank any kind of spirit or wine this term, and I shall not till the last week. I remain N.H. I must have some money, for I have none left except about 75 cts. Do not show this. Neither in this letter nor in a subsequent one to his sister .•there any suggestion of contrition or repentance. He promises to : good only until the end of the term, when, presumably, the : liege rules will not apply. Having confessed the real nature ) the “blow,” however, he still must reveal his desperate need r money. He must have been uncomfortable while writing lis letter to his mother. But, at the end of his freshman year, when he had learned b contents of the president’s letter (and when he was once more writing for money—this time money to come home), 1 was at once relieved and angered by what President Allen hj said—relieved that the message was not so severe as he had antic pated, and angered because the president had seemed to imply weakness or a juvenility in his character. The President’s message is not so severe as I expected. I perceive that he thinks I have been lead [sic] away by the wicked ones; in which, however, he is greatly mistaken. I was full as willing to play as the person he suspects of hav¬ ing indeed [sic] me, and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to commence playing again, mere¬ ly to show him that I scorn to be seduced by another into anything wrong. This letter has been praised for showing the manly, clea headed attitude of its youthful writer, but one may ask wheth the letter, in its self-assertion and scorn, may not have a Byron flavor, young Hawthorne, like his contemporary, young Edg; Allan Poe, having imbibed the heady poetry of Lord Byron a tender age. After all. President Allen had probably only trie to reassure Widow Hathome that her son was really not a bt boy. The significance of the turmoil in the mind of the writ may have an interpretation of another nature, as will appear ; the development of the college years. And as for “showing” Prei dent Allen, the unrepentant collegian, in the next two years, w to lay before the president, if the latter was personally intereste all the evidence necessary to convince him that young Nathani Hawthorne needed no traducer to teach him how to flout tl college rules. In judging these boyish peccadilloes, it may be of some a to know that Hawthorne was by no means alone or even in small group of rule-breakers. For instance, when the faculty fii caught up with him for cutting classes and chapel exercises, was merely one of fifty-four boys fined for various reasons, tl list including his roommate, Alfred Mason, and two of his close friends, Franklin Pierce and Horatio Bridge. When, at facu meeting, it was voted that Hawthorne be admonished before t government for neglect of recitation, sixty-eight other boys w€ assessed fines for one reason or another. Since the total enrollme t the time was about one hundred twenty, one can conclude that le rules of Bowdoin were very strict, or that corruption was impant, or that the most of these sins were venial indeed. The ict seems to remain, however, that Nathaniel Hawthorne at the eginning of his college career was skating on very thin ice. ’hough he lacked the social qualities of his friend Pierce, there as apparently a time, as Pierce’s biographer said of the future resident, when Hawthorne was “cultivating a talent for discover- ig exactly how many times he could cut recitations and prayers ithout suffering a disconnection from his Alma Mater.” The remaining records tell us of a number of his other ■eshman activities. At the end of the first quarter or thereabouts e ceased boarding with the Newmans and took his meals with le Mrs. Adams with whom, presumably, he had roomed. During le year he and his chum. Mason, removed to Maine Hall, and 'ere living there when, on March 2, 1822, the interior of the uilding was gutted by fire, but with no injury to Nathaniel ive a tear in his coat. When the building was restored, he and lason continued to room together in Room 19 until the close E their sophomore year. In his freshman year Hawthorne joined the Athenaean Lit- I'ary Society, in the library of which, so he wrote to his sister, h had access to all sorts of books—about eight hundred of them, iiough he mentioned only Ree’s Cyclopedia, which continued to i terest him even after he had left college. Perhaps in this library L* came upon Hume’s History of England, the reading of which 1 ; began and then abandoned because he found it so dull. Of whatever else he may have read during his college years, either in te library of the literary society or of the college itself, not a sigle contemporary word seems to remain—a blank, truly, of vast I'oportions. Through his membership in the Athenaean Literary Society, Ijawthorne cultivated his most intimate friendships. Here, as he Ipiself later said, he was drawn to Franklin Pierce, one class a^ead, who was one day to be of greatest worldly service to Haw- [^5] thome, and in whose friendship Hawthorne, through long yeai and through severe trials, was to find great solace. But even i their college days Hawthorne must have found more in Pierc than any record explicitly reveals. Undoubtedly Pierce was on of the most popular men on the campus—sociable, lively, intei ested in outdoor activities—a healthy extrovert. His father ha been a Revolutionary hero at Bunker Hill, and doubtless thi fact gave the son prestige. Since he came from a family of som means, the boy Franklin (aged sixteen when he entered Bowdoir was permitted the luxury of a horse. He was the commander an leading spirit of the Bowdoin Cadets; in his senior year he wa prominent in his literary society—chairman of the standing con mittee, of which junior Hawthorne was also a member. Durin his first two years he was somewhat of a playboy, if that moder epithet is applicable to an environment in which the temptatior of pleasure-seeking were so limited. At any rate, at the beginnin of his junior year he discovered himself precisely at the bottor of his class, having thus attained the exact point of equilibriur between passing and failing toward which, for some time, he ha^ been traveling. In this threatening situation, with the aid and er couragement of two religious friends, he, with remarkable resoli tion, changed his ways, with only a few exceptions forsook hi idle courses, devoted himself to the most rigorous study, and grac uated the third scholar in his class. Though in part the motiva tion may have been injured pride, in larger part it was probabl the stimulation of his religious comrades. The story of Pierce’ transformation includes the picture of two roommates on thei knees at bedtime in solemn prayer, the altered playboy thus seel ing determination and strength. Another Athenaean with whom Hawthorne was on friend! terms was Jonathan Gilley, a youth of practical mind, whose ii fluence among his fellow students was probably greater than th: of any other student, that influence being largely exercise through his gift of eloquence. In his literary society, of whic he became president, he shone in forensic debate, and in the st dent mock trials he was a fervid advocate. In his relations wit individual students, he had a power of sympathy which seeme to enable him to understand every companion and to hold cor [ 66 ] nunion with him. Hawthorne regarded him almost as an older Drother, with whom he could converse freely. Pierce and Gilley were two of Hawthorne’s good college iriends, but his bosom companion was his classmate, Horatio Bridge, whom he regarded, long after Bowdoin, as the best friend le had ever had. Though Bridge seems not to have possessed he social qualities or the force possessed by Pierce, nor the elo¬ quence or the influence among students that distinguished Gilley -seems, in truth, not to have been distinguished on the campus n any way—yet in his affection and most of all in his undoubting 'aith in the as yet unproved powers of his friend, he performed he greatest service for Hawthorne, a service greater, in all prob- ibility, than that rendered by books, professors, or any other ispect of college life. One may make certain allowances for the dealization accompanying a retrospective view, yet there remains dawthorne’s simple statement that if anybody was responsible or his becoming an author, it was Horatio Bridge, an indebted¬ ness stated in the dedication to Bridge of The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, a volume which contains some of Haw- horne’s most delightful or most powerful and profound writing, i high and excellent tribute of friendship. Bridge’s continued ividences of affection, manifested in manifold ways, indicate not mly his lifelong friendship for Hawthorne, but the noble possibili- ies of human character. These and other students formed Hawthorne’s circle of ac- juaintances. These, and even those with whom he was appre- lended in breaking the college rules, those whose names appear in dnjunction with his only in the record of discipline, indicate omething of the range of his college life. However much or how- ver little these compainions knew of the inner workings of his houghts, his associations with them indicate that he was no ecluse. He was on friendly terms not only with such campus eaders as Pierce and Gilley but with such a humble student as ohn Brown Russwurm, illegitimate mulatto who lived beyond he village limits in retirement and solitude, but who was accepted >y the Athenaeans, graduated from Bowdoin, and lived a life of (Onor and distinction devoted to his people in Africa. An ac- uaintance with the lowly was to be a prominent characteristic of lawthorne’s life, an experience begun, perhaps, at Raymond, [^ 7 ] where he had spent some of his most pleasant hours with t mulatto, William Symmes, and continued in later life among sa ors and the most motley lot in the hinterlands of New Englar But in so small a school as Bowdoin then was, where everybo must have known everybody else in one way or another, it not astonishing that young Hawthorne knew so many of 1 fellow students. Somehow, however, he missed an intimate ; quaintance with Henry Longfellow, their kindred interests, o might suppose, being hard to disguise in so small a student boc and naturally drawing them together. But such was not the ca Though they knew each other, once participating in the sai exhibition (each with a Latin discourse), and both present at t final meeting of the class at graduation in the room of th( classmate, Cullen Sawtelle, their friendship did not truly beg until long after college days. [/^] The known events of Hawthorne’s sophomore year are qui( ly told for the reason that the extant records are so spar limited as they are to a couple letters and the record of discipli at Bowdoin. Nevertheless, they tell something of the young mai progress in discovering the possibilities of college life. For o thing, now that he was a sophomore and therefore a member one of the three upper classes, he was supposed to participate Public Declamations. But having an aversion to such exercis he cut them not only once, but twice, and thereby invoked a fi of one dollar. Prayers and recitations, which he had begun to c as a freshman, he now cut more frequently, as perhaps befitted sophomore experimentalist. His crowning achievement for t year, however, was being caught at a tavern one Saturday nig in July with two companions, William Hale, a future railro president, and Frederic Mellen, a painter and poet of some tale who, however, was to die too young to prove his artistic abilii The event at the tavern seems to have created something of stir on the campus, because at the next meeting of the facul it was voted “that the students be prohibited from frequentii [65] hie house of Mr. Wardsworth, now a tavern keeper in Brunswick, nd from calling there on any pretense whatever.” Though there i no letter extant recounting the incident, the news doubtless cached home in the form of a bill for one dollar, which each of he three culprits was assessed. Unknown to anyone, however, was he fact that the erring sophomore had probably picked up, in Mr. Vardsworth’s tavern, the setting for a scene or two for his first ovel-to-be. In a letter to Uncle Robert, he confesses that his dilatoriness in orrespondence is to be explained partly by his laziness, though, at he same time, he protests that he has had a great deal to do, since, 1 addition to the usual exercises, he now has to write a theme or ssay of three or four pages every fortnight, a task which employs early all his time. What he did not tell Uncle Robert was that mong his new accomplishments was the neglect of themes, in rhich he was to acquire a wider and more skilful practice in his anior year. But Uncle Robert would find that out, too, for the ne for neglect of theme-writing would be itemized with those 3 r absences from recitation and sent to Salem in lieu of a prog- ess report. At the moment it hardly seemed that the youth was mbarking on a career of authorship. The letters which Hawthorne addressed to his home during ais year reveal glimpses of the boyish humor that had charac- crized the Spectator, and mention members of the family with le old affection. The spring term he seems to have spent with a ollege friend in Augusta, Maine. At least he asked for money D make such a trip and emphasized the especial need for money ■nee he was ‘‘going to the house of an Honorable,” thus, perhaps, aggesting a degree of ostentation in his social acquirements. At le end of the year, he wishes the novelty of traveling homeward y steamboat from Portland to Boston, providing that his mother as no apprehensions of the boiler’s bursting. He tells his sister of ae hanging of Parson Mead in effigy and of the suspension of one cudent for his part in the scandal, but assures his mother that she ,eed not be frightened since he himself had no part in the inci- lent. Of the nature of his reflections on his school studies, or of ae drift of his hopes for the future, neither the letters nor any ther records give the slightest clue. In his junior year his neglect of studies attained grave pro portions. Early in the fall term he again avoided public decla mation, and thus for the third time ignored an important forma requirement of the faculty. His absences from chapel and publi( worship now reached their peak, as did his absences from recita tion. Much has been made by his biographers of his dislike foi declamations, though, astonishingly, the truth is that his neglec of themes was the greater. In his junior year, at least, Hawthorn( seems to have found no pleasure in the required writing, and hi: indifference toward it could only, at the time, have augured to hi teacher neither literary ambition nor talent. One might well won der what the trouble was—whether with boy or with course. Th( excellent and delightful essays of the Spectator, as well as the let ters to his mother about his hopes for a literary career, hat seemed to indicate a love of writing. Small wonder that Hawthorne’s great success as an authoi came as a surprise to most of his former college mates. Those wh( remembered him as he was in his junior year must have remem bered him most of all as one whose name was frequently befon the faculty for the infraction of its rules. His fines for that yeai had exceeded the half of his cost of tuition for the same period But in his junior year Hawthorne was not only concernec with the breaking of rules and the receipt of fines imposed—al the while aware, as he must have been, that a student could go jusi so far in such matters and no farther. There hung over his heac not only the threat of suspension or the more ominous danger o: expulsion for neglect of his studies; for throughout the year, also he had another care—namely, the knowledge that his college bill: remained unpaid. Uncle Robert perhaps being delinquent eithei because his approaching marriage had increased his financial obligations or because he had become disappointed in his ap parently idle protege. Whatever the cause, for over a year thes( bills remained unpaid, and this was a debt that the truly lenieni college business administration could not brook forever. These difficulties evidently reached a climax when, near tht close of the year, the faculty voted that Hawthorne’s mother “b( [70] written to,” without clearly indicating whether they were (rompted so to vote because of the delinquency in Hawthorne’s onduct or because of the overdue tuition. Since, however, such letter was also written to the well-to-do parents of Stephen Long- ellow, carefree brother of the studious Henry, it is not likely hat the letter was a mere dun. There was danger in the air for oung Hawthorne, and he knew it. He knew the danger, and what he wanted desperately was to o home, away from a situation in which he took no pleasure -was, indeed, very uncomfortable. Though he had been at col- ;ge for three years, he had not found himself. At the end of the year, when the final examinations were ver (he must have passed with a thin margin), he wrote a most Tgent communication to his sister Louisa at Salem. She was asked 0 concoct a letter to be given to President Allen, a letter excusing lawthorne from remaining at Bowdoin through the commence- lent period. “If you can think of a true excuse, send it; if not, any ther will answer the purpose.” If his sister would not comply, he [ireatened to forge the necessary statement himself. Nothing, ap- arently, mattered so much as going home at once. He needed a lace of refuge—to think, and to take stock of himself—for the resent, but for the future, too. In the meanwhile, his good friend ranklin Pierce would have to graduate without Hawthorne’s resence at the commencement exercises. When Hawthorne returned to Bowdoin late in September, 824, to begin his senior year, he came with such resolutions > he had not had before, one of the simplest and clearest pieces of /idence for the change being the fact that not again during the atire year did his name appear in the minutes of the executive Dvernment. No more was his name to appear among those of oys disciplined for cutting chapel or classes, for neglect of theme riting, for playing cards, or for frequenting the tavern, or for ly other of the means which the students had discovered for laguing the faculty. One can only surmise the reasons for the lansformation. There may have been the recognition that some change had become mandatory if he was to remain in school Possibly Uncle Robert, who had not yet paid the college bill for the junior year, had threatened to end his support. Thoug] these factors and other smaller ones may have had their place, on can with good reason assume that the youth was motivated by more positive principle: namely, by the desire to resume his bo^ hood ambition to write and to that end to make the best of wha yet remained of his college career. But the transformation, however effective in the long run, wa by no means complete upon his return to college. He was a senio now, and he possessed the superficial qualities characteristic o some young gentlemen of that exalted station on the campus When he promenaded across the college grounds with his whit gloves and his cane, his gold watch-chain in prominent view he flattered himself that he made a most splendid appearanc in the eyes of the pestilent little freshmen. One is reminded o Wordsworth’s description of himself as a student at Cambridge . . . attired In splendid garb, with hose of silk, and hair Powdered like rimy trees, when frost is keen. My lordly dressing-gown. . . . Genius, like mediocrity, may have its early vanities before it ha been chastened and subdued. The senior’s superciliousness went still deeper, manifestinj itself in ways which, if he reflected upon them in later years, mus have given him ample proof of the weaknesses in the nature o man, especially when sympathy for fellow-man is lost. In th course of time he was to dwell upon such human weakness in hi fiction, and to give it unrivaled force and artistic expression. Bu let the young sophisticate, aged twenty years, reveal himself in hi own words. He is writing to his sister about a freshman fron Windham, Maine, a crossroads village much like Raymond. Th likelihood is that Hawthorne had known Gardiner Kellogg' family, because the villages were only a few miles apart. Somethin may be added to the scene by the knowledge that Kellogg, wh died in his thirties, was described in his maturity “as a Christian c pure and excellent purposes, ... a simplehearted and honest mat but not fitted to cope with or to prosper in the World.’’ In 182 [72] Jawthome looked down upon him from that eminence which e assumed his seniority had rightly given. I have been introduced to Gardiner Kellog [sic]. A few weeks ago, as I was entering the door of the college, some¬ body took hold of my cloak and said that “Kellog wished the honor of Mr. Hathorne’s acquaintance.” I looked round, and beheld a great, tall, awkward booby, frightened to death at his own boldness, and grinning horribly a ghastly smile. I saw his confusion, and with that condescending affability which is among my many excellences, I took him by the hand, expressed my pleasure at the meeting, and inquired after his sisters and friends. After he had replied to these queries as well as his proper sense of my superiority would admit, I desired to see him at my room as soon as convenient, and left him. This interesting inter¬ view took place before numerous spectators, who were as¬ sembled round the door of the college. He has since been at my room several times, and is very much pleased (how should it be otherwise?) with my company. I am, however, very much displeased with him for one thing. I had com¬ fortably composed myself to sleep on Saturday afternoon, , when I was awakened by a tremendous knocking at the door, which continued about ten minutes. I made no answer, but swore internally the most horrible oaths. At , last, the gentleman’s knuckles being probably worn out, he I retired; and upon looking out of the window, I discovered that my pestilent visitor was Mr. Kellog. I could not get I asleep again that afternoon. Perhaps the saving quality of this letter is the irony in it, le recognition upon the writer’s part of his own vanity. Unmis- ikably, in this letter, and in the reference to the magnificence f the gold watch-chain, white gloves, and cane, there is a pose, pose which gave him no true comfort when he was alone with le realities of his character, but which revealed to him only 10 clearly how shallow, how wasteful of his time and energy, ad been all his efforts to accommodate himself to the external 5 pects of college life. The class-cutting, the neglect of studies, le card-playing, the tavern-haunting—all these activities had been [73] at odds with the solitude, the meditation, and the life of tl imagination which he had known when, propped between rcK and chimney of Grandfather Manning’s house, the rooftops ( Salem town around him, and sea and wharfs and ships belo him, he had chanted the poetry which had charmed him; c when, at night, lying on the floor of the log cabin in the woo< of Raymond, he had looked up through the fireplace chimney an had watched the stars. Now, after three years of a life quite oi of harmony with his true nature, he was tired of college and a its amusements, tired of his friends and acquaintances, and, pe haps more than all, tired of himself. He had no wish whatev( to live his college life over again. Hawthorne was painfully learning what young Ralph Wald Emerson, likewise an essentially solitary being, had learned i agony of spirit: that it is difficult indeed to keep in the midst ( the crowd and with perfect sweetness the independence of sol tude. When these unhappy, experimental years were fortunate] in the past, and when he could with equanimity contemplate tf aims of his life, Hawthorne drew up a statement of four precept: “To break off customs; to shake off spirits ill-disposed; to meditai on youth; to do nothing against one’s genius.’’ Three years fri tered away at college had taught him that it was his genius to b a spectator of life, and, most of all, to watch those lights an shadows which flitted across his own inward sky. The role of th worldling was not for him. Rather it was for him to think h own thoughts, to feel his own emotions, and to possess his ii dividuality unviolated. The regeneration was marked not only by the absence of h name from the faculty record of discipline; it was indicated pos tively in a number of ways. For one thing, he chose now to pa ticipate in public declamation, which, in his sophomore an junior years, he had avoided at faculty displeasure. Now, thoug the classical languages were no part of the senior course of stud he prepared a Latin dissertation to be delivered in the autum Exhibition, a public exercise held in the college chapel. Indee [ 7^1 is part had been assigned to him in August, before he had left :hool in his junior year—an evidence that he had not wholly eglected his work, but had retained good standing in at least ne subject. Hawthorne’s new diligence was manifested, also, in the as- irances he gave in the letters written to the family at home. To is sister, after a long silence in his correspondence, he explained lat his negligence had not been occasioned by suspension or xpulsion, over the threat of which in an earlier year she had ivitted him. To his Aunt Mary Manning, in whose behalf he had nee facetiously advertised for a husband in the pages of the pectator, he apologized for the brevity of his letter as due to his reoccupation with his studies. He was keeping excellent fires on lese winter days, and never stirred from them except when it was bsolutely necessary. He was now, as in his junior year, rooming lone, the only student in the house, and so could, when he dshed, study undisturbed. Incidentally, in his letter to Aunt Mary, he reveals that what- ver was the source of his new determination, it was not supported y religious emotions, for though he mentions a religious re- ival on the campus and in the town, he confesses that his regard or truth compels him to say that he has had no part in it. Unlike is friend Pierce, his strength was not attained by kneeling in •rayer. Neither in college or in later life did formalism in re¬ gion have any appeal for him. Though he was always deeply feligious, his religion, apart from his conduct, received expres- ,on only in meditation or in quiet communion with that unseen ower which he regarded as guiding human affairs. Of the specific nature of his religious emotions while he was t college there is but a glimpse. One moonlit summer night, ^hen he and his friend Horatio Bridge had sauntered down Maine treet to where the bridge crossed the Androscoggin, and where ae tumultuous river glistened and made the night sublime, the bys paused to enjoy the scene. It was an occasion to lift the spirit nd to evoke the ideal, an occasion for such confidences as per¬ haps only youth can know. Into Bridge’s mind came the colloquy f Jessica and Lorenzo in the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice: '. . . in such a night as this. . . .” Bridge quoted the words, and lawthome responded by speaking some verses which he had him- self composed in his pre-college days. If they are not even promis ing verse, they are nevertheless indicative of the warmth witl which the religious sentiments of his early boyhood had been pre served. Beneath the college sophistication with which he cloakec his sensitiveness lay the sentiments voiced in the boyish writing of the Spectator, sentiments from which he never really parted In boyhood, youth, and maturity, though the shadings might alter he always retained faith in the immortality of man. We are beneath the dark blue sky, And the moon is shining bright. Oh, what can lift the soul so high As the glow of a summer night. When all the gay are hushed to sleep. And they who mourn forget to weep Beneath that gentle light? Is there no holier, happier land Among those distant spheres. Where we may meet that shadow band. The dead of other years. Where all the day the moonbeams rest. And where at length the souls are blest Of those who dwell in tears? Oh, if the happy ever leave The bowers of bliss on high To cheer the hearts of those who grieve. And wipe the tear-drops dry. It is when moonlight sheds its ray. More pure and beautiful than day. And earth is like the sky. Although Hawthorne in his senior year had resumed that diligence in study which had characterized him under the tutelage of Dr. Oliver in Salem, he was by no means confident of his ultimate success as a student or of the mark that he would make in after-college life. Near the end of the year, after he had been [76] [sited at Brunswick by his uncle John Dike (who had married riscilla, a younger sister of Hawthorne’s mother), he was dis¬ eased by the praise in the report of him which Uncle John had lade at home. I am not very well pleased [he wrote his sister Eliza¬ beth] with Mr. Dike’s report of me. The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my talents, and probably formed expectations which I shall never realize. 1 have thought much upon the subject and have finally come to the conclusion that I shall never make a distin¬ guished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude. I do not say this for the purpose of drawing any flattery from you but merely to set Mother and the rest of you right, upon a point where your parti¬ ality has led you astray. I did hope that Uncle Robert’s opinion of me was nearer the truth, as his deportment to¬ ward me never expressed a very high estimation of my abilities. If the senior’s letter indicates anything other than a passing lood, it indicates the recurring uncertainty in Hawthorne’s mind E the degree of his attainment, or of his wish for distinction, 'nee, after his name had first been praised in public print, he rote among his diary notes, “In this dismal chamber fame was on.” Still, when his work was all behind him, and when he had iceived the acclaim of the world, he yet doubted his literary im- lortality. To Emerson, his friend of more than twenty years, he cpressed his doubt one day when Emerson found him pacing is wood-path on the hill above Wayside: “This path,” said Haw- lorne, “is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Perhaps the modest young man, in spite of his protest to the )ntrary, was secretly ambitious. Perhaps, like that of the hero i; his first novel, his inmost heart, if it could have been laid open, ould have revealed a dream of undying fame. But, if so, he was liscreet in keeping that dream hidden in the recesses of his private loughts, for the truth was that he had as yet no substantial asis for any claims to fame. He had not distinguished himself ;i college. Though he had finally recovered himself after largely asting three years, he was to graduate not above the middle of [77] his class. Most of such efforts as he had made to open an intei course with the world through the medium of authorship ha( met only with apparent failure and near frustration. But in thus thinking of himself as plodding forever along witl the multitude, never rising above the average, he had entered ai area of reflection to which he was to give artistic form in late years. Such plodding, he was to see, is not necessarily failure. Th youthful hero and heroine of “The Great Carbuncle” achieve( happiness when they had learned not again to desire more ligh than all the world might share with them. Uncle Venner oi Th House of the Seven Gables, who attained the best of philosophic because his had not a drop of bitterness in it, was, in the eye of the world, only a mellow, quiet, and simple old man. Of how Hawthorne’s college mates regarded their contem porary, little that is not retrospective can be said. No letters o remarks of the day seem to have been preserved. As for the late comments, they are perhaps inescapably blurred by time or colorei by the writer’s intervening celebrity, so that fact and legend seer indistinguishable. Yet they are the best evidence available, thei recurring themes and points of view suggesting a common d( nominator of truth. That Hawthorne was not the complete scholar, as was hi classmate Henry Longfellow, was obvious to his companion! Rather, he was regarded as one of the laggards of his class, wh' utterly neglected some of the required studies, and who often, ii the student language of the day, “took a dead” in his recitation! though, at the same time, he was admired for the clarity ani elegance of his translations from the Latin—by teacher as well a by students. That he was a constant reader was also generally ot served. In spite of the card-playing and tavern episodes, he wa remembered as shy and retiring, a quiet if not wholly silent fellov distinguished by his modest address and by the soft tone of hi voice. Naturally reserved, he formed few intimacies. Most frt quently he was alone, though it was noted that his chosen friend were Jonathan Gilley and Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierc( vith the last of whom he was remembered as often strolling down he campus arm in arm. That he was solitary and pensive seems clear. Though present n scenes of student merriment, with an evident relish of the un, he sat quietly by, speaking scarcely a word. What his private houghts were all the while, no one knew, for no one could ead him, and he himself did not tell. It was felt that he dwelt in mrevealed recesses which even his most intimate friends were lever permitted to penetrate. Gilley, whom Hawthorne regarded Imost as an older brother, and who, as Hawthorne himself said, lad a special talent of sympathy which enabled him to under- tand human nature in all its varieties, confessed his inability 0 pierce his friend’s shyness. Gilley’s statement, particularly since t was less dependent upon a long memory than were the other xtant reminiscences, and particularly because of Gilley’s close- less to Hawthorne, is probably our best evidence of this funda- aental aspect of Hawthorne’s youthful character. “I love Haw- horne,” said Gilley; “I admire him: but I do not know him. le lives in a mysterious world of thought and imagination which e never permits me to enter.” In youth, then, and even after his death, he was so remem- 'ered. Years after Hawthorne lay beneath his simple gravestone 1 Sleepy Hollow cemetery, in Goncord, his schoolmate Long- dlow recalled his unfathomableness. “Hawthorne often came ito this room,” said Longfellow, “and sometimes he would go lere, behind the window curtains, and remain in silent revery le whole evening. No one disturbed him; he came and went as e liked. He was a mysterious man.” The mystery in which the youthful Hawthorne dwelt included n area of which his college mates were aware, though hardly one, seems, had anything but the most hazy comprehension of their Dmpanion’s real aspiration. In after years they saw that even in pllege he gave promise of what he was one day to do; but at the ^me most of those who noticed at all merely observed that his jiemes were well chosen and specially commended by his teach- :s, particularly Professor Newman, who, some years before, had fken the freshman into his own home when the boy had had the leasles. So pleased, in fact, was the professor with his student’s compositions that he often read them at home to his wife ( friends. Some remembered how, with diffidence and averted loo Hawthorne would present to his teacher such a composition : no other man in his class could equal. However, if there wei some who understood that their classmate intended one day i be a tvriter of romance, none, from the evidence at hand, coul anticipate his later remarkable development and enduring fam The Bowdoin students who seemed most confident of the careers and most assured of success as writers were Leonard A thorp and Henry Longfellow, both of whom, before their grai nation, were known as writers beyond the narrow confines of tl Bowdoin campus—especially Longfellow, whose poems, essay and book reviews appeared in publications in Portland, Bostoi and Philadelphia. As for Longfellow, he was very different from Hawthorne, f( he was not enveloped in any atmosphere of mystery; nor was 1 restrained by shyness. His parents, his teachers, his college mates all those who knew him—knew that he aspired to authorship an was already publishing frequently in the public journals in h senior year. Younger than Hawthorne by three years, he w; nevertheless the more mature. For one thing, he had had the ai vantage of living in a prosperous and cultured home, where 1 was stimulated by both mother and father, so that he not on felt more at home in the world than did Hawthorne, but w; encouraged to exercise his talents. By native inclination, prol ably, and certainly through the inducements of his advisers, 1 early learned to attune his ear to the popular likings in literatur "When, for instance, the editor of the United States Literary G zette of Boston advised young Longfellow to model his writir after that of Washington Irving’s “Broken Heart’’ in The Sketc Book, he was giving him, doubtless, good advice on how to mal immediate success, though in the long run such counsel was poc enough. Hawthorne, constituted as he was, could hardly hope for tf early recognition which encouraged young Longfellow. His fathe less home in Salem, the very modest means of his mother, th habits of solitude acquired at Raymond—these and other factoi contributed toward a limited experience with the tvorld and t late development of maturity, though perhaps the greatest factor as his own inexplicable nature. He seems to have had no im ination to seek popularity, to yield himself to the prevailing inds. What he sought, apparently, was as yet only imperfectly mceived in his own mind; but whatever it was to be, it must be taped essentially from within. If, for example, he was to model imself after Washington Irving (as he did), he was only to adopt le outward form of tale or sketch; the life-giving spirit within as wholly his own. And Hawthorne was shy—reluctant to reveal his ambition, ductant to show to the world anything that he had done until e had done his best, well recognizing, it seems, that his talent squired a slow and long development. In college, though he ood out as a writer in his class, to only one of his classmates, pparently, did he disclose his wish to become a writer. Only to loratio Bridge, who was himself without literary talent or am- ition, did he unburden himself regarding the otherwise secret romptings of his heart. The dedication of The Snow-Image to ridge is, after all, ample evidence that it was while at college lat Hawthorne cast the die that irretrievably made him an jthor, and that to Bridge he had confided his aims to do so. It must have been not only his aims, however, that he revealed ) Bridge; for the latter could hardly have prophesied that his iend was to be a writer of fiction by profession unless Haw- lome had already actually tried his hand at such writing. While was keeping those excellent fires from which he did not stir, : he had told his aunt Mary, one can reasonably assume that he ''as not only diligently pursuing his college studies, but that he ’as once again, as in the days of the Spectator, assuming the role c. author. Bridge must have seen some of these products of Haw- t.orne’s pen, though, unhappily, in his book of recollections, he icords no such memory. That book, however, appeared when iridge was, almost unbelievably, eighty-seven years of age, and >hen the events of which he wrote from memory had occurred narly seventy years before! It is no wonder, then, that he wrote (ily in the most general terms of that which Hawthorne had writ- tn so clearly and enthusiastically forty-two years earlier when he odicated The Snow-Image to Bridge. [ 5 /] The problem, in short, of when Hawthorne began to wri with the hope of publication, is inescapably fraught with son perplexities, and, though the doubt is probably the lesser weight ( the scales, there is little to be gained by concealing the degree < the uncertainty. In 1865 or thereabouts Hawthorne’s sister Eliz beth, in letters written to a niece, remarked that, in the summ( of 1825 (Hawthorne graduated on Sept. 8, 1825), her brother ha showed her a group of manuscript stories bearing the title Seve Tales of My Native Land, one of which, a tale of witchcraft, w; entitled “Alice Doane,” and another “Susan Grey.” He told he too, that he had made progress on his novel (presumably Eai shawe), which he would try to publish before the arrangemen for bringing out the tales were completed. All these details woul make it clear that Hawthorne had been writing a great deal in h senior year if not even somewhat before. Unhappily, howeve Elizabeth beclouded the issue when, five or six years later, in letter to James T. Fields, Hawthorne’s last publisher, she sai that the Seven Tales had been written after her brother had le college. Obviously these two statements do not agree, thougl other things being equal, the earlier memory is probably th more reliable. But other evidence is perhaps necessary to produc a greater certainty. Such evidence there is. When, for instance, Hawthorne’s soi in-law, George Parsons Lathrop, wrote his Study of Hawthorn (1876), he assumed that the Seven Tales were written after th venture of Fanshawe (published in 1828). However, in recoun ing the difficulties met in finding a publisher for the tales, Lathro told the story of the young Salem printer, Ferdinand Andrew; who promised to undertake the work, but who delayed so Ion that Hawthorne, exasperated, recalled the manuscript, and to th chagrin of Andrews, burned it. Beyond any doubt, this anecdot is dated incorrectly, for the young printer, who had begun bus ness in Salem in 1823, had already left town in 1826, a considei able length of time before the publication of Fanshawe. Henc it seems certain, from this evidence, that the tales were writte first—and written, moreover, while Hawthorne was still at colleg From Hawthorne himself, before his name had appeared i [ 52 ] mnt and while the matter must still have been relatively fresh n his mind, there is more evidence which should further allay loubt. In “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” as published in The Token (an annual or gift-book) in 1835, he remarks that this tale is one )f a series that he had written “years ago.” Of this series, three )r four “after a long time and numerous adventures,” appeared n The Token. “One great heap” meant to delight the world and ndure for ages, he burned—“Alice Doane”—and one other tale (unnamed) escaping from this fate only because, at the time, they vere in kinder custody than his own. Since Hawthorne was al- eady contributing to The Token as early as 1830, there could carcely have been “a long time and numerous adventures” be- ween 1830 and the date subsequent to 1828 when Lathrop suf>- )osed the Seven Tales were written. But there is still additional evidence. That Hawthorne was lot merely reminiscing idly when he wrote of the “long time and lumerous adventures” of “Alice Doane” before its publication 5 a fact proved by his letter to Samuel G. Goodrich, editor of ^he Token, a letter dated at Salem, Dec. 20, 1829. “Alice Doane,” ogether with several other tales already in Goodrich’s hands, he emarks, “have been completed a considerable time”; that is, one aay infer with assurance they had already had their “numerous dventures,” including the long and unbearable delay of Ferdi- and Andrews. That Hawthorne should thus early have written /ith an eye to publication is not at all astonishing. His sister, Mary ^ouise, his junior by four years, was already contributing verse to he Salem newspapers in 1828. Sister Elizabeth, the oldest of the hree, had made such contributions long before that date. Haw- horne himself, in 18 ig, wrote, with the boyish pride of all his fteen years, that Elizabeth was not the only one whose writing ad appeared in print. One can, therefore, confidently assert that Hawthorne began D write the Seven Tales and Fanshawe while he was still in col- ige, there being no concrete evidence to the contrary, and all the nown facts supporting the conviction. What the young author aimed to do in his writing—with wha kind of subject matter, what settings, what characters, what ir cidents, and, most important of all, with what kind of ideas h wished to deal—that is surely one of the very most significan questions relating to his college life. The answer should disclos somewhat of that mysterious world of thought and imaginatioi which, as Cilly said, his college mates were not permitted t enter. Regretfully one must recognize that perhaps insurmountabl obstacles make possible only such an answer as is burdened wit qualifications, for both the tale of “Alice Doane” and the bool length Fanshawe in their present form may have undergone a terations between the time when they were written in college an when they were finally published. Such is unmistakably the case a it relates to “Alice Doane,” for its patchwork character seems ol vious. As for Fanshawe, though there are no such apparent change in it, one’s scruples, at least, will suggest the possibilities of a terations—induced by the author’s growing maturity—between th period in which it was written and the date, three years later o more when it was finally published at the author’s own expens< But, having made allowances for these uncertainties, which ma^ after all, not be so great as one might conjecture, one can b fairly certain that in these two pieces of writing are revealed th gradually clearing outlines of the young author’s interior work To begin with the earlier of the two, “Alice Doane.” In il present form it is a patchwork; at least its structure—its frequer and abrupt transitions, its total concept of organization—give hardly a hint of that unsurpassed unity which Edgar Allan Po was later to praise so highly as evidence of Hawthorne’s literar genius. The author represents himself, accompanied by two youn women (probably his sisters) taking a walk up Gallows Hill i Salem, where, in the seventeenth century, the “witches” wer hanged. At the very spot where the uncoffined bodies presumabl had been unceremoniously buried, he reads to his feminine aud tors his story of witchcraft. But his tale is interrupted by allusion to the present scene, and, instead of being read directly from th manuscript in his hands, is awkwardly paraphrased. Whatever the intent, the effect is jaggedly created. But the story is not without merit. The scene in the burying ground, where, in the winter moonlight, under starshine and the glare of northern lights, the barren trees and ground covered by shining ice, the dead rise in ghost-like form, all possessed by false ind evil spirits—this is a weird and haunting scene. If it lacks substantial thought, so that it suggests a skilful play of fancy rather than a functioning of the imagination, it is nevertheless presented in phrases that a mature writer might envy. Such was the apparition, though too shadowy for lan¬ guage to portray; for here would be the moonbeams on the ice, glittering through a warrior’s breastplate, and there the letters of a tombstone, on the form that stood before it; and whenever a breeze went by, it swept the old men’s hoary heads, the women’s fearful beauty, and all the unreal throng, into one indistinguishable cloud together. Even when the writer turns from this play of fancy to a state¬ ment of the historical facts out of hoary and cruel antiquity to picture the dread procession of the victims up Gallows Hill on :heir way to martyrdom and eternity, he writes with beauty and DOwer. In these concluding paragraphs, as in some of the earlier Dnes, in spite of an unfortunate want of total effect, there is an imple prophecy of a stylistic mastery of no small magnitude. But what was the author’s aim in the use of such material? His general aim was one which his own family tradition, the his- ;ory of Salem, and the stirrings in the literary atmosphere of the ■ime all prompted him to adopt. When the Bowdoin student, Leonard Apthorp, had made something of a sensation with his ‘Confessions of a Country Schoolmaster,” it was because he had nterested his readers by the use of subject matter chosen from ife that they and he himself knew. At Bowdoin, too, young Long- 'ellow was eager for the day when America might have a literature ;ruly indigenous, as his commencement oration, ‘‘Our Native \uthors,” clearly indicates. He, and perhaps Hawthorne also, had been encouraged to participate in the creation of such a literature by their young college professor, Thomas Cogswell Upham, who lad been brought to Bowdoin in 1824 to refute the infidelities of Kant, but who may have exercised his greatest influence througl his American Sketches, with its plea for a commemoration in lii erature of the glories of our native country. In the Seven Tales of My Native Land, then, and specificall in “Alice Doane,” it was Hawthorne’s endeavor, for one thin^ to represent in the drama of fiction our ancient superstitions a they were embodied in tales of witchcraft, in the witchcraft ii which his own ancestors had so ignominiously figured, and in th legends of which he had been steeped since childhood, his ir terest increased and his knowledge augmented by much reading It was an endeavor to which he devoted himself in such earl fumbling efforts as “Alice Doane,” as in the later unsurpassei artistry of “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “Young Gooc man Brown,” in all of which, through the magic of art, the ugl and the terrible are transformed into a dark yet glowing beauty The theme and the skill, of course, were to reach their climax ii The Scarlet Letter and in The House of the Seven Gables. Bu while they were yet only incompletely conceived in the dream c the senior collegiate, no wonder that communication with hi fellows was difficult for him, or that his companions thought c him as dwelling in unrevealed recesses. In Fanshawe, his first book-length story, he attempted to df pict a romance at a small country college—smaller, humbler, am more rustic even than his own Bowdoin. The critics are probabl right in maintaining that the book is steeped in the atmospher of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, novels which Hawthorne love( as a boy and continued to read into the last years of his life. Th story lacks force, weakened as it is by an imitative melodrama. I appeared without the author’s name. In later life, he would no speak of it, and wished it forgotten. It will not suffice, however, to dismiss Fanshawe as merel imitative of Scott, for there are in it elements which were in th very grain of the young author and which remained an integra part of his thinking. In the character of Fanshawe he saw a typ which always fascinated him, and which he continued to represen in his fiction with altered emphasis and in various forms. Perhap his model was in part his classmate Gorham Deane, who devote< himself to his studies with such intensity and with such a disre gard for his health that, feeble, emaciated, and sinking with tuber [ 55 ] losis, he died a few weeks before graduation, thus missing the nor of standing second in his class. Beyond question, also, the )del for Fanshawe was in part Nathaniel Mather, younger 3 ther of Cotton Mather, the inscription on whose tombstone 11 apprises the reader that there lies a hard student, “an aged m at nineteen years.” Hawthorne had seen that tombstone my a time as he had played, as Salem boys still play, in the 1 Charter Street burying ground, where he placed the weird ;ne from “Alice Doane” already mentioned. And somewhat of nshawe he must have seen in himself. Faust-like, Fanshawe devotes himself to the acquisition of su- rior knowledge, in the very act of moving t oward his goal, how - gr, recognizing the gmptines.s and futility of his quest. He is itary, isolated—deeming himself “unconnected with the world, concerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his rsuits.” How often, in modified forms, does not Fanshawe re¬ pear, from the detached Holgrave redeemed by love in The ouse of the Seven Gables; the minister in The Scarlet Letter, irchm^ to, thfi. fateful delivery^_f_his_Ele^ion Sermon, so remote )m Hester’s “own sphere, so utterly beyond her reach ... so un- ainable ... in that far vista of_his unsympathizing thoughts”; d in its extreme forms, Rappaccini, who would sacrifice his ughter in the interest of science, or Ethan Brand, guilty of the pardonable sin itself, “the sin of intellect that triumphed over ? sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God.” Even the final years, when Hawthorne paced the hill above Wayside, nly trying to give shape to his errant and uncontrollable imag- ition, the spirit of Fanshawe reappeared as the studious, melan- loly, and unhappy Septimius Felton. No Rousseau, no Kant, no deridge, no Emerson ever looked with more distrust at intellect assuaged by the affections. Momentarily, however, Fanshawe experiences the love of Ellen .ngton, and thus feels the thrill of one of the ties that unite us ;our kind. With this experience he realizes what he had not own before, “the exulting tide of hope and joy.” This is the ler side of the coin. If the unrestrained pursuit of the intellec- L.l isolates and estranges, love, in whatever form, unites, and ings such happiness as is given mankind to know. It was a con- ition that attained greater and greater strength in Hawthorne’s [<57] thought as the years went on, expressed in his private life well as in his fiction. To his friend Longfellow he wrote, afte decade of literary apprenticeship and such solitude as few auth have known, that “there is no fate in the world so horrible to have no share in either its joys or sorrows.” How deep witl his inner convictions was this idea appears in a letter of his coi ship of Sophia Peabody: “Indeed we are but shadows; we are i endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about u! but the thinnest substance of a dream,—till the heart be touch That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are ings of reality and inheritors of eternity.” In The House of Seven Gables, the theme is not, as Hawthorne says with tongue cheek, the moral that the wrong-doing of one generation lives tv the successive ones, finally becoming a pure and uncontrolla mischief; rather, the theme is the beneficent and regenerating fluence of the affections—just as clearly as such is the theme Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale or The Tempest. Though the beginnings of Hawthorne’s mature thought n be found in considerable detail in Fanshawe, one further exam must here suffice. After Ellen Langton had been rescued by Fanshawe, all while aware of his devotion and his hesitancy in speaking of love, that young heroine herself makes the proposal: Will it not be happiness to form the tie that shall con¬ nect you to the world? to be your guide—a humble one, it is true, but the one of your choice—to the paths from which your proud and lonely thoughts have estranged you? From this one might turn to “The Flower of Eden” in The Ho of the Seven Gables, a chapter in which the same thought recei its most artistic and satisfactory expression. A more explicit semblance, however, appears in Hawthorne’s last completed mance. The Marble Faun. There, in the final chapter, it is solitary spectator-philosopher, Kenyon, who utters the sentirae . . . the mind wanders wild and wide; and so lonely as I live and work, I have neither the pole-star above nor light of cottage windows here below, to bring me home. Were you my guide, my counsellor, my inmost friend, with that white wisdom which clothes you as a celestial garment, all would go well. O Hilda, guide me home! nd, lest such a concept seem but a literary convention remera- ;red for thirty-five years—remembered from his first to last novel here again is a fragment of a love-letter to Sophia Peabody: . . . foolish . . . to have doubted my Dove’s instinct,—whom, henceforth (if never before) I take for my unerring guide and counsellor in all matters of the heart and soul. Even so small a sampling from these writings of the college nior will indicate the character of his private thoughts, which his companions were such an enigma. But Hawthorne himself, the dedication of The Snow-Image, after The Scarlet Letter id The House of the Seven Gables had brought him world nown, looking back over some of his earlier tales and compar- g them with some of the later ones, draws all the pertinent con- usions. In youth, men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago. The truth that was only in the fancy then may have since become a substance in the mind and heart. In July, preceding the commencement exercises for Haw- ;orne’s class. President Allen called the senior into his study to ;ll him that, though his rank in the class entitled him to a part . the exercises, the laws of the college forbade giving him such ipart because of his neglect of declamation in his sophomore );d junior years—an arrangement with which Hawthorne was :'rfectly satisfied, since the remark was a sufficient testimonial : his scholarship, and since this arrangement saved him the mor- :ication of appearing in public at commencement. President Hen, it appears, was aware of the recovery in the senior year : the youth who had once so heatedly wished to demonstrate b moral independence. In July, too, or at least during the early summer, Hawthoi paid a visit at Raymond, though he complained of the coldn with which he was received by his uncle and aunt. The vi gave him little pleasure, and he determined not to go there aga Nor, apparently, is there any evidence that he ever returned w any satisfaction to that region which he had once regarded a; family Eden. Distinctly, with the close of his college years, 1 boyhood closed, too. The charms of Raymond were to be renew only when time and remembrance had restored their origii luster, and when his imagination had added the iridescence the ideal. After the college custom of the day, the graduating class h their silhouettes cut, to exchange among friends, and to lea with their Alma Mater for such interest as posterity might ha in these fledglings. On his silhouette Hawthorne wrote his colic nickname, “Hath,” thus at once reminding his present admir that the young man once spelled his name “Hathome,” and tl the first syllable was once pronounced with a short “a” and r with a broad one as now. On the day following graduation, t class met in the room of Cullen Sawtelle, where Henry Loi fellow read a poem. He and Hawthorne, who were to raise th class and Bowdoin to the attention of the world, were not have another word with one another until twelve years later wh Longfellow, already a successful professor at Harvard and a pro ising author, was, by his friendly and generous review of T Twice-Told Tales, to help lift his classmate out of his long ( scurity. Commencement, on September 8, 1825, was probably r much different from what it had been during the short life Bowdoin. It was something of an occasion in the area, for t young state of Maine was proud of its college. There were nu erous visitors from out of town, who tied their horses to t wooden fence along the campus. There were booths near by, provide refreshments—pies and gingerbreads and drinks in varyi degrees of strength. Since the college chapel was too small 1 students and spectators, it was the practice to hold the exerci: out of doors, a platform being erected for faculty and graduati class, the graduates attired in gowns borrowed from the adjace ministry. Henry Longfellow, fourth in his class (following Little, the iceased Gorham Deane, and Bradbury), of course had a part, an ation entitled “Our Native Writers,” a subject near his heart, ough not his own first choice. Though it was only a boyish fort, it contained thoughts echoing in increasing volume through e land, and culminating, a dozen years later, in Ralph Waldo nerson’s American Scholar, the classic expression of young merica’s literary aspirations. Is then [asked orator Longfellow] our land to be indeed the land of song? Will it one day be rich in romantic asso¬ ciations? Will poetry, that hallows every scene,—that ren¬ ders every spot classical,—and pours out on all things the soul of its enthusiasm, breathe over it that enchantment, which lives in the isles of Greece, and is more than life amid the ‘Woods, that wave o’er Delphi’s steep’? Yes!—and palms are to be won by our native writers! Hawthorne, sitting there mute, must have listened with lively notions, a mingling of hope and pain. He had as yet won no dms; on the contrary, though he had tried to communicate with e world, had endeavored to picture the romance of our ancient perstitions, the world had been utterly indifferent. The orator, addressing the future writers of America (such as ight hear), called for “an utter abandonment of everything else, noble self-devotion to the cause of literature.” He himself was devote a lifetime to literature, and not without great adversity, 5 s, and sorrow. On the whole, however, he was Fortune’s fav- ite, upon whom she smiled with warmest blandishments. It IS the widow Hathorne’s son, who had played among abandoned aches in his grandfather’s livery stable, entertained himself □ne among the rustic environs of Raymond, and worried over e payment of his college bills, who was about to embark )on such a devotion to literature as his classmate fondly en- ;ioned. Just now, as for the past four years, he was eager to be at home lain. What lay beyond his return, he could only dimly know. ^Ae cherished scenes of home once more si rounding him, with the accustomed presence of mother and sist( and the uncles and aunts of the numerous Manning family provide the old solaces for which he had longed during his fo years at Bowdoin, the young college graduate once more tablished himself in the room which had in his boyhood serv as the “Spectator Printing Office, No. 2 Herbert Street, up ti pair of stairs.” But if he had returned with the avowed intent to aband^ himself with a noble self-devotion to the cause of literature, early learned of the wide chasm between the dream shaped in t relative seclusion of a college campus, stimulated by idealis teachers and excited by other aspiring youths, and the realizati of the dream in a world of practical affairs. It was one thing attain the praise of Professor Newman and to astonish his fello students in composition. It was another to acquire the width ai depth of thought and the skill and force of writing capable competing with mature authors in a literary atmosphere not ] very favorable to any kind of American literature. In the meanwhile, when he was maturing his thought a; developing his skills, there remained, among other embarra ments, the suspected if not spoken questions of family and frien and acquaintances—questions of what the young man ^vas doir w that he had graduated from college. Anywhere in the world, : youthful writer was to learn, it is dangerous to keep aloof m the regular business of life; in New England it seemed il. The world expects a young man to enter one of the profes- Qs, to open a store, to take to farming, or to show some other ible and customary means of earning a livelihood. To seem to idle is to arouse the suspicion that one is no better than he luld be, the apparent idler being ranked with tavern-haunters 1 town paupers. It was, after all, in a relatively small New gland town that young Hawthorne was living, and to its iracteristic opinions he was keenly sensitive. There were, too, the difficulties of getting into print. The tory of the Seven Tales of My Native Land has already been tched—its composition in college, the dilatoriness of the young em printer, Ferdinand Andrews, the dejection of the author, 1 finally the burning of most of the manuscript. What sinking the spirit accompanied the ill-fated publication of Fanshawe 1828, it requires no great effort to imagine. The family re- mbrance was that it was subsidized by the author, surely after hbling and anxious efforts of the inexperienced and unknown ;hor to find a publisher. The title page was without the author’s ne. That page, however, carried a motto from Southey, a intive appeal when it was chosen by Hawthorne, and bitterly nical in the sequel—“Wilt Thou go with me?’’ Few, indeed, ompanied the young author on his first journey in novel-writ- ;. The book remained in oblivion until the fame of its author urrected it a dozen years after his death. Not even in the midst Ihis greatest success did Hawthorne speak of the book, not even his wife, who, when informed, could hardly believe that it > his. Of these two ventures in publication in the early years of i post-college life somewhat is known, however vaguely; but lother matters in this period, only shreds and patches of in- :mation seem to remain. Some penciled notes among the finan- i: records of Uncle Richard Manning, administrator of Grand- iier Manning’s estate, indicate that, in 1825, when he reached i majority, young Hawthorne acquired an inheritance of $1,400 prhaps $1,700), the “slender means” of supporting himself of dch he wrote thirty years later. His friend Bridge recalled, after the passage of a half century and more, that he had paid H thorne two or three flying visits at Salem after graduation ; that the two had kept up a correspondence, a correspondence happily burned at Hawthorne’s request, thus illustrating o more a strange, life-long desire—a passion, almost—of Hawthon to destroy by fire the record of his personal past, a propensity v at least one fortunate result, however, in that it may have to the writing of an excellent sketch, “Earth’s Holocaust,” Mosses from an Old Manse. From the reminiscences of a hig unreliable reporter, H. L. Conolly, who was one day to pla villainous role in one of the depressing episodes of Hawthon mature life, it may be supposed that Hawthorne, while travel through Connecticut with his uncle, Samuel Manning, visi Yale University in 1828. Of these first three years after graduati nothing more, it appears, can be said with assurance—only, j haps, that he may have served as clerk for the stagecoach busii in which the Mannings were engaged. With the year 1829, however, the outlines of Hawthon activities become clearer, as do the indications of his hopes : fears. If one can believe the Recollections of Samuel Goodri that shrewd business man, purveyor of books for children ( Peter Parley series), and publisher of The Token from 1828 1842, at this time he saw some anonymous publication wh seemed to him, as he said, to show “extraordinary powers.” Fr the publishers he obtained the name of the writer, Nathai Hawthorne, and thus began a relationship which extended 0 a number of years, not without benefit to Hawthorne, thoi not without numerous vexations and disillusionments also. When and where Goodrich saw this early publication of H thorne is not revealed. If Goodrich’s statement, however, true (a doubt may remain because Goodrich is obviously pos as the “discoverer” of Hawthorne), a number of implications se clear. In this case as in the case of Fanshawe, Hawthorne 1 writing anonymously, as he continued to do for years. Furtl more, he was publishing earlier than any one has imagined, sii Goodrich is supposed to have published in The Token the f of Hawthorne’s sketches. But in spite of Goodrich’s endeavor puff himself, his statement may well be true, for, as a matter fact, Hawthorne’s writings had appeared in print as early as 18 [94] fhen, at fifteen, he had sent some of his boyish effusions to the alem or Boston newspapers, as had his sisters, Elizabeth and ,ouise. Though the history of Hawthorne’s early writing can, robably, never be fully traced, it is evident enough that he wrote arly, and early dreamed of professional authorship. The Spec- itor, the boyish newspaper contributions. Bridge’s prognostic at lOwdoin, the Seven Tales of My Native Land, and Fanshaioe were lerely the upper movements of a deep stream of remote and un- nown origins. That Goodrich did correspond with Hawthorne is proved ,y the letters fortunately extant, the first in the series being one 'om Hawthorne—seemingly the very first letter that we have of le young author to show his efforts to establish himself in the eld of letters, and therefore of the greatest curiosity and interest. Salem, Dec. 20 th, 1829 Dear Sir; I am obliged to you for your willingness to aid me in ' my affairs, though I perceive that you do not anticipate much success. Very probably you may be in the right, but I have nevertheless concluded to trouble you with some of the tales. These which I send have been completed (ex¬ cept prefixing the titles) a considerable time. There are two or three others, not at present in a condition to be sent. If ' I ever finish them, I suppose they will be about on a par with the rest. You will see that one of the stories is founded upon ' the Superstitions of this part of the country. I do not know that such an attempt has hitherto been made, but, as I have thrown away much time in listening to such traditions, I could not help trying to put them into some shape. The ' tale is certainly rather wild and grotesque, but the outlines of many not less so might be picked up hereabouts. Before returning the tales (for such, I suppose, is the most probable result) will you have the goodness to write to me, and await my answer? I have some idea that I shall be out of town, and it would be inconvenient to have them arrive during my absence. I am 'ifc Nath. Hawthorne P.S. None of the pieces are shorter than the one first sent you. If I write any of the length you mention, I will send them to you; but I think I shall close my literary labours with what I have already begun. With what pathos is not this letter enshrouded! Here is i first concrete evidence of that “weary delay” for recogniti which Hawthorne was to lament in the days of his success, a de already begun, of course, with the Seven Tales and Fanshai but now first explicitly revealed. Goodrich, one can surmise, 1 written to Hawthorne with a view toward obtaining a contril tion to The Token, and Hawthorne, probably aware that Go( rich was the publisher of N. P. Willis’s Sketches and was v turing into the field of the publication of American writings, 1 sent him not only the story which Goodrich had requested 1 also the manuscript for a volume of tales which he hoped Goi rich might publish. The hopes, however, are slender and feet for the young author has already been forewarned by Go( rich’s doubts of success, and hence sadly anticipates the return the manuscript of his book. So fearful is he, so sure of failure, tl he doubts that he will complete his proposed volume. Thou he cannot quite put all his hopes from him, he anticipates i close of his literary labors. What basis for hope can he ha' He can only suppose that the fate of the Seven Tales and Fi shawe will be repeated. In which case, why should he go on? would be inconvenient, furthermore, to have his manuscript turned during his absence—a suggestion, one can suppose, tl he wishes the whole matter to be kept as secret as possible, that none will know of the rejection. But in the midst of these dying expectations, something self-confidence or assertion remains. It is with a gleam of pri that the dejected author points out that he is a pioneer in t fictional use of the superstitions of witchcraft, though even h( he surmises that he may have thrown away his time in listening such traditions. The story, as Goodrich’s answer shows, was “Ali Doane,” which had already had various adventures in rejectk and which was yet to remain in limbo for another half-doz years, when it was at last to appear in The Token (1835). The postscript is not without its special interest. Precedi e manuscript for the proposed volume, Hawthorne had sent le “piece” for Goodrich’s examination. This piece was evidently cepted by Goodrich for The Token of 1830, and, one may mme with assurance, was the first of Hawthorne’s stories to pear in Goodrich’s gift-book series. It was “The Young Provin- d.” Though unidentified by the author’s name, the story is imistakably Hawthorne’s, the fallen young English officer lying f the wayside in his beauty, with an expression of calm repose i his features, reappearing after many years in the unfinished ptimius Felton. The tale is represented as told by an old man ting in an armchair, a device used again in Hawthorne’s first »ok for children. Grandfather’s Chair, though in the latter case is used with far superior artistry. With the acceptance of this jry by Goodrich, Hawthorne had at least a token of hope offered m, the beginning of a halting and never quite satisfying progress ward recognition by the world. Goodrich’s reply to the young author’s despairing appeal for e publisher’s help was polite but cautious, expressing praise d offering a degree of help. He had read the tales with great easure, was sure that Fanshawe would have succeeded had it en published by “more extensive dealers,” and promised to use 5 influence to induce a publisher to “take hold” of Hawthorne’s muscript. As practical evidence of his opinion of the “uncom- iDn merit” of the tales, he offered thirty-five dollars to use “The 'mtle Boy” in The Token, the author to have the right to repub- :h it in his proposed collection. What his statement amounted ' after all, was a request to choose the one tale that he liked best, author to do what he could with the rest. The promise to n his influence with some unnamed publisher must have given riwthome small comfort, for Goodrich, who was himself a Dblisher, was himself obviously declining to risk the publica- in of Hawthorne’s book. Though Goodrich was not unaware ) the distinctive character of Hawthorne’s stories, he feared that by would not be popular like the Sketches of N. P. Willis, which i had published; would not, in short, be advantageous as a busi- iiS venture. At this point and later he was willing to use Haw- bme and to aid him—within limits—but, in Hawthorne’s time of "•atest need, was never ready to extend that wholehearted as- ilance necessary to bring Hawthorne fully before the public, a [P 7 ] I measure which was to await the unselfish help of a true friei Horatio Bridge. As for the helpless Hawthorne, he was in ^ position of not daring to abandon Goodrich entirely, for t! realistic gentleman was, sad to say, his one indifferent stay in unpromising world. And so the oddly sorted relations between these dissimilar rr continued—the factualist and man of business, and the drear and romancer, the one with an eye to profitable financial und takings, the other with the wish to communicate with his fell men, and not without the desire of attaining fame. Though the time being Hawthorne rejected Goodrich’s offer to publ “The Gentle Boy,” preferring to cling to his diminishing hope the publication of his proposed volume, he did send Goodr “two pieces” for the 1831 ToAen—“Sights from a Steeple” a “The Haunted Quack, a Tale of a Canal Boat,” with the requ that they be published as by the author of Provincial Tales, 1 title of his proposed volume. Though he accepted the sketch Goodrich declined to use Hawthorne’s guarded acknowledgm( of authorship, then and later being careful not to reveal to 1 readers of The Token that his unnamed contributor was rep sented by more than one item in a given issue. Hawthorne’s ai nymity, though in part a natural inclination of the retiring auth was surely encouraged by Goodrich for his own ends, and not the advantage of Hawthorne. Before the 1832 Token had : peared, Hawthorne had given up hopes to publish the Provinc Tales (as he had earlier abandoned the project of publishing i Seven Tales of My Native Land) for in that year “The Gen Boy,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “Major Molineux,” and “T Wives of the Dead” appeared in The Token, for which publi tion he continued to write until 1837, when, after the publicati of his first volume of stories under the title of Twice-Told Tal with his anonymity abandoned, he was freed from the necess of retaining Goodrich’s restricted aid. During the dozen years between college and the appearai of Twice-Told Tales, the young author was, of course, concert ith other matters than writing and striving for publication, lOugh little enough is positively known of his activities. Once a lav, or thereabouts, he made excursions, according to his own ter account, in which he enjoyed as much of life in a few weeks ; other people do in the whole year’s round. Of these excursions >me factual information remains, both in a few remaining letters id in occasional essays, the latter published here and there sub- quent to the event, though, after all, the record is incomplete id indistinct. He seems to have accompanied his uncle, Samuel [anning, upon expeditions of horse-buying for the stagecoach usiness, a sufficiently earthy experience, it would seem, since the uying and selling of horses has from time immemorial been a :st of shrewdness and honesty. Such an expedition into Con- ecticut he seems to have made in 1828, as has already been said, id perhaps again in 1830. In 1830, also, if not earlier, he jour- eyed along the Erie Canal, visited Niagara, went westward as far . Detroit, and stopped at Ticonderoga on his return. In 1831 e traveled in New Hampshire in the area of Franconia, where e spent a night at Ethan Crawford’s Inn, memorable as the spot here Emerson, a year later, went to meditate his departure from le ministry. About 1833, according to his sister Elizabeth, Haw- (Ome passed two or three weeks at the not very distant seacoast llage of Swampscott. Somewhere in the early thirties he was hr a month or so at Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachu- tts. A few letters preserved from 1830 and 1831 reflect his aware- ess of current events and gossip in Salem. After 1835, when Is diary is resumed, the record of events, as well as of thoughts, Irtunately becomes clearer than it had ever been before. The journeys and letters of this period indicate a number c facts more or less significant to an interpretation of Haw- torne’s life. They indicate, for one thing, that he mingled freely v-/ \,th people encountered on his travels, freely and with evident e joyment. With apparent gayety he writes home of his many rarvelous adventures in Connecticut while accompanying his Incle Samuel. He is amused when he is mistaken for someone Eie, as when he is taken for a lawyer, an Englishman, a hostler 3 a tavern—though never, it seems, for an author. Among the S'akers of New Hampshire—a curious community group that :d eschewed marriage and the begetting of children—he joined [99] a jolly old Shaker in drinking a tumblerful of cider so stro: it was as much as a common head could clearly carry. With mo( seriousness, he spoke of becoming a member of the society. I made innumerable acquaintances, sitting on doorsteps with va eties of men, gossiping about scandals in Salem, and talking abo the price of hay and the value of horse flesh. The self-portrait tf he draws in these travel-letters is of a carefree and sociable you: man, quite at ease in surroundings characteristic of ordinary ai tangible affairs of life. On second thought and negatively these travel-letters rev( something else: of the life of his imagination, hardly a hint a pears. When he writes with seeming intimacy and at some leng to a cousin in distant Steubenville, Ohio, he writes only of fam; affairs, of a dance which he does not attend, of engagements marry of which Sister Louise has told him, of drunken ministe and faithless wives, of the great White murder in Salem (a scanc involving some of the most prominent families), of how Unc Robert and Uncle Samuel have been bleeding at the lungs, the advantage to his cousin of marrying early in life—and befo cold weather comes. Almost solely do these letters deal with t outward aspects of events. Furthermore, the writing is prosa with no indications of a latent literary talent. If one were to jud solely by such letters, one could only assume that the writer was very ordinary young man, one hardly capable of exploring th dusky region of the psychological romance which is penetrat only by the light of observation and the tact of sympathy. But a momentary forward glance will be a sufficient sugg( tion of that interior life which no one saw and of which he hiras( did not speak, but which nevertheless stirred silently within. . he journeyed among the mountains of New Hampshire, folio the road that leads up through the Notch, he passed the si where an awful avalanche, in the dark of the night, had, a ft years before, crushed a family, as, warned by threatening sounc they had rushed to their destruction while seeking safety, leavii behind their unmolested house, the household lamp all the whi [zoo] lurning quietly, an open Bible upon the table. The story had een told far and wide, and poets, at least in the Salem news- apers, had sung the fate of the cottage inhabitants, as Haw- tiorne knew upon the occasion of his journey. Not so much as a mrd of all this appeared in his letters home, nor any hint of the tory of a young man, the secret of whose character was a high nd abstracted ambition, one who could have borne to live an un- istinguished life, but not to be forgotten in his grave, something rue not only of the Ambitious Guest, but true, also, of the un- jccessful author of the unpublished Provincial Tales. Nor, as young Hawthorne moved unobtrusively among the shermen of Swampscott, listening to tales of haddock and scul- ins and cod and halibut and whales and sharks, of equinoctial orms, wrecks and dripping corpses, were there outward evi- ences of the fancies flitting across his heart—of his visions of a retty young girl, who, as the evening winds fluttered her skirts, :emed a sea-bird ready to skim away. He colored her image with a lousand fantastic hues—she of the slender waist, the brown hair hich curled on her neck, freckles that became beauty spots be- eath her eyes, and possessing the happiest gift of brightening i^ery topic with gayety, so that even gloomy spirits felt her sun- iiine. He imagined himself a hermit in the depths of his mind, a iribbler of trash, who had wandered out of the real world and got ]ito its shadow, so that he hardly knew whether he lived or only reamed. It was she who kindled a domestic fire within his heart, ! e who gave him warmth of feeling, and she who led him out of Is empty solitude. Whoever the real Swampscott girl who sat for the portrait ( Susan of “The Village Uncle,” her memory sank deep into the Ijer of Hawthorne’s consciousness, for her image reappears as hoebe in The House of the Seven Gables—with the same bird- ke grace, the same brown ringlets of hair, the same freckles, the sme cheerful disposition, and with the same gentle power to hmanize the abstracted lover who is all astray. And when, some )ars after the Swampscott experience, Hawthorne’s real-life ro- lance with Sophia Peabody was in its course, it was she, he wrote t Sophia, who had drawn him out of his solitude, she who was leping his heart warm and renewing his life with her own. The cliege boy who had conjured up the Ellen Langton momentarily [JOJ] I to draw Fanshawe from his solitary ways, the young man who fancies played about the charming person of a fisherman’s daug ter, and the mature man who courted Sophia Peabody were z one. The dream which the boy had dreamed, the man dreame too—only, at last, the dream had become mingled with time ar place and reality, though little or none of this was visible whe “about the year 1833,’’ as his sister said, he sojourned “two or thr weeks at Swampscott.” [/H Though the correspondence relating to the incident appea to be no longer extant, it seems that in 1834 Hawthorne on more submitted to Goodrich, with a view toward publication, tl manuscript of a group of tales with the proposed title of T Story Teller. In this work an itinerant storyteller was imagim as traveling about the country telling his tales to country a diences, his various experiences serving as links among the stori( Once more, however, Goodrich declined publication and aga left Hawthorne disappointed, though again he made a gestu of assistance by sending some of the tales to The New Englai Magazine, where only a fragment of the original framework w preserved. Once more Hawthorne had to be contented with 1 ( than he had hoped for. Though the weary delay of the publication of his first boi continued, two smaller blessings befell him. In the first pla( with the appearance of his tales in The New England Magazir his field of publication was enlarged. Then, in the October, 185 issue of The New England Magazine, in a notice by the editor, i had the pleasure of seeing the first public words of praise th linked him to his works. It was upon this occasion, as he sat his study in the old Spectator Printing Office, that he wrote in 1 diary, “In this dismal chamber fame was won.” The cloak anonymity had at last been partly withdrawn, and he now sto( before the world—a very small part of it—as a recognized authc And then Hawthorne experienced a dubious blessing—dubio because the event brought him little but vexation and disillusio ment, and yet a blessing, as his friends thought, because it to( [/02] m out of Salem and into the world of men and affairs. Early in I36, Goodrich, with whatever strange mixture of motives, se- ired for Hawthorne the editorship of a struggling Boston jour- ^ il, the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowl- Ige, published by the Bewick Company, in which Goodrich was a Dckholder and director. Immediately the editor’s troubles began, r, though he had been promised forty-five dollars upon his rival in Boston, no money was forthcoming, Goodrich prom- ing from day to day but never keeping his promises, until Haw- orne, impatient and desperate, broke off all intercourse with m. Though Hawthorne had gone to Boston in January to pre- ire for the March issue, he received not even a token payment itil May. Besides, there were other irritations. As was the case nong some other journals of the time, the writer was supposed adapt his copy to the woodcut illustrations which were the •St interest of the owners. In short, the writing was mainly the ost burdensome kind of hackwork, almost all of which fell Don Hawthorne’s shoulders, though he appears to have received me aid from his sister Elizabeth. Even before his first issue appeared, he had concluded, as he rote Elizabeth, that the Bewick Company were “a damned eaking set.” After seeing a half-dozen issues of the monthly rough the press, he resigned, with scarce disguised anger ap- .rent in an externally polite farewell editorial. What part of s year’s salary (supposedly $500) he received, remains unknown, hatever he received came after interminable delay, the Bewick ompany having, in the meanwhile, gone into the hands of re¬ ivers. Somehow or other along the line he patched up his rela- )ns with Goodrich, whom he regarded as good-natured enough la man, but unscrupulous in money matters and not particularly istworthy in anything. Hawthorne came away from this disil- sioning experience with the conviction that the world was full : rogues. Of course, under the circumstances, most of the writing in the Mgazine, the subjects largely determined by the woodcuts, and e composition done under pressure of time, was dull for the '■iter as it must have been dull for the reader. The author could ilrdly find much enthusiasm in writing about lightning rods or e fashions of hats. Occasionally, however, subject and writing [^03] rise as the author treats a topic to his own liking. His own travt are reflected in some of the essays, as in “An Ontario Steal Boat,” and in “Martha’s Vineyard,” which forecasts the lat “Chippings from a Chisel” of Twice-Told Tales. In “Habitatio: of Man” and “Bells” there are nostalgic memories of the 1 ( cabin which Hawthorne frequented when he was a boy runnii wild on the shores of Sebago, and of the chapel bell at Bowdoi A supposedly scientific article on “Nature of Sleep” ends on note on Eternity, and “Coffee House Slip,” which begins wi some remarks on a woodcut illustration of a building on Wa Street, New York City, quickly becomes a description of tl activities of a wharf—in writing suggestive of passages in tl Custom House chapter of The Scarlet Letter and, of its kin unsurpassed anywhere in the works of Hawthorne—though tl wharf life so vividly represented is a composite of Salem at Boston scenes rather than of New York, where Hawthorne hj never been. Of Hawthorne’s personal life during his editorship, a fe glimpses are permitted us. In the midst of the tedious hackwor of which he felt heartily ashamed, there were moments of fun ar moments when he could exercise those powers of insight and i sympathy which were the marks of his genius and which brougl him such deep joy in his observation of men and women. “Pu Beelzebub’s tail for me!” he writes facetiously to his sister, tl present Beelzebub being one of a long line of family cats so name To his sister, too, he writes lightly that he has been invited i a literary party “holden weekly by two bluestockings,” the remai carrying gently ironical implications of his supposed literal status, now that he is an editor, and of his own amused an caustic attitude toward pretentiously learned ladies. He doub that Uncle Robert will care to visit him in the room several High up, where he sleeps and writes and does all his editorial busine —so much nearer Heaven is he than Uncle Robert is ever like to climb. However odious his tasks, he was pleasantly situated at p H ancock Street, somewhat to the rear of the capitol building, i the apartment house of Thomas Green Fessenden, for whose Ne England Farmer he had recently corrected some of Uncle Robert contributions on horticultural subjects. Notwithstanding the di [104] arity of their ages, the two men became friends soon after their rst meeting, when the gray-haired old man, with lamp in hand, is tall and portly figure bent with infirmity, greeted Hawthorne indly. It was a rare pleasure to see the old man in his family ircle, to hear him play some old-fashioned tunes on his bass-viol, r to watch him, at meal time, brighten up the conversation at le table at which were assembled his family and the men and omen who, like Hawthorne, had rooms and were taking meals t his establishment. Hawthorne loved him because his heart was ) transparent, so fully occupied by integrity and purity, by simple lith and good will. The hours spent at Fessenden’s cheerful reside were, for Hawthorne, a compensation for the innumerable exations of his work, a gentle reminder of how pleasant is the jmpanionship of good and honest men. [/H Early in May of 1836, while Hawthorne was still awaiting his rst compensation for editing the Bewick magazine, he was ap- roached by Goodrich—with whom, in February, he had scarcely sen on speaking terms—to undertake the writing of a universal iistory, the pay to be about one hundred dollars. Whether Good- :ch wished to propitiate Hawthorne for the shoddy conduct of le Bewick Company, which of course included himself, or 'hether he merely thought that he could obtain Hawthorne’s srvices at a modest sum, remains an unanswerable question. Why 1 awthorne accepted the offer of such further hackwork must also imain unknown, especially since he offered the full amount of le pay to his sister Elizabeth for her participation in the project. 1 is possible that he was confident Goodrich would meet his (^ligations in his own private undertakings. However that may h, Hawthorne undertook the project, which was published in -!37 as Peter Parley’s Universal History on the Basis of Geog- iphy. The Peter Parley series of books is not without interest even c)art from Hawthorne’s relation to it, though Hawthorne’s rela- tsn had far-reaching consequences in his own literary career, bgun by Goodrich in 1827 with The Tales of Peter Parley about [^05] America, it ran into the 1850’s, included one hundred and sh teen titles, and sold, according to Goodrich, in the millions t copies, a very popular series. Goodrich, in the Peter Parley books, proceeded on a theoi or principle, and in so doing may have been a pioneer, in Americ; in the production of a certain kind of writing for children, t whom the series was addressed. It was his position that the ol “bad books,” such as the Mother Goose rhymes, though suj posedly spiritualizing the child and teaching it to live in the worl of the imagination, were actually often coarse, vulgar, and 0 fensive, mere jingles, and presented the child with a low ide of the meaning of books. It was his aim, in spite of charges ( being utilitarian and materialistic, as he complained, to deal wit facts, and to present the lessons of charity, piety, and virtue i books which were aimed to displace Puss in Boots, Jack the Gian Killer, and the like. Though he had written and published otht books, the writing and publishing of juvenile books he regarde as his true vocation, “an ample and noble field.” He took parti ular pride in conjuring up, as a principal part of his stories fc children, the character of Peter Parley, “a kind-hearted old mai who had seen much of the world and . . . loved to sit down an tell his stories to children.” It is easy to suppose that Hawthorne’s one Peter Parley boo had considerable influence upon his own later writing. Thoug the device of a story teller was certainly not original with Goo( rich and not unknown to Hawthorne, as his own stillborn volum The Story Teller, indicates, the nearness in nature and time ( creation of Peter Parley and the grandfather of Hawthorne Grandfather’s Chair surely suggest something other than an acc dental kinship. Nor can it be wholly fortuitous that both treat ( historical matter, though Hawthorne’s book is not solely factu; and represents a play of imagination which such a factualist : Goodrich could not conceive and much less execute. And ( course it must be remembered that Hawthorne’s greatest boo for children, A Wonder-Book, is not factual at all, dealing as does with Greek myths, though, like most of his books for chi dren, it retains the storyteller. However casually Hawthorne began the Universal History (“ need not be superior in profundity and polish,” he wrote to Eliz; [106] )eth), there shortly came a time when he entertained with great eriousness the prospect of devoting himself to writing for chil- iren. In the year following the publication of his first book, he onfided to a friend his deep dislike of the shoals of books for hildren which were pouring from the press (he may have had Goodrich’s book in mind), and his wish himself to attempt to reate a new literature for the young. To embark upon such an mdertaking would provide him with a vocation which he con- idered of the highest character—would make him feel that he lad a right to live. Such a reform in the literature for youth, oo, he regarded as both necessary and possible. Through it, so- iety might be shaped for the better. And so, strangely and paradoxically, Goodrich’s life and Haw- horne’s were again interlocked. Though in his aims for a chil- .ren’s literature Hawthorne may have felt revulsion in the very ct of writing for Goodrich the Peter Parley Universal History, hat book may have been an agent in the formulation of his own deals—if only by contrast; and though he and Goodrich differed /idely in their concrete objectives, they shared a respect for the ocation. In the end, of course, Hawthorne did not think of him- ;lf chiefly as a writer for children, and he surely forsook the rospect of reforming society through the medium of juvenile terature. That type of literature, however, long remained for im a part of his serious efforts—and not without the oblique in- uence of a man for whom he had no very high regard. I As for the Universal History, which began with the Biblical ;ory of creation and outlined the history of the world to the jesent day, it, too, like the magazine of useful information, was trgely a piece of drudgery. Goodrich said that he liked it pretty 'ell—that he would make it do, and apparently paid the author 'ith some promptness. It did, indeed, do very well, since it con- ,nued to be printed as late as 1865, though the best evidence of roodrich’s approval, at first so guardedly expressed, is the fact lat before the year was over he offered Hawthorne $300 for a milar book on the manners and customs of all countries, an offer hich Hawthorne declined. Parts of the machinery of the Universal History are old Peter arley, the teller, and a small group of children, the listeners, ittle enough is done with the characterization of old Peter, and [707] nothing with the children, who are mere blanks. The book h: a prevailingly somber tone, Hawthorne’s examination of histoi having left him, apparently, with his thoughts focused on war deaths, and cruelties, so that his impression of man’s collecth life is not a favorable one. The book is patriotic, has a religioi tone—Protestant and orthodox—and, after the manner of Priestly Lectures on History which Hawthorne read as a youth at Bo\ doin, is moralistic. “But beauty, accomplishments and power, writes the author, “cannot insure happiness.” Occasionally tf writer permits his fancy momentarily to play over his materia as when he writes of the mutiny on the Bounty, or as when f imagines old Peter Parley drinking of the fountain of youth whic the Spaniards surmised gushed forth somewhere beneath tf shadows of the American forests. The supposed great of history ai now and then dismissed with a turn of humor, as when Lou XVIII of France is characteried as “chiefly distinguished for h love of oysters,” and as when Peter the Great of Russia is repr sented as sometimes soundly beating his empress Catherine wit his cane, “but perhaps not oftener than she deserved.” Primaril of course, the Universal History is of interest for the training provided for Hawthorne’s own infinitely superior stories fc children. The fiasco of editorship behind him, Hawthorne found hin self adrift, with no vocation and no source of income save what h received from the scattered publications of his short stories. Ha' ing no other prospects in view, he turned once again, in Septen ber, 1836, the month following his resignation from the Bewic Company, to his already thrice-defeated hope of publishing volume of his stories. Once more he went to Goodrich, thoug he must have done so despairingly and only because he knew ( no other source of help—and once more met exasperating an unnerving delay, Goodrich the while seeming to entertain th plan favorably and, indeed, agreeing to publish the volume. S deep was Hawthorne’s dejection that his friend Bridge, fearin that Hawthorne was contemplating suicide, wrote twice withi [7o5] le week to dispel his melancholy, and hastened from his home 1 Augusta, Maine, to rouse Hawthorne with his own courage id good cheer. What Hawthorne did not know was that Bridge, between ■ Iters to his friend, had also written to Goodrich with an offer ) subsidize the publication of Hawthorne’s book, and that, on le trip to Boston to dissuade Hawthorne from any desperate eed, had arranged a guarantee of I250 against loss to a publisher, roodrich under these circumstances agreeing to find a publisher, e himself not then being one, so he said, but professing great jterest in the book. There were, however, still other painful delays; the frantic Hawthorne meanwhile, it appears, endeavored unsuccessfully to ;gain the resigned editorship with all its irritations and in spite : its low and uncertain pay—evidence that he was clutching at pws. For Goodrich, in this exigency, Hawthorne’s feelings fluc- ijated from one extreme to another. In the first flush of his sense 1: indebtedness to Goodrich, who seemed to have arranged for i>e publication of his tales, he proposed to dedicate his book to l.m, against which the better informed Bridge quite naturally ilvised him. Then, though Goodrich offered him the employ- lent of writing another Peter Parley volume, Hawthorne de¬ eded that he would break with Goodrich forever, though doing 5 might destroy the one link which he had established with the jiblishing world. Twice-Told Tales finally appeared in March, 1837. Goodrich hd proposed as title “The Grey Champion, and Other Tales, by I.H.,” thus once more hiding Hawthorne’s identity. Fortunately, fridge’s sensible advice prevailed, so that the title page contained lawthorne’s full name, Hawthorne at last coming before the torld with no further disguise to hamper his recognition and pogress. Twenty years after the appearance of Twice-Told Tales, Good- i:h published his Recollections of a Lifetime, and therein told sjnewhat of his relations with Hawthorne. It was he, he said, Xiio in 1837 recommended to Hawthorne that the latter publish acollection of his various pieces, Hawthorne consenting to do so. "hen, it being difficult to find a publisher, Goodrich joined a f^end in a bond to indemnify the Stationers Company, with the [109] result that the book was published and carried its author on fame and fortune. In Goodrich’s memory, the young Hawthori was of sturdy form, with dark bushy hair, steel-gray eyes, thi brows, “his mouth sarcastic, his complexion stony, his whole ; pect cold, moody, distrustful.” Though Goodrich protested 1 admiration for what he called the cherished gems and pearls price in Hawthorne’s writings, he expressed his preference for t gay muse of N. P. Willis over Hawthorne’s descent into the spir ual charnel house. Elizabeth Peabody, Hawthorne’s sister-in-la wished to defend Hawthorne against these dubiously complime tary remarks; but Hawthorne, all his greatest literary work now behind him, counseled her not to take up cudgels in his c fense. In the intervening twenty years since his curiously tangl associations with Goodrich, so inextricably beneficial and hind( ing, he had learned to look upon his early struggle with eqi nimity. His name made known by the publication of the Twice-To Tales, Hawthorne henceforth found it easier than before to pla his stories in the magazines of the day. But even while his bo( was in process of publication, he was looking about for wo that would give him a more promising emolument. In this e deavor he was prompted and aided by his college friends, Brid and Franklin Pierce and Jonathan Gilley, Pierce already being U. S. Senator from New Hampshire, Gilley a Congressman, ai Bridge being acquainted with rising politicians, including Geor Bancroft, who was presently to join the ranks of men of affai eager to help Hawthorne. An early effort of these friends was; endeavor to obtain for Hawthorne the position of historian wi a federally sponsored South-Sea exploration, Hawthorne’s willir ness to take such a position revealing the extent of his dissat faction with the uncertainties of authorship and his increasii desire to participate in the world of action, to take the place ol man among men which he thought his solitary authorship deni him. But the government plans for the expedition temporari fell through, and Hawthorne thus lost a possible opportuni to sail the South Seas and to confront the salt spray and tl gale which had blustered against his sailor father and grandfath before him. [ Though the perplexities of vocation and steady income re¬ tained unsolved, Hawthorne now entered a haven of calm and uiet happiness such as he had not known, probably, for years. 1 the first week of July, 1837, he journeyed to the home of his Dod friend, Horatio Bridge in Augusta, Maine, and there he )ent a month as idyllic as two young and uncommitted bachelors ;uld well desire. The bonds of their understanding and affection, rong as they had been ever since as boys they had watched the ndroscoggin rushing under the bridge in the moonlight at runswick, had grown firmer with Hawthorne’s awareness of ridge’s generous aid in the publication of the Twice-Told Tales, secret which Bridge no longer felt obliged to keep after the book ^d clearly met all the costs of publication. As for Bridge, he had e unselfish pleasure of seeing his friend an acknowledged author, us fulfilling the prophecy which he had made long ago. Bridge had inherited his father’s mansion, a rambling house of /enty rooms and green shutters, with a fanlight of many panes ;er the front door. The house, it seemed to Hawthorne, was ;easantly situated at the outskirts of the town and on a swell of id, with a grassy tract between the house and the road along dich rolled the river Kennebec. From his window he could see ;e rush of the current and hear the voice of the water as the r/er, three hundred yards wide, flowed between its wooded t'nks. Idly, and forgetful of his former cares, he watched the j*stening reflection on logs as they turned over in the eddies on :eir downward course, or his glance followed with languid in¬ vest a floating raft of lumber, as the lumberjacks guided it long its way. All day long, from across the river, came into his rom the puffing and panting and groaning of a steam engine, here came too, the original sounds and the echoes of the voices id the hammering of the Irish and Canadian workmen employed i. building a mill-dam for Bridge, who was risking his fortune D this ambitious business enterprise. As yet the dam was in so rde a state of building that it resembled the ruins of a dam dstroyed by spring freshets rather than the foundation of a dam y: to be—as Hawthorne observed with a strange kind of inverted Ecesight, as will appear. [rrz] And so the sunshiny summer days went lazily by, with ar number of homely incidents to fill the passing hours. Sometirai Hawthorne accompanied Bridge on his errands among the shai ties of his Irish and Canadian workmen, among whose famili( Bridge exercised an even-handed and paternal authority rem niscent of an older day; or the friends drove to villages near b where they had little adventures among the local frequenters ( inns, inns dingy and dimly lighted perhaps with a single candl where Bridge treated twice around, the drinkers sitting on box( and barrels, and drinking their gin and brandy from an earthe jug. They went to meeting together, too, and Hawthorne w; charmed by a little girl in the next pew who fell asleep and looke very pretty—a picture of sleeping innocence. Sometimes Brid^ went fishing, Hawthorne accompanying him for companionshij or Hawthorne went for walks alone, most agreeably along a broo which found its sources among tree-covered hills and which som times quietly and sometimes tumultuously traced its coun through the alternate sunshine and shadow of wooded gorg( and ravines. Far up among its shady and lonely recesses a dam ha been built many years before, and though the dam had now gor to ruin, it still formed a broad and deep pool, where Hawthorn loved to bathe. It was a wild and solitary spot, the vestiges of tli labor of men long gone only adding a deeper peace. Though some of the rooms in Bridge’s many-chambered hou< remained empty and unused. Bridge did not live quite alone. H had befriended a young Frenchman, ■who lived with him, a littl fellow with t^visted features and ungainly form, but vivacious an intelligent, who was trying to make a living by teaching Frencl The three men had long literary and philosophical discussions, th little Frenchman being remarkably well informed, though, i Hawthorne thought, damnably perverted as to religion. Wit him, -^vhen Bridge was in bed, Ha'^vthorne spent the twilight houi in talk of Christianity and Deism, of ways of life, of marriage—i short, of all the deep matters of this world and the next. Then, in a part of Bridge’s house remote from the men, ther lived a retired captain and his wife—together with Nancy, thei pretty, dark-eyed servant, who came daily to make the beds in th men’s quarters, who exchanged a good morning with Hawthornt and who, though somewhat shy, gave him a glance and smile- [112] idence, he thought, that she was capable of being made con- ;rsable. He observed her as, morning and evening, she went a- ilking, or, once a week, stood over a washtub, her white throat :posed, her bare arms in the water as she stood talking to her istress. In the afternoons she dressed in silks, very ladylike, rolling round the house and perhaps not unaware that some mtleman was staring at her from behind the green blinds. One ly, after a heavy rain, a nest of young chimney-swallows was ashed down the chimney into the fireplace of one of the front loms, and Nancy brought a basket filled with cotton, while awthorne tried to feed the helpless nestlings—the pretty, dark- ed Nancy, she of the white throat, looking on solicitously the aile. The idyllic month with Bridge at an end, Hawthorne left for homaston to visit his friend Jonathan Gilley, who had been ; e a brother to him when they were boys at college, and whom 1 had not seen since their graduation. Though they met like old :ends, and talked almost as freely as they had done a dozen years ID, there was, on Hawthorne’s part, an interval of second bughts. Gilley’s success in politics (he had recently been elected (Gongress) had been attained, it seemed, at the expense of a de- r;e of hardening of his character, his shrewdness, craft, and tact rlicating an artificiality not seen in the college youth. But in jte of this subtle barrier, Hawthorne retained a liking for his companion and developed new sympathies for him when he jerned that two of Gilley’s children were already in their graves, 111 when he observed how fond of him were his two remaining ws, how gentle and amiable was Gilley in the midst of his family. I; garden and his flowers delighted Gilley, who, for hours, he al, loved to watch the labor of his bees, soothed by the hum with vich they filled the air. It made Hawthorne smile, as he thought f he dignities and formalities in the life of a congressman, when It watched his old friend driving home the family cow after it ic[ strayed away among the village streets of Thomaston. At Thomaston, at the boarding-house tavern where Hawthorne stayed, a tavern without bar or wines or spirits, he talked everybody—good sense, fun, sentiment, romance, and nonsen There was music one evening, with a song by a rather pret fantastic little devil of a brunette, who amused Hawthorne a go deal. She walked, he observed, by jerks, with a quiver, as if s were made of calf’s-foot jelly. He struck up an acquaintance w an old lady from Boston and her three daughters, teachers of o kind or another. With the landlady’s daughter, a frank and h girl in her early twenties, he engaged in a flirtation which, as recalled, made them both rather solemncoly when they parted. In the first days of his visit with Bridge at Augusta, as Ha thorne mused upon the singular and monk-like nature of Bridg life and his own, the thought came to him, as such thoughts son times come to contemplative young men, that Fate must be p paring changes for both of them. His own circumstances, at a rate, could hardly continue as they had been, and Bridge, t( appeared to stand between high prosperity and utter ruin. Ha thorne could hardly have had a truer premonition, for only a f months later the raging floods of the Kennebec carried aw dam and mills, wrecked the family mansion house, and left Brid financially ruined. As for Hawthorne himself, his friends and 1 own little book were presently to be the instruments of chan^ so momentous as to alter the course of the rest of his life. Somewhat of the nature of the young Hawthorne is sun unveiled even by so incomplete a record as we have of his eai struggles as an author—the handful of his letters, his brief dial the letters and remarks of his friends and associates; but twel years is a long while for living, and in the ample leisure of t period between college and the publication of Twice-Told Tai there were a multitude of thoughts and feelings hardly hinte even in their essence, by the outward events of his life. Ha thorne was an artist, and as such lived in an interior ^vorld wdii one can know only as it is pictured in his art. If we turn to sor of his earlier writings for a nearer view of the essential man—soi of the writings with at least a partial basis in external inciden [^^4] 7 e may assure ourselves that we are in the area of spiritual auto- iography, though we must remember that in this interior world, le real is not merely the factual, but fact transformed into the leal by the artist’s dream. The Oberon of “The Journal of a olitary Man” or of “The Devil in Manuscript” is the artist Haw- lome, though that sensitive recluse, whose consumptive cough nded in the eternal slumber of death, was not quite the same [awthorne who drank gin and brandy from an earthenware jug 1 a dingy, candle-lighted tavern, or who chuckled at the bouncy runette, or flirted with the landlady’s daughter. These two were ot quite the same, in spite of being one; but we can with as- irance assume a truth in both realities, though Oberon was never en on the streets of Salem. ' Even his outward world, of course, was transformed by the irtist when he transferred it to the written page. When he takes lis reader into his room, it is doubtless his own small chamber, ith its low ceiling and many-paned windows, of which he writes, he fireplace, the table near by, the book with ivory knife be¬ tween the leaves, the unfolded letter, the elbow chair, the slippers, t,e hat and the fallen glove—all these are his. And when he steps ut upon what he calls one of the quietest streets in a New Eng- Ind town, it is Herbert Street, Salem, which he has described. 1 is the weathercock on the East or Second Church (once Dr. hntley’s church) which begins to flash as the sunrise steals down te steeple, though the writer could not see steeple or weather- cck from his chamber window—neither these things nor the Ethering or dispersing congregation at the church door, nor the f^etty girls of white stockings and neat slippers, nor the clergy- can, so stern of face, in black silk gown. Nor did the declining 5 h hide behind the steeple, at the close of afternoon service, and ttow its shadow across the street so that his chamber was dark- eed as with a cloud. The actual physical relationships of house ad street and church would not permit, except in the writer’s f:^cy. The Juniper Point to which he rambled on a September Doming is easily located on the bay of Salem, but the magic of tib spot in a recess of the cliffs where dreams flitted around him a he shaped his stories was a magic not visible in the actual scene, ^bch less could the casual observer have guessed the consequences ilhe had followed Hawthorne and his uncle on that horse-buying [^^ 5 ] expedition, into Connecticut, when the young writer, in th spring of his life and the summer of the year, set out for tli celebrated town of Stamford but never arrived there, interrupte 7 as he was by such imaginary adventures as L’Allegro himse might envy and, in the end, as II Penseroso might muse upon. Of himself there are fleeting pictures as he saw himself, t as he wished himself to be seen, among the sketches of his fane As he rambled through the town with Annie, enjoying sue sights and sounds and diversions as a little girl might relish, 1 walked in black attire, with mournful tread, with heavy brow and thoughtful eyes cast down, yet with an occasional smi which, he prided himself in believing, was such as children love( On his solitary excursions along the seashore, he carried a pilgrii staff with which he wrote his name in the sand, cutting deep, bi well knowing that the waves would mockingly wash away tl words. On the seashore he was the meditative stroller, with saui tering step, and shy demeanor, and with an observant yet al stracted eye—and from the like of which, from his own kind, 1 would scramble hastily over the rocks to take refuge in nool which many a secret hour gave him the right to call his own. Consistently he thought himself as a solitary. In his jouma he contemplates a tale of a recluse, like himself, or a prisoner, wh measures time by the progress of sunshine through his chamber with what intimations of slow-moving hours, of silences, of lonel ness! In the representation of his idealized self, in Oberon, 1 has kept aloof from the regular business of life, from mortal di quietudes, a pleasant idler among care-stricken and laborious mei an ineffectual shadow, solitary and sad. Oberon, who is a ^vrite too, is a solitary because of the very nature of his vocation, or whose tales have drawn him from the beaten path of the worl and led him into a solitude where nobody cares for what he doe nor thinks nor feels as he does. And when Oberon is supplante by the Village Uncle, the actor is still, in his youth, a writ( who has wandered out of the real Avorld and got into its shadov one who hardly knows whether he lives or only dreams of livini Yet Oberon has hopes of another kind of life—of adopting soir great and serious aim, of becoming a man among men. The sui shiny Susan has kindled a domestic fire within his heart and h2 led him into a life of action, a simple life, though one of hone; [ii6] toil for some useful end, and bringing health and quiet heart through chaste and warm affections. In the drama continually being enacted in Hawthorne’s mind, imong shadowy scenes where the reality and the dream shift and :hange places and blend in indescribable ways, Fanshawe and Ellen Langton now make their bow and now give way to the tillage Uncle and Susan (the latter a creature of ocean foam and :rimson light), though all the while on the stage, too, seen mistily md heard indistinctly, are Oberon and his mortal counterpart, he author, who come and go in the play as if they were under- itudies zealous to be seen and heard and not awaiting their proper urns. The fable of the drama is a man’s vision of fulhlment md happiness in vocation and in love; and, while the man lives, he fable has no end. But the solitary of the sketches is not always sad, for the com- )anionship of nature is an enlivening and cheering experience, ^s he strolls along the glistening seashore, the multiplicity and ndless variety of natural objects awaken his curiosity and charm lis dalliant interest. A shell half covered by the sand, a twisted )iece of seaweed, a jellyfish, the prints of his own square-toed »oots, the flock of beach birds that flutter away at his approach, and again, and again flutter away—these and the rising and falling urf and other innumerable sights and sounds and odors engage lis momentary fancy. At every glance, too, he is aware of some lew light or shade of beauty—a rough, high precipice to which irs and oaks cling precariously, tufts of yellow flowers, trailing /reaths of scarlet, and the reddened leaves of wild roses, the whole I variegated splendor. And nature is not only lightly pleasing to the eyes and other enses, but it is provocative of profound thoughts extending end- essly away. In a recess of the cliffs he finds a spot haunted by ireams, dreams which are sometimes shadows of the Past or some- imes the stuff out of which stories shape themselves. The two lulls which scream and wheel and hover about each other, flap- ing on the foam of the waves and then soaring aloft until their [^^ 7 ] white bosoms melt into the upper sunshine, carry his though upward and exalt his mind. Everywhere the palpable real dimi; ishes, fades, and blends into the intangible ideal. How gladly h spirit leaps forth when he gazes upon the full extent of the broai blue, sunny deep! In another moment, all unlooked for, the: comes to him an overpowering conception of majesty and awfr ness. The unchanging voice of the sea, which has spoken for j many ages, has pervaded his soul with the infinite idea of eternit But not only such grand scenes bring their deep thoughts, mu( humbler sources sufficing. On a dark, rainy, and blusterous nigh when he has ventured to walk beyond the last lamp, and in tl darkness seems to stand on the borders of uncreated space, eve the hollow roar of water as it rushes into a subterranean gutt( awakens sensations of sublimity. Nor are these sacred communications from nature withoi their beneficent consequences. In the noontide of the day, amor the common relations with men, their influences are to be felt i affection and sympathy, at the same time that they preserve a seni of individuality that will not permit a melting into the indi tinguishable mass of human kind. In some such experiences with nature, clearly enough. Word worth had shared when he had wandered lonely as a cloud, c when he had contemplated his debts to nature and counted amor them the unremembered acts which constitute the best portion ( a good man’s life. The analogy is irresistible, as is the convictio that for both men such experiences brought the deepest kind ( joy. Nor does the similarity end with their attitudes toward n; ture, for both thought much On man, the heart of man, and human life, and not without a significant likeness in their fundamental refle tions. In Hawthorne’s case, during the early years of his autho ship, these reflections find expression mainly in sketches whic show little evidence of their origins in the outward circumstance of his life, though, now and then, as in “The Toll-Gatherer ly” and “The Haunted Mind,” the autobiographical element is tvious. Unmistakably, when Hawthorne’s thought dwelt on the human t, and on the nature of man, he saw much that was solemn and i. Edward Fane’s Rosebud had so long breathed the atmosphere sick-chambers and dying breaths, had watched at so many death- ds and wept at so many funerals, that she seemed to have sym- thies only for pain and grief, seemed herself to be a picture of cay and desolation, an awful, fearful woman. Life had shown r only brief moments of kindness. As for the Ambitious Guest, th his lofty and abstracted ambition and generous emotions, at high-browed youth was to endure the agony of death in a undering avalanche, his name and person utterly unknown. The me Nature which had fostered a poetry of feeling among the habitants of that lonely New Hampshire cottage had quite in- [ferently crushed them all—and covered them all forever from iman view. Guest and hosts were alike “at peace.” If the view from without seemed overhung with ominous adows, the view from within often seemed obscured by an im- netrable gloom. Such were the encroaching outward circum- nces in “Roger Malvin’s Burial” that Reuben Bourne appeared :apable of mastering his moral cowardice. So long had the idow Dabney suppressed her true feelings in order to enjoy the nities of the world, so long had she been ruled by hypocrisy, and I long had the lover of her youth waited in vain, that when at it their marriage was consummated, when both were wrinkled d old, it seemed only appropriate that the church bell should :ig a Wedding Knell. The venerable and dejected Mr. Smith of ancy’s Show Box,” plagued by Fancy and Memory and Con- cence, could not disclaim his brotherhood with the guiltiest, for 1 ? flitting phantoms of iniquity which Fancy had conjured before i vision were truly memories of his own subdued intentions, [le Reverend Mr. Hooper, reflecting the piety of his day, wore his >'.ck veil as a symbol of the secret sin which he saw mysteriously il^eloping himself and all his fellow men. Young Goodman i^wn, who had yielded himself wholly to a belief in the total I'bravity of man, was convinced that he had seen, in the night- ike and before a blazing forest altar of the Prince of Darkness, i! most honored friends and even his beloved wife. Faith—all [ ^^9 ] joined in a communion of their evil nature, all revealed in t basic wickedness of this dark world. But if Hawthorne’s own concept of the nature of man made possible for him to enter imaginatively into the darkest chamb of Puritan or Calvinistic dogma, he himself did not dwell the For such as young Goodman Brown, for such as were blind the redeeming qualities of man, Hawthorne saw, and saw w revulsion at such a belief, that there was no solace on earth or Heaven. Goodman Brown became a stem, distrustful, and d perate man, whose dying hour was gloom. Not so the Revere Mr. Hooper, whose black veil was a symbol of the desert pla^ which he saw in himself and in other men. In the depths of kind heart there was sympathy even for the darkest affections, a when the mourners came to lay away their dead, his praye though full of sorrow, were yet so imbued with celestial hopes tl his listeners imagined they heard the music of heavenly hai mingled with the sound of his voice. It was but a mortal v that he wore; it was not for eternity. So, too, with Edward Fan withered Rosebud, that fearful woman so conversant with dei secrets. Within her was a germ of bliss—a memory of youth a beauty and love once possessed and a hope of a happier din As for the Widow Dabney, the gush of one true feeling, comi even at the close of life, restored her to what she had been youth. She and her forgiving lover, two immortal souls, learn to look down upon their woe. Reuben Bourne at last redeem his broken vow, however belatedly and with whatever grief, a his sin was expiated. Every hateful picture which Memory evok for the venerated Mr. Smith would have been washed away by o truly penitential tear. When all the early stories and sketches are seen in th totality, Hawthorne’s view of human nature emerges with clari Such is the nature of man that he must face his weaknesses wi great humility. But the gates of a divine mercy are never clos( and since man possesses a living soul, all may be restored to original inner freshness, whatever the course of outward circu stances may have been, and however irretrievable in time a space the externalities of the past. The secret lies in the convict! that man was made for eternity. Nor is regret, or sorrow, or adversity, or even mortality its [I20] ithout a final beneficence. The elderly lady, in “Chippings with a Ihisel,” who after forty years still mourned her first husband, who ad been killed by a whale in the Pacific, had had a lifelong )rrow indeed; but this misfortune had given an ideality to her find and, though she had been faithful to the husband of her laturity, she had nevertheless communed with a vision and had ms been elevated and refined. The careless young lovers of “The laypole of Merrymount” had no knowledge of true love and )y until they had been subjected to earth’s doom of care and sor- Dw, until they had been chastened by adversity. Miriam and Dsiah, wiser far than the despondent Canterbury Pilgrims, turned leir backs upon the cold and passionless security of the Shaker Dmmunity, preferring rather the normal lot of mortal hopes and ;ars. Not even the Ambitious Guest and the Notch family had erished in vain. For a little while they had sat by the fire com- )rtable and contented, the light hovering about them fondly and iressing them all, while their humanity expressed itself in re- lembrance and love and innocent hopes. Something very pre- ous had blossomed and had had its day, something the more hal- )wed by its passing. Under the shadow of adversity and mortality, in short, does lan develop his highest qualities—that is, the affections. It is le affections which endear life and make it sacred. The elders ;i “The Shaker Bridal’’ had crushed their natural sympathies ;>r mankind; but for Martha Pierson, who could not forget the sit thus with the moon in her face was revelry. With the com- [H3] ing of the dewy freshness of morning, her whole inward bei was a wilderness of melody. It was the more understandab therefore, that she found expression for her emotions in mu and especially in painting, in the latter of which she possessec skill beyond the ordinary. This skill she exercised in copyi such original paintings of note as were available in Boston; a with such a Chinese exactness of imitation did she copy that oi a practiced eye could distinguish copy from original. In the ex cise of her art she worked in an intensity of feeling, with assurance of power and with great happiness, especially after s had recognized that she was in love with Hawthorne and that was in love with her. Without any formal education save that received at home the private school of her sister Elizabeth, she read much, not oi in such long-accepted literature as the Bible, Shakespeare, Spens 7 and Milton, as well as in the dominant authors of the eighteer century still current in early nineteenth century America—Ad son and Pope; but, what is more significant, she read those authi whose thought was quickening the intellectual tenor of the tir Like others who were a part of the contemporary awakening, sei ing freedom from the firm confines of Puritanism, she read in t mystical Fenelon. Her searchings in the history of philosop were made through the then newly current writings of Geranc Plato and Xenophon she read, in part for their characterizatic of Socrates, a comparison of Socrates and Jesus as ethical teachi constituting one of the somewhat venturesome novelties of t day. Perhaps her climactic reading, however, the reading in whi her personal convictions were most sharply focused, was in C lyle and Coleridge and Wordsworth, in Goethe, and in Emersc the exploratory writers of the period. She was no detached read( rather, she read to be persuaded, seeking for anchors of beli and seeking with the most lively emotions. It was natural that among her personal acquaintances a; friends was Washington Allston, the most prominent of paint( in Boston, whose work she copied with his warm approval. Th shared an interest in Coleridge as well as in painting. It v through her more strictly literary associations, however, that s was to be most provocative in her relations with Hawthorne, her home town of Salem she intimately knew the poet Jones Ve [^44] tio came to tea at the Peabody home, and whose mingled vani- ?s and mystical sublimities constituted a peculiar interest. In Dston, all the Peabody sisters knew the prominent figures who sre participating in the intellectual ferment bubbling in the city id its environs—Dr. William Ellery Channing, James Freeman larke, Orestes Brownson, Frederick Hedge, George Ripley, Mar- ,ret Fuller, and others. With Amos Bronson Alcott, in whose emple school in Boston her sister Elizabeth taught for a while, iphia corresponded on such subjects as Carlyle and Schiller, on Icott’s own never-to-be-published Psyche, or the Breath of Child- wd, and on Sampson Re^’s Growth of the Mind, a book per- eated by a Swedenborgian concept of a dual world of matter and irit, the two parts corresponding like an object and its mirrored lage, a book greatly admired by Emerson. It was for Emerson mself, however, among all her distinguished friends, that Sophia id the highest admiration and after whose thought she endeav- ed to pattern her own. Though the Peabodys were aware of Emerson while he was ill a minister and before he had attained any literary fame, it ems to have been in April, 1836, when Sophia’s acquaintance ith him truly began. In that month he lectured in Salem, was itertained at the Peabody home (Dr. Peabody apparently being i the Lyceum committee), and first saw Sophia’s paintings. Her ork, he thought, was admirable, and he rejoiced in her genius. ;om then on their acquaintance grew, Emerson’s admiration ^pressing itself in a request that Sophia make a medallion of his :other Charles, who had recently died. The task entailed a num- ;r of visits from Emerson, and from Elizabeth Hoar of Concord I well, Elizabeth having been engaged to Charles. An invitation (Sophia to visit Emerson at Concord followed, and so the friend- Ip became more and more firmly knit. Thus it was that when iohia came one day to live in Concord she was drawn there by able cords of affection—Emerson and Elizabeth Hoar befriend- Hawthorne as well as Sophia. Despite the fact that Emerson’s first book. Nature (1836), ap- iiired without his name on the title page, the author’s name was Bwn and the little book was read by Sophia, who read, also, "he American Scholar” when it appeared in 1837, and who wrote D the author in high praise of both. When Emerson’s [M5] Divinity School “Address” shocked the orthodox in 1838, Sopi thought that Emerson was the Word again manifesting itself, ai rejoiced in sharing his gospel. Nor was she without an understanding of Emerson’s ide; She grasped the import of the aphorism in Nature, “The si shines today also,” which reflected the contemporary wish to ci off the past and to live in the present. Though her headach raged, and though she often wrestled with the mystery of pai she clung to the Emersonian persuasion that the beautiful ai good and true are the only real and abiding things, and that ei and ugliness and falsehood are abuses, monstrous but transfer The proof of the divinity in human nature for her, as for Em( son, was that, by being true to it, all things might be attained a simple and grand truth proclaimed by the oracle within, ai every human being possessing capacity enough to obey it. Su( ideas she did not hold merely as abstractions. She regarded h mentor as the greatest man that ever lived. A visit from hii though she tried to share his oceanic calm, left her in a very i tense state. She felt exalted, wanting to paint Cuban skies bright than those she remembered from her sojourn there a half-doz< years ago—wanting so to paint and feeling capable of doing so. The world has remembered Hawthorne’s reserved acceptam of Emerson in the period when the Hawthornes lived at tl Old Manse or later, and it has thought mainly of the differenc between the two men—differences, perhaps, largely of temper ment really. Of course one need not believe that Hawthorne a cepted every idea held by Sophia; it is true, also, that in such tali as “The Wedding Knell” he had touched upon Emersonia themes before he knew either Sophia or Emerson; but can or doubt that so appreciative a lover would be unaffected by the coi victions of a sweetheart with enthusiasms so intense as Soph Peabody’s? The likelihood, rather, is that these enthusiast] blended with his affection for her and manifested themselves his personal convictions as well as in the world of his imaginatio The “Be true, be true!” of Hester and Arthur in The Scarl Letter is but an echo of Sophia’s thought (and of Emerson’s), is Hester’s plea, however ironical the implications there, “Let not look back. . . . The past is gone,” a sentiment receiving, ho [146] ver, an expansive and wholly sympathetic development in The louse of the Seven Gables. In his friendship with Longfellow, Hawthorne found the stim- lation of an intellectual companionship unknown to him before, 5 in Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” and Hyperion (“Look not lournfully into the past,” etc.) he doubtless acquired an impetus “freshing and provocative—preparing his thought for vistas of ovel character. When he fell in love with Sophia Peabody he ^as exposed to such vistas not only by the intense Sophia, but y the group of idealists—the transcendentalists—who constituted le circle of her family and friends. Sophia lived in an atmosphere "emulous with expectancy of something undefined but presum- bly enlarging the prospects of mankind. It seemed beyond doubt lat a complete moral revolution would change the world in nother fifty years. Dr. Channing, a household friend of the Pea- ody family, who was at the heart of the ferment, though now old nd yielding his power to younger men like Emerson, still coun¬ ted fear of conformity as a greater evil than fear of eccentricity, .merson himself was confident that he saw about him the rise f a new spirit prompting men to a simpler, manlier, more self- ependent life, a broaching of new questions in every part of fe and practice. It is noteworthy that almost at the very time hen Emerson was recording these convictions, Hawthorne and ophia Peabody were deciding to cast their lot with the new mture at Brook Earm, where, in the sentiment of Sophia’s sister, lizabeth, they might find leisure to live in all the faculties of the i'ul. Oberon had indeed left his physical solitude, carried hence V love and hope as he had dreamed, though the manner of the ialization was not as he had imagined. What Eanshawe had de- saired of had happily come to pass. It was Elizabeth Peabody, in her eager quest for exponents c learning and literature, who made a discovery important in the 'nily annals: namely, that three people—the anoymous author :i some admired magazine stories, the author of Twice-Told hies, and a former neighbor’s son, Nathaniel Hawthorne—were [^ 47 ] one and the same man. The modest young writer had cloaked ti identity not only by an original anonymity, but when he pu lished his book, by adding a “w” to the family name, a lett appearing in old town records of the family, though not in rece: use among Salem Hathornes. Indeed, when the Twice-Told Tal were first reviewed in the Boston newspapers, it was assumed th the name “Nathaniel Hawthorne’’ was a poetic pseudonym. The task of becoming acquainted with the shy new celebri was not an easy one. Apparently the frontal attack was ma( upon Hawthorne’s sisters, Elizabeth and Louise, themselves n easily approached because, in the long interval since the Ra mond episode, they, like their mother, had come to live mu< in seclusion. Elizabeth Peabody, however, was not a young womj easily daunted, and so, before the year 1837 had come to an en the two families were upon relatively intimate terms marked 1 exchanges of visits and books, by gifts of flowers, by little not sent back and forth, and by walks along the seashore and els where, walks shared by the young women and Hawthorne himse as well. Actually it was only a few minutes’ walk from the Mannir house on Herbert Street, where the Hawthornes lived on tl second and third stories, to the somewhat more pretentious Pe body home cornered on the graveyard on Charter Street, fii short blocks distant. The comings and goings, the simple acti\ ties, all suggest the village life of a century and more ago, an u: hurried time and families among whom plain living and hi^ thinking were ideals pursued with hopeful expectancy. The Pe bodys and the Hawthornes were not of Salem’s financial aristo racy, and so had no contact Avith whatever fashionable sociei continued in the seaport which had long ago resigned its impo tance to Boston and New York. The Hawthorne sisters saAV a most nothing of the Avorld, though they read much; the Peaboc sisters, on the other hand, were socially inclined, were frequent! in Boston when they did not live there, and associated freely Avit most of those in the intellectual vanguard of the period. In later years, in Doctor Grimshaioe’s Secret, HaAvthorne d scribed Avith complete detachment the Peabody house and tl old graveyard adjacent. The graveyard, indeed, had furnisht the setting for an incident in one of his earliest tales, “Ali( [148] Boston Wharves From a photograph of the original print in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Doane.” Doubtless the engaging picture in Doctor Grimshawe’s secret of the children playing in the graveyard, spelling out the lames or memorizing the doleful verses on the headstones, or fathering dandelions or chasing butterflies, represents memories )f his own childhood. Charter Street he described as but a shabby ly-street, the house itself, however, characterized by decent re- pectability, and certainly not sinking below the boundary of he genteel. It was a frame building, three-storied, square-fronted, ind with a little enclosed front porch having oval peep-holes at lither side to permit the householders to look up and down the treet. The rooms Hawthorne remembered as low, ill-lighted, and igly, though not unsusceptible of warmth and comfort, the sun- liest and cheerfulest looking into the graveyard, which was sur- ounded by a high wooden fence. A little gate from the rear of he house led into the graveyard itself. When he was courting lophia, Hawthorne remarked in his notebooks that the tomb of he Peabody family was close to this gate. Near by, also, was the rave of Nathaniel Mather, “an aged man at nineteen years,” /ho had provided some hints for the character of Fanshawe in is college novel. Only a little distance away was the gravestone of lolonel John Hathorne, the witch-judge. For Hawthorne the lace must have suggested innumerable memories and reflections. But in the late 1830’s, when the Peabodys occupied the cen- ary-old house, it seemed to possess few of the characteristics of loom which might be associated with a residence so situated. )n the third floor, on the sunny side overlooking the cemetery, ophia had what she called her studio, which included, among ther articles of furniture, a hammock and the equipment for her ainting. Here she painted, read, and took frequent siestas in her ammock, and received visitors among her pictures and flowers. It was Elizabeth who had discovered Hawthorne, though it as not long until her sisters Mary and Sophia shared the young athor’s friendship. It was Mary who sometimes went walking .ong the seashore with Hawthorne when the wind was east and iDphia felt that she must not venture out. It was to Mary that awthorne confided his wish to devote his life to a literature for •lildren, with the hope of improving society at its fountain. It 'as Mary who sought to interest Horace Mann, her husband-to- I2, in finding a publisher for the books for children which Haw- [149] thorne planned to write. It was Mary, too, who sometimes accoi panied Hawthorne to the home of Miss Susan Burley on Che: nut Street, where, on Saturday evenings, centered some of t] intellectual life of Salem, and where Hawthorne was lionized a small way, however reluctantly on his part, after the publicatk of his book had brought him out of what he called his owl’s ne: It was, however, his walks with Sophia that Hawthorne be remembered, though there were other little incidents whi( served amply to express their growing interest in one anothe When he came to propose a walk or to dine, she sensed that it w he when she heard the bell, and she regretted keeping him wa ing while she smoothed her hair and arranged her dress. She d scended the stairs somewhat dramatically with a blue, odorous vi let in her hand—violets soon becoming a recognized part of the unspoken language. She showed him her Cuban journal—a seri of letters she had written some years before—and when he calb her the Queen of Journalizers, she was delighted that she h: given him pleasure. She painted for him a forget-me-not pin i brooch, which he took to Boston to have mourited in crystal at gold. In May (they had first met the preceding autumn), he to her that he was putting her into one of his stories. She longed see it, and could not wait until it was completed. He had see her clean an old painting, and had imagined a story in which similar situation was to be the principal incident. The sto was “Edward Randolph’s Portrait’’ in “Legends of the Provin House,’’ wherein the young heroine is a pale and ethereal creatui with a taste and enthusiasm for sculpture and painting acquire not in the rude atmosphere of New England, but in sunny Ital She is dressed all in white, as was Sophia when he first saw her. Whatever the sentiments revealed to one another in the cour of these simple incidents, it was early clear that Sophia w: charmed by Hawthorne, who, even in the view of the rather ma; nish Elizabeth, was handsomer than Lord Byron. When Hai thorne called for Mary to go with him to Miss Burley’s, Soph came down from her room to catch a glimpse of that celestial e: pression of his which she did not like to miss. She was especial captivated by his beautiful smile. She remembered from “Litt Annie’s Ramble” that Hawthorne had prided himself on his smi as one that children loved. No wonder, she thought, since it hs [^50] 1 it the innocence and purity and frankness of childhood itself, le looked exteremely handsome, with sufficient sweetness in his ice to supply all the rest of the world and still leave the ordinary lare for himself. She called at the Hawthorne house on Herbert Street oc- isionally, carrying books or flowers, but whether the flowers were )r Hawthorne or for his sisters sometimes remained an enter- lining ambiguity. She was provoked when Elizabeth Hathorne ppropriated them to herself. In her perusal of history, Sophia :ad of a woman traveler in Persia whose husband was paralytic, he imagined a time when she, too, might travel in far lands, lough happily her husband would not be paralytic. Then she smembered that she was an invalid and never intended to have husband—or, rather, that no man was ever to have her for a 'ife. For a moment, however, she had permitted herself to dream f so desirable a fulfilment, and in a train of thought in which le had reflected that Hawthorne’s expression was a manifestation f the divine in the human. I Late in July, 1838, Hawthorne came to the Peabody home to ly goodbye, looking radiant, Sophia thought. He was setting out a a three-month excursion, though he would tell no one—not /en his mother—where he could be found, nor would he write or e written to. Evidently, as Sophia observed, he was determined > be let alone. At Mary’s request, he consented to keep a journal, lOugh he had at first determined not to do so. When he turned 1' say goodbye, it seemed to Sophia that he suggested the sun lining through a silver mist, so wonderful was his face. She felt as ]i he were a born brother. She acknowledged to herself that she lid hardly known anyone for whom she had such a full though laiet admiration. Though she protested that she did not care ti see him often, she delighted to remember that he was near, and i,at she might see him from time to time. She felt entirely at ease tith him, as if she had always known him. She was obviously in ]|Ve. When he was contemplating his excursion, early in July, Haw- torne remembered that Ladurlad, in Robert Southey’s The Curse [^ 3 ^] of Kehama, on visiting a certain celestial region, experienced dying away of the fire in his heart and brain, though it was n kindled again on returning to earth. So it might be with hii during his projected three months’ seclusion from old association He remarked, too, on the strange capability of one’s observar faculty to detach itself and so to perceive one’s eventual and mor: self as if it were another person—this getting out of one’s se being accompanied by surprising realizations. What was the fii burning in his own heart and brain, he did not say, nor what h might find in such a detached self-examination. But in some kin of stocktaking he was engaged, and to do it he wished seclusioi It is perhaps sufficiently obvious that, like Oberon in his earl fiction, he was pondering anew the questions of vocation and lovi though now these questions thrust themselves forward with an ii escapable urgency. He, too, like Sophia, was in love, and the siti ation demanded reflection and decision. And so, on July 23, 1838, he took the stage from Salem t Boston, and then the train to Worcester in preparation for journey to western Massachusetts. At Worcester, at the Ten perance House, where he stayed for a night’s lodging, he had sue an experience as might well happen in fiction, though rarely i real life. An old Boston gentleman got into conversation wit him, speaking very freely, with an old man’s privilege, of mo< intimate matters. Was Hawthorne married? A man should ac in whatever way. He himself, said the kindly and beneficent ol gentleman, would have no objection to being a servant, if no othe mode of action presented itself. They were, of course, fatefr remarks, for they Avere the very topics upon which HaAvthom wished to meditate. Then, next morning, began the long stagecoach ride to hi destination, though just where he was going he had not decider Nearly all day he sat outside, very sociably, with the driver am another passenger. On the following morning, between one an( two o’clock, he left Northampton with three other passenger whose faces were invisible for some hours; and so they Avent 01 through unknoAvn space, saying nothing, but glancing forth some times to see the gleam of lanterns on Avayside objects. Finall daAvn broke, their faces became partially visible, the morning ai greAv colder, and at last the cloudy day came on. The stage strainei [ ^52 ] up the heights at Windsor and rattled downward on its way to Pittsfield. At Pittsfield Hawthorne uncertainly decided to go to Williamstown, though, arriving at North Adams in the forenoon ?£ the twenty-sixth, and, liking it indifferently well, he determined :o make it his headquarters until such time as his fancy prompted liim to go elsewhere. But there he remained, with side excursions to Shelburne Falls, Lenox, and Stockbridge, into southern Ver¬ mont, and to Canaan, Litchfield, and Hartford, Connecticut. It ivas his introduction to the Berkshires, to Mt. Graylock, and to Lenox, where he was to live one day and to write The House of the Seven Gables as well as some of his best-known stories for :hildren. It was to be Sophia’s friendship with the owners of Langlewood at Lenox which was to return him to the serenity of the mountains where he had gone to meditate in the decisive months of his courtship. A multitude of little adventures now befell him, simple and pleasant adventures, leaving him all the leisure in the world to think and feel and dream. Everywhere about him the human drama of rural life engaged his eye. At the inn where he was stay- ng, he observed with fun and sympathy the indignation of a woman charged with theft, a yellow, thin, battered old thing, yet 'ather ladylike in a countrified manner. She had objected to a ;earch of her person by the serving women of the inn, not be- :ause she concealed the missing items, but because of the poorness )f her wardrobe. One afternoon he attended the funeral of a child, aking his seat among the mourners in the plain and homely ipartment. While the minister read and prayed and expounded, i heavy thunderstorm rumbled among the surrounding hills, and he lightning flashed fiercely through the gloomy room, the min¬ ster using the occasion to speak of God’s voice of thunder. With he innkeeper at North Adams he drove one evening to get some hickens. They entered a farmhouse kitchen, where he noticed he fireplace with its rough stones, a clock without a case, a coffee- aill against the wall, a religious newspaper on the mantelpiece. The old farmer reluctantly accompanied them with a lantern to he woodpile where the chickens were roosting. In a twinkling the nnkeeper had wrung the necks of four or five which fluttered bout in the shadows long after they should have been dead. He /ent to commencement at Williams College five miles distant, [^ 55 ] where there was a considerable gathering of people arriving i wagons and buggies mainly, and only a few in barouches ar chaises. The country graduates were mostly rough, brown-fe tured, schoolmaster-looking, half-bumpkin, half-scholarly figun though others were gentlemanly young fellows, and his hea warmed to them. He attended an exhibition of animals that ha come to the village. The sailcloth pavilion was crowded wii people eager to see the anacondas, the lion, the pony-riding mo: key, the hyena, the elephant. As he left the caravansary, he can upon shanties where liquor was for sale, and where many mf were drunk, swearing, and fighting. In the distance, he observe were the mountains, in the quiet sunset. Though the villages were small and the houses far apart i the rural solitudes, he saw a variety of people with whom 1 struck up some kind of acquaintance—stagecoach drivers, in: keepers, traveling dentists, itinerant ministers, country doctoi town officers, the haunters of taverns, wood-choppers, men wor ing on the mountain roads, and men and women and childre living in remote woodland cottages. One morning on a walk 1 met an underwitted man, gray, bald-headed, and with -tvrinkk visage, tvith cowhide shoes, a coat on one arm and an umbrella c the other, who was on his way to visit a widow in the neighbo hood. He advised Hawthorne to get married, and even recor mended a maiden of forty years who owned three hundred acr of land. He spoke of his dead wife, and of his children, who wei proprietors of a circus. As they parted Hawthorne shouted aft( him a request to be remembered to the widow. And then, in tf silence after the parting, it occurred to Hawthorne that if on^ something tragic could be conceived to be talked about, muc might be made of this interview in a wild road among the hills Graylock in the distance, with gray, heavy mist upon his hea( looking somber and angry. Upon another occasion he encountered a remarkable charact( —a disagreeable figure of a man, waning from middle age, dresse in tow homespun pantaloons, soiled shirt, barefoot, with one ( his feet maimed by an axe and an arm amputated a little belo the elbow—a man with a grim and grisly beard, and a disgustin figure. There was something wild and desperate and ruined i his thought, though beneath his degradation was a suggestion of [^54] lind once strong and cultivated. He was, indeed, a former lawyer, low sunk through liquor into poverty and the odorous livelihood if soap-making, with no friend but his dog. Yet he asserted that is study was mankind, and remarked that Hawthorne, too, had bout him something of the hawkeye. To Hawthorne he seemed a arlom and miserable thing in the light of the cheerful summer aoming, though he was yet a man preserving somewhat of his elf-respect, and not clearly deserving the scorn of his fellow-vil- igers. In the inn at North Adams was frequently a little barefooted loy named Joe, four years old, who haunted the tavern, where he /as teased by the men, who put quids of tobacco in his mouth nd otherwise tormented him. Hawthorne meditated upon the toy’s future career—a wild and brutal period of youth, ten years a the state prison, and his old age in the poorhouse. More agree- bly, one evening after supper, as the sun was setting, there ar- ived a man with a hand organ, and soon there gathered about im a little crowd of people on the stoop of the inn, peeping over ne another’s heads with huge admiration, all the small boys in cstasy as the music sounded forth, the dancers on the organ pir- uetting, a lady playing a piano, a Negro wench dancing and pening and shutting a huge mouth—all in time to the tunes of le organ. On another evening the entertainment was provided y a diorama man who traveled the country in a wagon, exhibit- ig his pictures along the way. He was an old man, with a full, ray-bearded countenance, and his pictures were the worst imag- lable scratches and daubings, in every way dilapidated; and so )oking through the glass orifice of his machine had none of that larm of a similar experience when, in the spring of his life and le summer of the year, Hawthorne had peeped through a similar pening and visited, in his imagination, the wonders of the world ith Mirth herself beside him. Such were Hawthorne’s experiences as the summer days went y, and such were the many people he saw in his role of thought- :il wanderer in the back country of his native state. It was all in- escribably delightful—this unobtrusive observation, this un- jrained association with those leading unexamined lives, this ich indolence. On a cool and rainy day, when a great blazing fire lightened and warmed the barroom, it was pleasant to have [^ 55 ] such November-like weather, to hear cheerful fireside talk, whil wet garments smoked in the fireside heat, and the day wore o with a heavy, lazy pleasantness, and night set in, still stormy, Oi after a day spent among mountain solitudes, when it had bee like a daydream to look at the blending of hills and clouds, it wt another pleasure to return to the haunts of men—to be given ride back to the village in a wagon by an old man, to see wome and girls look after him from windows as he passed, and me nodding and greeting him with curiosity—strangers being few- and two little girls, bearing tin pails, whispering to one anothe and smiling as they looked at him. Nature, however, as well as the kindly race of man, retaine its old interest. He bathed in a wild highland rivulet whic brawled and tumbled and eddied through its rock-strewn bed i a rude forest. He wandered over a clearing on the slope of Bal Mountain—where blackened stumps and a single shattered tre trunk stood among the clover of the pasture, where a cow n mained long gazing at him, and where a solitary butterfly W2 blown about by the wind—the whole atmosphere being one c solitude, as of a forgotten land. In the deep valleys, where th shadows at sunset were thrown from mountain to mountain, i seemed as if his soul might rise beyond the gloom and soar awa in the heavenly gold of the clouds high above. From the mountai eminences, by one standing so elevated above mortal things an seeing so far and wide, the alternating sunshine and gloom wer seen at one view, and all was comprehensible in one impressior the diversity of hills, valleys, farms, and village joined in uniu In a walk one night, remote from houses and far up on hillside, he found a lime-kiln, where a dark, black-bearded ma was tending the fire, stirring the immense coals with a long poh the marble red-hot and burning with a quivering flame sometime nearly a yard high. In such a scene, he thought, a poet might mak verses with moonlight in them, and with a gleam of fierce fire light flickering through. Though he was no poet, a memory of th lonely kiln-tender, the gleaming fire, and the red-hot marble wa; a dozen years later, to unite with a variety of other memories c North Adams to form the background of “Ethan Brand,” one c his most powerful stories. The underwitted old man whom he hai met on a wild road near Graylock, the repulsive soap-makei [^56] he gray-bearded diorama man, and others whom he had known It the inn, now assembled, in his imagination, before the glowing ime-kiln. There, too, was little Joe, now no longer a small tavem- launter doomed to the state prison, but transformed into a sensi- ive child shrinking intuitively from the evil Ethan Brand. When lay dawned, after the night in which the fearful laughter of ilthan Brand had haunted the dreams of the lime-burner and his ittle son, the sights upon which the early sunshine poured its ;old were no longer those of reality, but reality idealized. The illage which lay as if in the hollow of the great hand of Provi- lence was a composite of the villages of North Adams and Wil- iamstown as seen a dozen years ago, and the coach which rattled [own the mountain road was a phantom of the coach which had attled down the hills from Windsor to Pittsfield. Magic had been dded to the sound of the horn which had announced the coach rom Bennington, for now Echo caught up its notes and inter- wined them into the rich and varied and elaborate harmony of he ideal. Laconically Hawthorne recorded in his journal that he had ift North Adams on the eleventh of September and reached ome on September 24, 1838. To his friend Longfellow he wrote lat he had had such a pleasant time as seldom happens to a man f his age and experience. That, too, was only a very restrained ;atement. Actually, he had returned refreshed and recruited 'om the depths of his being. The fire which had burned in his eart and brain when he set out upon these adventures was in- eed rekindled. He was prepared now to resume his old asso- ations with renewed interest. His courtship of Sophia Peabody as to proceed with such expedition as unto^vard circumstances ere to permit. Home again from his excursion of three months, Hawthorne usied himself once more with writing, as indicated by the in- • eased publication which followed and by the numerous sug- jistions for stories entered in his diary at the time. But the admo- Htion to act, in whatever way, which the old gentleman at Worces- 'r had given him, and which had expressed his own sentiments [^57] in revulsion from the physical inactivity of his long years of s elusion, was still revolving in his mind. He could scarcely hat escaped a thought so closely related to his own needs and wishe Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life,” composed when Hawthorne w; setting out for western Massachusetts, in the period in whic the young authors were first sharing the enthusiasms of their ne friendship, appeared in the Knickerbocker Magazine of Octob{ (1838), and was stirring young readers everywhere with its fres and provocative lines: Let the dead Past bury its dead! Act—act in the living Present! These simple words captured a significant element of the spir of the times, at once reviving the fervors of the American revoh tionists and expressing the new hopes of the early nineteent century. The jx)em was saying what Franklin had said: “Let t then, up and be doing, and doing to the purpose; so by diligent shall we do more with less perplexity.” It was repeating the di regard of the past and urging a living to the present prominer in the thought of Jefferson and Tom Paine, though the idea w£ now largely divested of its political implications. It was the cu: rent echo of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and Faust, heard also i the contemporary Sartor Resartus of Carlyle, and in “The Amei ican Scholar” of Emerson. The thought was everywhere in th air. It is no wonder that Hawthorne embraced it—stimulated a he was by his friend Longfellow, weary of the loneliness of hi hermit-like life in Salem, and recognizing the need of a mor remunerative vocation if his newly born love for Sophia Pea body was to be anything but a dream. It was at this juncture that George Bancroft fortunately ol fered Hawthorne the position in the Boston Custom House alread mentioned. It was a welcome opportunity, which Hawthorne ac cepted eagerly, for it seemed to promise the realization of hi greatest present desires. For one thing, the salary represents ever so much larger an income than he could anticipate by authoi ship, even the popular Longfellow not at the time earning by hi writing so much as a thousand dollars per year. Hawthorne se about assiduously to save his money for a future occasion. Fui thermore, the position apparently offered the realization of h? lesire for action among men, his hope to dispel the sense of un- eality and separation which had plagued him in his solitary study, entiments again and again attributed to Oberon in the early ketches. To Longfellow, on January 12, 1839, Hawthorne wrote gayly )f his new position, facetiously remarking that it was doubtless )ecause of his adaptability to an active life that Bancroft had hosen him, and assuring Longfellow that he had no doubt of his apacity to fulfil his duties, which would begin within the fort- ight, for the reason that he had no idea what those duties were, lis duties as measurer once assumed, however, he entered into is work with zest, and with an eye alert to the wharf-life about im. One of his first tasks was to superintend the measuring of a )ad of coal from a little, black, dirty schooner from New Bruns- ick. It was bitter zero weather, and he shivered as he walked le wharf, watching the Irish workmen shoveling the coal into lbs to be craned out of the hold of the ship, others wheeling it ,vay in barrows to be loaded into wagons. When he sought refuge i the cabin of the vessel, he found it the rudest and dirtiest hole naginable, everything grimy and black with coal dust. Long harf, where he was generally employed, he quickly discovered, as mainly devoted to evil-smelling, inelegant necessities of life ach as salt-fish, oils, molasses. As for his own work, it was a very l ack business, and at the end of the day he felt like a chimney- 5 /eep. ' Nevertheless, as the seasons moved on, there was much on t'e wharf to engage his interest—to divert his mind from the cudgery of his task. He observed an English brig discharge a lad of girls imported to work in some Worcester factory— sme pale and delicate-looking, others rugged and coarse, and all uving their handkerchiefs in farewell to the sailors. Here was a )ung seaman with an anchor tattoed on the back of his hand a d wearing a sky-blue silk short jacket, with velvet collar, and a bsom pin—a sailor dandy. Here was an old seaman, seventy )ars of age, who had voyaged all over the world, on merchant vssels and on men-of-war. He was a philosopher in a check sirt and sailcloth trousers—a skeptic who doubted that he should cte to live again. In the intervals of work, Hawthorne engaged [^59] him in a long conversation. It was a warm summer day, and t two men dodged around the mainmast to avoid the intense si A little Spanish boy of ten or eleven years old provided diversi —a very youthful citizen of the world, free and happy, who seem to take the whole wide world as his home. Sometimes he woi plunge overboard into the sea as if he were native there; or would run up the rigging of the vessel as if he meant to fly aw through the air. He seemed worth remembering for a story. Son thing beautiful might be made of him. An advantage of Long wharf was that it offered a view of wi expanse of water and sky. On a warm summer day, when the c sweltered, a delightful breeze fluttered about his brow or thre ened to blow his straw hat away. After a shower of rain, duri which he took shelter in the cabin or under an umbrella, th( might be a rainbow, exceedingly brilliant and so long-enduri that he fancied it stained into the sky—a sky of floating cloi of glorious and lovely hues. Strangely, Long wharf, where the were only brick storehouses, black ships, and the bustle of tc some men, was frequently visited by butterflies—broad-winged a magnificent—bright strangers in such a scene and unaccountal except as lonely fantasies of the mind. Perhaps, however, Lo wharf was at its best as a vantage point in spring, when the fo' steps of May could be traced upon the islands of the harbor, t tints of green gradually deepening with the advance of the seasc On a beautiful sunny spring afternoon, when all day he h been breathing the ocean air, it was happiness merely to live. If, after a day of labor begun at sunrise, he was very tired, consoled himself with the reflection that his was a healthy wea ness, which a night’s sleep would remove. His life was a burd only as life is so to every toilsome man. Henceforth forever should be entitled to call the sons of toil his brethren, and shou know how to sympathize with them, seeing that he likewise h risen at dawn, borne the fervor of the midday sun, and not turn his heavy footsteps home till eventide. Years hence, perhaps, t experience which his heart was now acquiring would flow out truth and wisdom. So it seemed during the first months while he tvas buoy up by his dream of a new kind of life, before the day’s stea tasks had revealed themselves in their unbroken routine, wh [i 6 o] oubts and questions began to arise in his reflections and his en- lusiasm began to waver. He confessed that his present doings nd sufferings—his whole external existence—would make but a ull, dry history, that his intellect, heart, and soul truly had no lare in his mode of life, and that he had become a machine. He Dund a kind of comfort in watching the dial of the clock in a istant church steeple which enabled him to measure the march of le weary hours. He had been at the Custom House only a little lore than a year when he no longer could conceal from himself !iat his task was a very grievous thraldom. In another year he oped to find some way of escaping. What he thought disagreeable in his position was not only his rksome labor, but his inescapable association with politicians, ^hose hearts, he was convinced, withered away and died out of leir bodies, and whose consciences turned to India rubber. He ould not have conceived the existence of such an animal without is Custom House experience. Actually, of course, as time was to ?veal, he was yet to know the bitterness of the political machina- ons of which he was to be the victim, and he was never to be ee from politicians, some of whom, however, were to treat him ith great kindness. But now the position which had seemed to romise so much had lost its charm. When he had resigned from lie ill-paid or unpaid editorship of the decrepit American Maga- :ne of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, he had concluded lat the world was full of scoundrels. Now, once more, he was cnfronted with disillusionment. Still, at times, he tried to raise his sunken hopes. If it seemed cidoom laid upon him of murdering so many of the brightest burs of the day at the Custom House when he wished to resume ^'iting worthily, it was only once in a while, he endeavored to amre himself, that the image and desire of a better and happier le made him feel the iron of his chain. After all, he thought that h was learning things worth knowing, and that it was good for hn to have this passage in his life. He knew much more than a yir ago, and had a stronger sense of power to act as a man among n.*n—the sense of power which Oberon had longed to acquire. Vhen he saw the vessels bounding over the waves with sheets of (im around them, when he breathed the effervescent atmosphere ash from the wilderness of the ocean, and witnessed the ac- [j6i] tivity of men on the wharf, all seemingly working with mig and main, it pleased him to think that he, too, had a part to a in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a pc tion of all this industry could not go on without his participatic But it was impossible wholly to escape the attritions of c cumstance. As he meditated upon all these worldly things, realized that, though he was among men, he was not of thei for the life which he cherished was only within himself. He i belled against being confined in the darksome dungeon of t Custom House, and longed for the day when he should be ft again, free to enjoy with the simplicity of a child. He imagin that Christian’s burden, in Pilgrim’s Progress, consisted of co though Christian’s burden could not have been so heavy as h He looked forward to the day when he could refresh his torp fancy and once more busy himself at the loom of fiction. I heart thirsted and languished to be away from the hot sun, t coal dust, the steaming docks, the thick-pated, stubborn, and cc tentious men with whom he brawled from morning till nigh away from all the weary toil which quite engrossed him. Unc such conditions he was continually forced to battle with his ot nature, which yearned for seclusion and freedom to think a; dream and feel. Once he had hoped to escape from that shadowy world which he had seemed to live apart, solitary and sad. He had hop to attain to a sense of reality through action. Now he discover that, though a sharing of physical burdens with the sons of t brought a reward, it also took away that delicate balance of mi and body in which his full happiness resided and which v necessary to what all the recurring urges of his nature prompt him—to creative writing. It needed only an external event prompt him to give tangible expression to the abandonment these hopes. This event occurred in the November national el tions of 1840, when the Whigs defeated the Democrats, and wh a general dismissal of Democratic appointees at the Boston Ci tom House could be expected. Before the month had endf Hawthorne had determined to resign, his resignation to be effi tive at the end of the year. He left, however, not in despair. [162] ilready new aims had replaced old ones, so that, though with ubdued buoyancy, he turned to his new ventures not without expectations. When Hawthorne had taken up his duties in the Boston Cus- ;om House in January, 1839, he was, as we have seen, already n love with Sophia Peabody, though neither he nor she, appar¬ ently, had made a formal declaration of the state of their feelings, heir affair developing so gradually that, later, neither could date he beginnings of their awakening affections. The outward mani- 'estations of the courtship were simple and few. In Salem, before Hawthorne received the Boston appointment, there were visits It the Peabody home, visits made brief when Sophia’s parents were present. Most enjoyed by both were their walks together, ■tvherein hey shared their common interest in nature despite the winter veather. After all had been revealed, they took pleasure in musing apon the strange fact that their love had blossomed during the vintry season. In Salem, too, they attended Miss Burley’s Saturday :venings, Sophia wrapped up in an incalculable quantity of lothes, Hawthorne solicitous lest she catch cold, though Sophia bought herself stepping on air, so happy was she as they walked ip Chestnut Street in the splendid moonlight. After Hawthorne lad gone to Boston, Sophia occasionally visited friends there, the Dvers seeing each other at such times, a favorite meeting place leing the art galleries—at the Athenaeum or at Allston’s. They let early in the morning, before others came, so that they could ■e alone. Often, too, Hawthorne spent the week end in Salem; in le intervals when they were parted, they wrote innumerable let- :rs—sometimes every day—letters in which they tried to say what lawthorne really regarded as inexpressible. After the Peabodys loved to Boston in July, 1840, the lovers could see each other lore often than before, though they continued to write to each ther just the same. Emerson, in his old-fashioned, poetic language, had spoken of ophia as being fair. Hawthorne thought her beautiful, and pos- essing an immortal grace—her voice the sweetest sound ever heard [^^3] outside of Paradise. When he came to call, and she stood witl the width of the room between them, she looked like a vision, sc spiritual that his human heart wished to be assured that she wa clothed in earthly vesture. He searched in vain among his ideal to find the image of her perfection; and in vain, too, did he try tc say what his heart perceived. She seemed the very type of womanh perfection—sweet, tender, lovely, and noble—the realized likenes: of the dreams of poets since the world began. Though he re spected her intellect and valued her talent—her skill in art ; miracle indeed—these qualities were in his view overshadowed b her innocence, her purity, her holiness. When he watched her a: she cared for her dying brother, George, who lay in a long illnesi in the Charter Street house, he saw her strength as well as hei love, and she seemed an angel. Surely she was as good and hoi] as the angels, though there was more goodness in her merit that in theirs, since they had always dwelt in a sinless heaven, whereai her pilgrimage had been on earth where many went astray. He would have said that he regarded her with awe, though awe mighi imply in her a sternness which she did not possess. But howevei impossible to describe his feelings, they were associated with hi; religion, and it was his prayer that God might never permit a severance of their love. Late in October, 1839, his friend George Hillard invited Haw thorne to take lodging and breakfasts at his home; and so during the rest of his tenure at the Custom House Hawthorne lived ai 54 Pinckney Street. He was lodged comfortably enough in his parlor and bedroom apartment. His letters he wrote at his ne\v bureau, the polished shadings of its mahogany panels showing tc great advantage when, after dusk, he lighted his two lamps. He wrote sitting in a cane-bottomed rocking chair, a coal fire burning in the grate and flickering up fitfully, once in a while, so as tc remind him that he was by his own fireside. In front of the fire, too, beside him stood a single haircloth armchair. Though his room was bright and cheerful, with a ruddy tinge on the walls, he thought of himself as a homeless man, a wanderer in the desert 0 a great city, picking up a precarious subsistence wherever he could find a restaurant or an oyster shop. His fireside was, aftei all, but a lonely one. He was a young man, he was a romancer, he was in love [164 ] nd he had the dreams of youth. Especially at the twilight hour, )efore he lighted his lamps, he conjured up vivid visions of lophia in the dusky glow of firelight. Now, in his solitary room, le remembered that this very day he had held her in his arms, iis memory dwelt upon their kisses—his kisses upon her lips and ipon her eyes. Once, when he had kissed her nose, she had mildly >rotested, though by and by such a kiss was accepted as a special ign of affection—private, intimate, and with a bit of humor—a ecret, something very much their own. Though often she seemed 0 spiritual as hardly to be of the earth, yet so human was he that lot for any unimaginable bliss of higher spheres would he give ip the hope of loving and cherishing her by a fireside of their wn. A cottage of their own, where they could always be together, •ecame a recurring dream. There he would be good and happy, "here she could draw, paint, sculpture, and make music, and he 70 uld admire and criticize. He, pervaded by her spirit, would 7rite beautifully and make himself famous for her sake, since she ?ould want the world to praise him, though her smile and kiss 'ould be his greatest reward. On summer afternoons or winter venings, he would read her what he had written earlier in the ay. When Sophia was spending a fortnight or so with the Emer- )ns in Concord in June (1840), and writing of her happiness mong beautiful scenes and sympathizing hearts, he wished that ley could build their cottage there that very summer. When he mused upon their love, it seemed very strange that should have begun among snow and wintry winds—accompani- lents which no poet or novelist would introduce into a love-tale, ut then, nothing like their story was ever written, though if it ould be told, it would be such as angels would delight to hear. Vhen he was engaged in the increasingly odious tasks of the wharf, = was sustained by his thoughts of her. When he was free for an ccasional walk in the country, she was with him in fancy. Not a eautiful scene did he behold but she was imaged in the midst of when he sighed or smiled, it was for her; when he thought of :iture happiness, he thought of her; and when he did not doubt c fear, it was altogether because of her. It was impossible to say ’hat she meant to him—no words, no figure of speech, no image (aite sufficing. When he contemplated her innocence and purity. she suggested a wildflower; when the poetry of his love throbbe in his head and heart, he thought of her as a poem—not an epi( '.not a labored and artificial sonnet, but a ballad that Nature wa / singing—sweet, simple, gay, pathetic—suggesting smiles and teai and the intermingling of tears and smiles. Nor, when he was with her alone, were words necessary fo what really concerned them. He felt under few compulsions t speak, for in her presence he knew an utter repose. Their silenc was golden and luminous. How much might be expresses without the utterance of a word! In their kisses, in the glances c their eyes—even in the pressure of their hands—volumes could b spoken. Once, as they walked in Salem on a Sabbath aftemoo; (what a sweet time it seemed then and in recollection!) she looke up into his face and asked him why he was so grave. He wa mindful then of the lights and shadows continually flitting acro< his inward sky—coming whence and going whither he did nc know. Nor did he think it well to inquire too closely. If at an time there should seem to be an expression unintelligible fror one to the other, it appeared best to wait for the soul to mak itself understood without earthly language. Words, it seemed t him, were often but a thick and darksome veil of mystery. Ii Heaven, no words would be needed. Yet words were not without their use, however ineffectual a last. He could not but resort to them at times. When headache and pain ravaged her days, he sought words of encouragement t make her thoughts dwell on hope of an ultimate relief. She mus go to bed at nine, sleep till sunrise, and grow round and plum] and rosy. She must be mindful of her health, yet not anxious am watchful like an invalid. Some day, when she had his bosom ti repose upon, she would no longer feel such overwhelming weari ness. His were tonic words, solicitous, discerning—counteractim a long expectancy that she was always to be ill. In the fatal sicl: ness of her brother, he had deeper words of solace. She must res the heaviness of her heart on his own, and let him keep himsel between herself and pain of any kind—let him clothe her in hi love to shield her from calamity. So might they hope that thei love thus blended would leave them happier after every sorrow It was a thought such as his imagination had dwelt upon when h( had created the young lovers in “The Maypole of Merrymount [i66] nd in “The Canterbury Pilgrims”; now that thought came home o his own hearth and heart with the warmth of a conviction— )ersonal and sacred. If, however, he endeavored to comfort her, he found his trength in her likewise. She was like sunshine and kept his heart ^arm. She was a happy smile on the visage of his Destiny, causing hat stern personage to look as benign as Heaven itself. Since the lay he had been in love with her, his heart had never been des- )erately heavy, for now he could always come to her to unburden lis cares. Without her he was insufficient—unequal, even, to ven- ure into company without the protection of his Sophie. It was he who gave him the sense of reality wh-ich he had vainly sought n a ction among the sons of toil. I t was she who kept his heart mre, and who elevated him above the. world, enabling him to nterpret the riddle of life, and filling him with faith in the un- een and better land, because she continually led him, thither. Such v^ere the altitudes when, in the Goethean phraselfhe saw in her he charm of the Eternal Eeminine, In more mundane moments, le simply felt as if he could run a hundred miles at a stretch, and ump over all the houses that happened to be in his way. He was inspeakably happy in the thought of her love. But in whatever mood—whether restless with physical exu- lerance, whether in pensive reyery, or whether deep in a con- emplation where his ideal oE loye merged with his relig ion— } fiere was always present a tantalizing mystery. How was their Dve to be explained? Even its beginnings were lost in the mazes f his memory. He recalled a beautiful hour when they had sat Dgether on the steps of the old burial ground adjacent to Sophia’s ome and there mutually confessed their love; but he was certain lat their friendship had begun much earlier than that. So fa- liliar was he with her inner heart, was she not his wife in some ast eternity? Only eternity, surely, could suffice for the fruition of ich a love. Heaven, he f^lt, had never been so certain until he new that she loved him,^ It was the touch of the heart whereby ley had become beings of rea lity and inheritors of e ternity—that as the secret of the mystery. Until his heart had been touched, is best knowledge of himself was merely to know his own shadow to watch its flickering on the wall, and to mistake its fantasies )r his own real actions—like the chained prisoners in Plato’s story of the cave. Now he knew the reality which he had lonj sought and sought in vain through physical toil among men. Thi was the true reality, for they loved not only in time, but for al eternity; and in Heaven they would remember and relive ever moment of their earthly happiness. By the first of October, 1840, it had become apparent t< George Ripley, pastor of the Unitarian church in Purchase Street Boston, that his relations with his congregation must soon ter minate, the views of minister and congregation differing so greatly in spite of their regard and affection one for another. By the mid month, while still in his ministry, Ripley was soliciting member for an ideal community in which he hoped to embody what h< regarded as Christ’s idea of society. Though he had entreatec Emerson to join, Emerson had declined. Emerson assured Riplej that the proposed community would not be good for him nor h( for it, for he found in himself neither enterprise nor ability ir reform. What he would do solidly, he must do alone. Privately he doubted Ripley’s possession of the practical talents necessary to an undertaking which must unavoidably have its financial as pects. Rather facetiously he wrote to his brother William that ai Ripley’s community he would dismiss his own workmen and him self learn to work on a farm under skilful direction, though h( doubted that he needed to pull his own house down to get these advantages. When Hawthorne, however, agreed to join the ven ture, Ripley felt as if a miracle had happened, or as if the heavens would presently be opened and Jacob’s Ladder appear. Ripley’s plan, in its outward nature, was to raise $30,000, to buy a farm of about 200 acres in West Roxbury, near Boston, for $12,000, to build $12,000 worth of cottages, and to remove to the farm—Brook Farm—on April 1, 1841. Here the days were to be divided between manual and intellectual labor, the supposition being that three hours of manual labor per day would suffice for maintenance. A boarding school was to be part of the arrange¬ ments. In its theoretical features Ripley’s experiment in communit) [z55] tving reflected the idealism of its associates and of the times. The im was to gather together a few individuals having the same ob- ect—of being wholly true to their natures as men and women, ince it was to be an ideal community, only to the ideally inclined /ould it be attractive. Whoever was satisfied with society in its xisting character—those whose sense of justice was not wounded »y its common action, its institutions, its spirit of commerce— /ould find no place in this community; nor would those willing to lave other men give their best hours and strength to bodily labor 0 secure for the favored few immunity therefrom find a home here. At Brook Farm competition and the ordinary rules of trade /ere to be excluded. All labor, whether bodily or intellectual, /as to be paid at the same rate of wages on the assumption that s labor becomes merely bodily, it is a greater sacrifice to the in- ividual laborer who gives his time to it. Besides, the higher Measures in intellectual labor offer more rewards than does bodily ibor. All labor, however, is sacred when done for a common iterest. Indeed, it is not more true that money is the root of all vil than that labor is the root of all good. So ran the theory—some f which its adherents had found already expressed in the chapter n Helotage in Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. In order to establish themselves in the most direct and simple dation to nature, the Brook Farmers wished to make agriculture le basis of their life. It seemed to them that a true life, although may aim beyond the highest star, is redolent of the healthy irth. About such a life lingers the perfume of clover, the lowing f cattle supplying the natural bass to the melody of the voices of lose working close to the soil. Under the circumstances of their ,leal community their members might hope to support themselves ad their dependents more completely, with less work and more use, than elsewhere. After all the working and teaching, there 'ould consequently still be leisure to employ themselves in the ::tivities of the outside world. Those who wished to pursue the lie arts or write books for private emolument would have ample me to do so. The community aimed to be rich in the wealth ^hich money should truly represent—namely, in the leisure to live i all the faculties of the soul. [i6p] Precisely when Hawthorne decided to join Brook Farm re mains unrecorded. At any rate, he and Sophia had agreed upoi the matter by late November, 1840, when he wrote Sophia bantering letter inquiring about some caricatures which she wa supposed to draw—caricatures of him staggering, puffing, and toil ing onward to the gate of the farm, burdened with the unsalabl remnant of Grandfather’s Chair, the stories for children whicl he had recently published. What a ponderous, leaden load i would be! Ripley, it seems, expressed to Sophia some doubt re garding Hawthorne’s willingness or ability to do manual laboi though Hawthorne protested his readiness to earn his bread—an Sophia’s, too—by the sweat of his brow. Hawthorne had, indeec experienced disillusionment in the concept of labor with whicl he had begun his work at the Boston Custom House. Now, hov ever, the situation was different. At Brook Farm all labor was to b done for a common interest, the conviction being that but a fet hours per day of united effort would be necessary. Besides, Brool Farm promised a home for Sophia and himself, as well as leisur to write. In the interval between his resignation from his position ii the Boston Custom House and his departure for the farm, an( especially as the hour of departure approached, his spirits flue tuated. On a sunny April morning, when he was staying witl his friend Hillard in Boston, it seemed to him that surely Heavei was one with earth that beautiful day. At the same time, he fel that he would greatly need comfort from Sophia when the hou actually came for his journey to the far wilderness. He woul( trust that she would fill him with hopefulness, and so his toi would seem bright, and he would sing as he drove his plow though he feared that his song would be a most unlovely screecli He was, it appears, leaning on Sophia, while he himself looke( into the future with some foreboding. When he left Boston for the farm, on April 12, a few day after Ripley had gone, Hawthorne left in such weather as oftei heralds the coming of spring in New England—a heavy snowstorm The next day, when he wrote to tell Sophia of his first adventure; the whole countryside was a great snowbank, the sky still full c snow, and the farm but a polar Paradise. Jokingly he wrote that perhaps he had wandered within the precincts of the arctic circle. When Sophia joined him, she must equip herself with snowshoes and would find the skin of a polar bear very suitable for a summer dress. Though his own chamber was the best in the house, the aouse was old and cold. Nevertheless, it was a cheerful sight when, at mealtime, the group sat round their table before the great dtchen fire. He liked his brethren in affliction very well. If only Sophia were with him, he should ask for nothing more. In the laeanwhile, she must think of him as having gone before to pre- aare a home to which he would bring her—all in good time. On the day of his arrival his outdoor activity was limited to matching the cows being foddered. There were eight belonging an the farm, together with a transcendental heifer, which, he vrote Sophia, belonged to Miss Margaret Fuller—a very fractious inimal, apt to kick over the milk pail, hook the other cows, and aehave generally in a very tyrannical manner, though she seemed o have an intelligent and meditative face. Sophia, of course, vould understand these allusions, for it was one of his little jokes o tease her about Margaret Fuller, who was a frequent visitor It Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in Boston, and who presided )ver occasional “conversations” in the Peabody home amid a Babel )f female voices—to Hawthorne’s amusement. In similar vein, le wrote Sophia that he hoped Mr. Ripley would, on the morrow, vhen he was to begin his tasks, assign him the kindliest cow in the lerd, or he would perform his duty with fear and trembling. When the morrow came, he did wonders—so it seemed to him. iefore breakfast, he went out to chop hay for the cattle, and in en minutes of vehement labor broke the machine. Then he was et to the task of carrying wood and replenishing the fires, after vhich he went into a breakfast of a huge mound of buckwheat :akes. After breakfast that day, and many a day thereafter, he vorked on a manure pile with a four-pronged instrument which lipley gave him to understand was a pitchfork. And so he was initiated into the routine of work on a farm. Vfter several days of observation he milked a cow, and presently vas milking two or three every night and morning. Daily he cut lay and straw for the cattle. As the season advanced, he guided I plow through the stubborn fields; he helped in the planting of [^ 7 ^] potatoes and peas; he raked hay with his companions and hoec and dug potatoes; he cleaned out the woodshed and carted loadi of oak; he chopped wood and turned the grindstone to sharper axes and scythes; he toiled and sweated in the summer sun; hi hands grew rough and brown. He was transformed into a farme: —a Brook Farmer, clad in high cowhide boots, a knee-length blu( frock, belted at the waist, and a broadbrimmed straw hat. H( worked long days—in the haying season, there was work to be don( after supper—and went to bed at nine. At four-thirty he was u{ again. It was his task to sound the horn to awaken his fellow workers to another day of toil on the farm. In his first impressions, he was enthusiastic over his new sur roundings. Brook Farm he regarded as one of the most beautifu places he had ever seen, as secluded as if it were a hundred mile from any city or village. He could not have believed that then was so much seclusion so near the city, many spots seeming un visited since John Eliot had preached to the Indians. There wen woods, too, in which one could ramble all day without meeting anybody or seeing a house. He and Sophia could not escape th( world more completely than there. Through the farm, too, rar a brook which, from their cottage, they should be able to hea; ripple in the summer evenings. The character of his new mode of life seemed likewise t( promise all that the Brook Farmers had envisioned. Such a de lectable way of life, he wrote to his sister Louisa, had never beer seen on earth since the days of the early Christians. Here, he tolc Sophia, he and the fraternity had thrown aside all the fopperie and flummeries which have their origin in a false state of society It was an endless surprise to him to see how much work there wa; to be done in the world; but, thank God, he was able to do hi share of it, and his ability was increasing daily. Sometimes, as h( worked on a hillside under the clear blue sky, it almost seemec as if he were at work in the sky itself. Really there was nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in his toil as Sophia might think- even in the work with his pitchfork in what he called the golc mine, for did not nature find such ore wholesome for nourish ment? For himself, he was becoming partial to the odor. Sucl work might defile the hands, but not the soul. He was impatieir because Sophia was not yet with him, but he was sustained by th( [772] ;hought that he was engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life. When he went afield to his tasks early in May, scattering the nourishing ore, he thought of Sophia, and looked beneath the itone walls, where the verdure was richest, in hope that he might [ind a little company of violets, or some solitary bud prophetic of iummer. He wished to award such flowers the blissful fate of being treasured for a time in her bosom, for he doubted not that Sophia would admit any flowers of his gathering into that sweetest place. For the time, in short, it seemed possible to blend fact and dream without alloy—to harmonize the real and the ideal without incongruity. Then, late in May, Sophia came to the farm for a visit and made a discovery. It was, to be sure, an excellent fraternity of which Hawthorne was a part. She noted his exquisite courtesy and geniality and what she regarded as a divine expression of sweet- less and kindliness in his face as he participated in the trans- ictions and witticisms of his associates, without the slightest evi¬ dence of pride in his manner. Nevertheless, she saw that his .“xpression was that of a witness and hearer, rather than that of :omradeship. She longed more than ever to have a home for him o come to, a sacred retreat such as he, of all men, would desire, or she saw very plainly that he was not leading his ideal life at he farm. Scarcely had Sophia made her discovery when Hawthorne nade the admission of his dissatisfaction. He had been on the arm only a month and a half when he complained that his pres- ■nt life gave him such an antipathy to pen and ink that even etter-writing was difficult—that his soul refused obstinately to be »oured out on paper, even more so than during his Custom House xperience. That abominable gold mine! Thank God, they an- icipated getting rid of it in a few days. He should never be able 0 comfort himself for having spent so many days of blessed sun- hine there. It was his opinion, he confessed to Sophia, that a lan’s soul might be buried and perish under a dung-heap or in furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money. As the summer advanced, when the dung had been scattered ver the fields, when the plowing had been done, when the crops ad been planted, and when, at last, the hay had been cut and [^ 75 ] raked, the labor of the farm ceased to be so pressing; neverthelesi before mid-August, Hawthorne had determined that by the en of the month he would no longer be a working member of th Brook Farm fraternity. Already in July he had spoken to Riple of his doubts, and he had continued his labors only because h had not wished to dishearten Ripley, because he saw that th spring farm work had to be done promptly, and because he wishe to give the experiment a fair trial. Nor was it only the irksomt ness of his toil that discouraged him, for it had become clear t him that, the financial status of the farm was unstable and withou visible prospects of improvement—a matter of grave concern t him since he had invested $1,000 in the venture, his savings fror his position in the Boston Custom House. Once having determined to sever his working connection with the farm, it was a joyful thought to him that by Septembe he should be free from his bondage—no longer a slave, but free free to think of Sophia, free to enjoy Nature, and free to think an( feel! Not even his Custom House experience was such a thraldon and weariness. Not even the burden of Christian which fell ol at the foot of the cross was of greater weight than that whicl would be removed from his shoulders. Was it a praiseworthy mat ter that he had spent five golden months in providing food fo cows and horses? Not so! Thank God, his soul was not utterf buried under a dung-heap, but, though somewhat defiled, was ye not utterly unsusceptible of purification. One truth he was con vinced he had learned at the farm: namely, that labor is the cursi of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becomin* proportionately brutified. Something else he had learned also. On a farm the pressure 0 work is such that it cannot wait upon a day nicely divided be tween manual and intellectual effort. It must be done expedi tiously as the season and occasion demand. Furthermore, wher it is one’s wish to write, no joint effort will avail. He decided thai he could not and must not lean upon the community. Whatevei was to be done must be done with his own individual strength He, as an individual, in his intellectual and moral conditions could not profit by merging himself in a community. As for him self, he was now assured that he could best attain the higher end; of his life through the ordinary relation to society. After fiv( [n4 ] Hawthorne in 1840 From the portrait by Charles Osgood the Essex Institute Collection. lonths of experimentation he adopted the convictions which Imerson had arrived at by forethought. He must return to writing. How much depended on his little ooks! If anything could draw out his whole strength, it should e the motives now pressing upon him. Still, the intrusion of an utward necessity into labors of the imagination and intellect was ainful and disturbing to him. So, after all, he must keep such onsiderations out of his mind. That he was despondent over his isillusionment with Brook Farm, however, he did not try to con- eal from Sophia. Having told her of his despondency, his heart irobbed the more lightly. He could not doubt that God had reat good in store for them, for He would not have given them ) much unless he were preparing to give them a great deal more, •id he and Sophia not love one another? What present bliss, lerefore, and what sure and certain hope! It was his faith, after all, which sustained him. Faith, he be- eved, is the soul’s eyesight, and when we possess it the world is ever dark nor lonely. During the first three weeks in September (1841), Hawthorne as at home in Salem, resolved not again to return to the labor : Brook Farm, though he had not altogether even yet given up te thought of making his home there with Sophia. All the while ; had been at Brook Farm his mother and sisters had opposed ' s being there. His mother lamented his absence, apostrophizing ;newly painted portrait of him, and fearing that he was working 10 hard. The strong-minded Elizabeth had little faith in the com- 1 unity, and teasingly protested that she felt sorry for the cows ’hich her brother might milk. She was curious, as time went on, to, to know what had happened to the original plan of a three- bur day of manual labor. Though Louisa had more confidence i her brother’s ability as laborer than had Elizabeth, she doubted tat it was good for his health to work so hard such long days, hrthermore, why should he burn out his brains in the sun when 1 ; could do much better things with them? From all of them, in te letters addressed to Brook Farm, came the repeated plea, cme home, come home, come home! Even the family cat, Beelze- lib, so Louisa said, was lonely without him. But by September 22 he was again at Brook Earm, a boarder cily, and not obliged to toil in its furrows. It seemed, in the per- [^75] spective of three weeks, a queer place, and he was apprehensiv( of the reception that might be given him. He was, however, kind ly received, Ripley quite likely being instrumental in seeing tha he was presently elected to two offices—trustee of the estate anc chairman of the finance committee. Hawthorne, however, in formed Ripley that these august offices would not constrair him to remain through the winter or to return in the spring To Sophia he wrote that, though nobody entered his room, h( had not that sense of perfect seclusion essential to his power o producing anything. It would be quite as well that he not seriousf set about literary occupation for the present, but permit himsel a considerable interval between his labor of the body and tha of the mind. In the meanwhile he must observe, and think, anc feel, and content himself with catching glimpses of things to b( wrought out hereafter. And so, for rather more than a month, he remained a Brook Farm, free to come and go as he pleased, writing letter to Sophia, making many entries in his notebooks, and takinc long, solitary morning walks over the farm and the adjacent coun tryside. Now he had the coveted leisure to enjoy man and nature as he wished—leisure such as he had had when he had visitec Bridge in Maine four years before, or more recently at Nortl Adams, where he had spent those three almost perfect months. The life at Brook Farm he could now observe with eyes dis engaged. With William Allen, head farmer, he drove in a wagor to the Brighton Cattle Fair, to buy some little pigs and to sel a calf—a poor little Bossie who, as they drove along, kept baaing a the cattle in the fields or in the road, and, by nuzzling Willian and himself, pleaded to be stroked and patted. The village wa thronged with horses and vehicles and a miscellany of people- great, round-paunched country squires, yeomen in their country cut Sunday suits, a variety of loafers, jxtor, shabby, out-at-elbovv devils, as well as city dandies, corseted and buckramed. Every where were cattle, sheep, and pigs—all destined for the slaughter house and thence to be sold to Boston folk in sirloins, joints, an( [ryS] mch pieces. Still, the scene of the fair was cheerful and lively in the bright, warm sun. It ought to be studied. It was, indeed, such a scene from ordinary life as he was often pleased to contemplate —unadorned, showing man close to his basic needs, something that a realistic writer might claim as the essential stuff of life. But such matter in its ingot form was never really for him. Of a quite different character was his experience at the farm itself when the members declared a holiday with a picnic in the woods. The occasion left a fantastic impression on his memory. He remembered the sunlight breaking through overshadowing branches, the adult picnickers appearing and disappearing con¬ fusedly in the intermingled light and shade, the children laugh¬ ing and sporting about, the loud uproar among strange shapes. It was a masquerade party with which the community was divert¬ ing itself. Here was an Indian chief and there the goddess Diana. A. bright, vivacious, dark-haired, rich-complexioned damsel of fifteen volunteered to tell fortunes. There was a Swiss girl, too, an Indian squaw, and a Negro of the Jim Crow order, a forester, and athers, as well as children of all ages. Presently Mr. Emerson and Miss Fuller came into the glade where the picnickers were as- iembled, and then, Hawthorne observed, followed much talk. Hawthorne, who regarded himself as a mere spectator both of sport md serious business, like Oberon of past years, lay under the trees md looked on. He noted that he was not alone in his role as spec- ator, for there was Tom Orange, a shrewd Yankee Brook Farmer, i thick-set, sturdy fellow, standing apart, enjoying the fun well mough, yet laughing with a perception of its nonsensicalness ather than entering into the spirit of the thing. It was all very Peasant, yet absurd, too. Ten years later Hawthorne was to recall hese impressions, transmuted for the purpose of art, in The ^lithedale Romance. For the purpose of his art, too, he was to remember the visit o the farm of a petite young seamstress from Boston—vivacious nd smart, laughing and singing and talking all the time. Her ntellect, indeed, was very ordinary, for she never said anything /orth hearing, or even laughing at, in itself; but she possessed 0 much sunniness of temper and liveliness of disposition that she dded immeasurable enjoyment to the community household. To look at her face was like being shone upon by a ray of the sun. [m] She romped with the boys, ran races with them in the yard, ar upset a load of hay when she with other boys and girls climbt upon it. The last thing one heard of her, she was tripping upstai to bed, warbling or talking lightsomely. She seemed an expressic well worth studying. By and by, in fact, she was to sit for tv portraits, each showing diverse aspects of her character as set by Hawthorne—as Phoebe in The House of the Seven Gables ar as Priscilla in The Blithedale Romance. She belonged, of cours to a type long ago represented by Susan in “The Village Uncle Quite apparently the life at Brook Farm was not being lived i vain, however disillusioning in its first effects. In this month of leisure, however, he spent most of his time i long excursions afoot when he walked alone almost unseei though occasionally he met a few nearly as solitary as himsel More often he walked wholly solitary where houses were f; apart. Many of the houses were quite antique—salt-box house with long, sloping roofs, commencing a few feet from the grouri and ending in a lofty peak. Sometimes huge old elms overshai owed the yard. Old barns there were, too, patched and supporte by timbers leaning against the sides, stained with the excrement ( past ages. One forenoon he passed an old house apparently quii deserted, some of the windows shattered and open, others boarde up. Trees and shrubbery grew in neglect, and an aged barn stoc near by, so ruinous it had been necessary to prop it up. Thoug so dilapidated a place must seem unoccupied, there in an ang' of the house stood a decrepit and infirm old man, its fit occupan The grass, however, was green and beautiful around this dwellin and, the sunshine falling brightly on it, the whole effect w cheerful and pleasant. It seemed as if the world was so glad th this desolate old place, where there was never to be any moi hope and happiness, could not at all lessen the general effect ( joy. Once, in traversing a by-way in which there was a double Hr of grass between the wheel tracks and that of the horse’s fee he came to where, in a former time, had stood a farmhouse, spot entirely secluded, with no other house within a mile ( two. The cellar was uncovered, a part of the chimney still stan ing, as was the oven, in which household bread had been bake and pudding and cake and jolly pumpkin pies for festivals. A [lyS] round the site of the house was a pleasant, sunny, green space, nth aged fruit trees still in fair condition. On the corner of a alf-decayed old shed was nailed a boy’s windmill, now black with me and weather-stained, but still going round whenever the wind irred. It was a spot to muse upon in quiet pleasure. When he began these walks, it was late in September, and utumn was on its way. In a distant meadow he found white and urple grapes in great abundance—ripe, and gushing with rich, ure juice when his hand pressed the clusters. After a week of loudy and showery weather, the mornings were breezy and clear, 'he grass was now much fresher and more vivid than in late jmmer, the trees still retaining much of their verdure, though ere and there a shrub or bough was arrayed in scarlet and gold, 'hen one day came a marked frost. There it lay, at sunrise, white 5 snow, over all the grass, and on the tops of fences, and in the ards, and on heaps of firewood. In the fields, meanwhile, squashes sposed in piles, presenting much variety of shape and hue—golden ellow, like great lumps of gold, dark green, striped and varie- ated; some round, and some with long, curling necks, nestling ?here they lay, and seeming as if they had life. In the orchards acre was an uneasy rustling in the trees, though not as if they were truggling with the wind. Scattered about were barrels, and heaps f apples—golden and scarlet. In the hollow of the woods, one fternoon, he lay a long while watching a squirrel which talked 3 itself, chattering and as sociable as if it had a dozen com¬ panions, instead of being alone in the lonesome wood. Dry leaves 'ere plentiful now, and rustled beneath his tread, the most au- umnal of sounds. Caterpillars—red, hairy ones, with black heads nd tails—crossed his path, a gently melancholy sight. In sunny ours, however, the grasshoppers still sang; nor had the crickets et finished their song. How genial the October sunshine! In no other season might ne come upon such pleasant and sunny spots with such agreeable fleets on the feelings. In the sheltered hollows it was rather too arm, though it was delightful to be too warm after the stormy lillness of early autumn. In a grove of oaks the sunlight broke cross his path in spots, though elsewhere the shadow was deep; ut still there was intermingling enough of bright hues to keep BE the gloom from the whole path. Indeed, in a very pleasant [^7P] wood-path, shut in and sheltered by trees that had not yet throw off their yellow robes, the sun shone in strongly, and quite kindle them, so that the path was brighter for their shade than if it ha been wholly exposed to the sun. But no language could give a idea of the beauty and glory of the trees in the sunshine of ai tumn. What a difference the sunshine made; it was like vamisl bringing out the hidden veins in a piece of rich wood. And th red patches of blueberry and whortleberry bushes, as seen on sloping hillside, like islands among the grass! It was such a pictui as had never been painted. O, the beauty of grassy slopes, an the hollow ways of paths winding between hills, and the inte: vals between the road and wood-lots, where Summer lingered an sat down, strewing dandelions of gold, and blue asters, as her par ing gifts and memorials! Yes, sunlight was like the breath of life to the pomp c autumn. Still, there was nothing dazzling in it, it seemed to hin rather, it was on the whole gentle and mild, with a most qui( and soothing and pensive influence. Such sunny October da] made him solemn and thoughtful. On such days, as he walke winding wood-paths bordered by old rail fences of moss-grow cedar, with bushes sprouting beneath them, or by stone walls c unknown antiquity, with shrubbery grown around them, he love to pause in pleasant meditation. Regretfully he saw the seaso come to a close. He had observed that the maple leaves change first to scarlet and then to yellow. Presently, one day, he foun a maple leaf which was yellow all over, except at its extremes point, which was bright scarlet. It seemed a symbol of the clos of autumn. Then, as October came to an end, he found a handfr of fringed gentians, the last of the year, growing on the margin c the brook which coursed through the farm. He was never to walk there again. Like the young lovers ii his own early story, “The Canterbury Pilgrims,” he had chosei to seek his daily bread among the people of the world. The publication of Twice-Told Tales in 1837 and the cor sequent moderate celebrity had proved a stimulus to Hav thome in the year immediately following. Nor did he ceas [180] lis literary efforts during the period of his employment at the Joston Custom House. Even while he was at Brook Farm, prob- bly after he was no longer a laborer there, he seems to have con- inued to tvrite. In the five years between 1837 and 1842 he pub- ished approximately two dozen tales and sketches as well as four mall volumes of stories for children—these last now collected inder the general title of Grandfather’s Chair. The nature of some if these items, in so far as they may have reflected Hawthorne’s arlier life, has been suggested in previous pages. From some of he rest, somewhat more of his developing interior life can be scertained. Apart from the biographical sketches of Fessenden and Cilley, /hich are distinguished by their careful scrutiny, insight, warmth, ir balanced judgments, revealing Hawthorne as an acute appraiser if men, the writings of the period consist of several informal ssays (“Time’s Portraiture,’’ “Snow'flakes,” and “The Sister ^ears’’), a group of short stories too miscellaneous to classify, and large group of tales and sketches based upon history or biog- aphy—most of them written for children—and indicating that in his period of five years Hawthorne was deeply engrossed with he objective which had inspired his first writing while he was till at college—namely, with the writing of tales of his native and. That most of these items were addressed to children show's nother bent of his thought long to continue, though perhaps lever again with such special enthusiasm, whatever the later im- irovement in art. It is difficult to say when some of the tales of these years were ctually written, the date of publication being no final indication tf date of composition. It may be that Hawthorne’s growing repu- ation made acceptable to editors that which had not been ac- eptable before. At any rate, such a tale as “Sylph Etherage’’ seems light indeed, its amateurishness apparent evidence that it may /ell have been among the earliest of those efforts of which Haw- home WTOte later in the “Dedication Letter’’ introducing The now-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales. Only an occasional Qeritorious sentence suggests the later skill. Even though “Jean nglefield’s Thanksgiving” did not appear until 1840, one might /ell suppose that it, too, was written much earlier. Like “Sylph Itherage,” it is slight and of no artistic distinction. Furthermore, though it was published after Hawthorne was regularly writin under his own name, this tale appeared under the pseudonym ( the Reverend A. A. Royce, a strange pen name which Hawthorn had inexplicably adopted for “The Devil in Manuscript” whe that tale had appeared in 1835 and when he was still publishin anonymously. That he did not at the time of publication wish t append his own name seems to support the likelihood of an earl origin and the author’s recognition of its imperfections. Simik conjectures may be made regarding “The Threefold Destiny, also published as “By Ashley Allen Royce,” though this tale distinctly superior to the other two. But if these presumably earl tales cannot be dated with exactitude, and though they may nc all possess merit as art, they—together with the better tales an sketches more apparently belonging to this period—neverthele; may reveal the unfolding of the author’s thought and literal skill. As for the sketches and tales written for adults, they at one look backward to themes and devices of early origin and forwar toward the characteristics of thought and manner more mature) developed in the later writings. A few of these backward glances may suffice to represent th tendency. Again in “The Threefold Destiny” (which may real) have early origins) the hero is the dreaming, weary wanderer, lik Oberon or the narrator in “The Village Uncle,” who comes hom to the quiet, peaceful woman and awakes to the happiness c life. In Lady Eleanore and in old Peter Goldthwaite reappear a eccentricity of character akin to that of the leading characters i “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Wedding-Knell,” and “Wak( field.” The mirror which, in “Monsieur du Mirror,” always n fiected the present moment, has now, in “Old Esther Dudley, acquired the marvelous quality of refiecting the Past, a qualit to be retained with enhanced power in The House of the Seve Gables. An unforgettable symbol, such as the minister’s blac veil, has its equally memorable counterpart in Lady Eleanore awful mantle. Shreds of early allegory are woven into a fim texture in “The Threefold Destiny.” Somewhat of the anguish c loneliness known to Eanshawe and Oberon, and, in his youth, ti the Village Uncle, old Peter Goldthwaite knows, too, togethe with a glimpse, before shutting his window, of the ^vholesome am [182] addening activities of normal life. Finally, through the seeming oom encircling the path of the young lovers in “The Lily’s uest” shines the same radiant hope of Eternity which enabled e old lovers in “The Wedding-Knell” to look down upon their ae. Perhaps even more interesting are those features which are irbingers of what is to come. Particularly interesting are those rerunners which foretell the mellow beauty of The House of e Seven Gables. In “Edward Randolph’s Portrait,” whistling rough the crannies of an old house are the first stirrings of the ind which sang, and sighed, and sobbed, and shrieked through e entries and the staircase and in the distant chambers of the ^cheon Mansion. That multi-gabled old edifice, moreover, had i origin in that rusty, moss-grown, many-peaked wooden house Peter Goldthwaite, who, like Judge Pyncheon, was confident at somewhere among the walls of the ancient mansion was con- aled a treasure of great value. Old Peter, too, like poor Clifford ^ncheon, looked out from his window upon the great street of le town and the animated life below with painful awareness of s loneliness and with strange cravings to belong. As Clifford was ^pendent upon Hepzibah and Phoebe, so did Peter lean upon d maid Tabitha. Hepzibah herself, however, with all her loyal- es to the decayed past, to an age gone by, came out of the Legends of the Province House,” where, in an earlier incarna- an, she had lived as old Esther Dudley. No less marvelous than lese transformations, however, was the metamorphosis of that )ung woman with no mean share of beauty whose doom it was “Endicott and the Red Cross,” to wear the letter A on the ■east of her gown, a fatal token which she had embroidered in arlet cloth, with golden thread and the nicest of needlework. > Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter she was, of course, to nerge the most famous heroine in American fiction. Situations, characters, and themes little by little advanced in laturity of conception and execution. There matured, also, the ithor’s understanding of what he wished to do in his art, what :e distinguishing characteristics of that art were to be. In college ys he had already made his first efforts in recording the ancient iperstitions which were the household tales of old New Eng- ad; and throughout the years of his obscurity he had continued to imagine his characters amid the lake and mountain scenei the villages and fertile fields, of his native land. But such air dealt with subject matter and not with mode. It is true that in 1 1829 letter to Goodrich he had remarked that one of his stori( founded upon superstition, an original attempt, was rather wi and grotesque. Indeed, the frequent repetition of the word “wih in his early fancies suggests that Hawthorne had long been awa of the peculiar nature of the matter of his fiction and of the pro lem of how it could be handled to best advantage. It became clearer to Hawthorne in these years that the kii of fiction which he wished to write was the Romance. What ] wished, for one thing, was to create a simple and not unpleasii effect—namely, that pensive influence over the mind which folloi from brooding upon hoar antiquity, or which may be created 1 throwing a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful over tl homely aspects of familiar things. He would not claim that 1 : events were real, though he wished, nevertheless, to preserve tl hues of nature and to infuse a lifelike warmth into his fancif productions. And so, to tell his readers what he was trying to d and doubtless to help clarify his aims to himself, he wrote out h purpose in the introduction to “The Threefold Destiny”—at tl same time, to aid further in indicating his design, appending tl subtitle “A Fairy Legend.” He recognized, however, that he w taking his readers into the familiar boundaries of a New Englar village, and not into “Fairy Londe.” He was already aware, lik wise, of what desperately hard work it was to endeavor to thro the spell of antiquity over localities with which the living wor had aught to do, as he remarked while writing those excellei head and tail pieces accompanying the “Legends of the Provin House.” Plain enough it is from these sources that he had no embarked upon his attempt to describe the nature of his writin the Romance, an attempt carried forward with greater detail ar force in the prefaces to The Scarlet Letter, The House of t) Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun throughout the remainder of his writing career. The theory of Romance which Hawthorne was developir created a strange paradox. Ever since his days at Bowdoin he h: aspired to tell tales of his native land. Furthermore, the tales 1 knew best, those which he had known from childhood, we [184] Dries, not of his own time, but out of such antiquity as Salem id New England could claim. Avowedly it was his hope to de- rve well of his country by snatching from oblivion the unre- rded facts of history—a hope tangibly expressed in the writing, the late 1830’s, of a very large number of historical tales. And t, in his own private life, he was at this time eagerly trying to ave behind him the solitude and loneliness of his own largely leventful past—to leave it behind and to seek happiness and Ifilment in action in the living present. His literary th eory took m into the past, as his authorship took him into solitude; his clinations as a man ledTiim-while he was yet hopeful at the DSton Custom House and at Brook Farm—to action and the esent. In “Old Esther Dudley” the opposing forces of Past and Pres- it meet in the persons of Old Esther and Governor Hancock, ither faithful unto death to the old, and Hancock pressing on- ird, though willing to give due reverence to the stately and irgeous prejudices of the tottering Past. Increasingly, as the ama of Hawthorne’s imagination we nt forward, the conflict Pas,t ind^Present provided a theme. It was the them^when" ester counseled Arthur to begin anew, though beginning anew as not for him; it was the theme when Holgrave condemned e odious and abominable past, and when the seemingly ruined lifford found something marvelously like happiness in the hereal and intangible present; it was the theme in Zenobia’s iguished prayer to be released from the miserable bond of her cret, and when Priscilla found cheer in the thought that the ist never comes back again; and, finally, it was the theme when iriam pleaded with Donatello to forget the deed and to cast it ;hind him. It was, for Hawthorne, a question perennially recur- ng and never wholly resolved. It was like the dichotomy in that ature which, as in “The Ambitious Guest,” is at once beneficent id destructive. It was a perpetual mystery, something to brood Don endlessly, and something to give the breath of life to many meditative tale. ‘ If none of the writing of this period equals in force some of lawthorne’s best earlier efforts, it does indicate an advance to¬ ward his mature powers. The uncertainty of date of composition tust, of course, make comment guarded. Nevertheless, for one thing, the variety of thought and sentiment is marked. Ineffe tual as is “Jean Inglefield’s Thanksgiving,” it is not withoi interest. The theme seems to be the irreparable power of sin, an so, perhaps, suggests the taint of morbidity as Matthew Arnold d fined the term—distress unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistanc If this is truly the theme, it is all the more interesting in the ligi of the theorizing on the permitted existence of sin which is in plied in The Scarlet Letter and which becomes the deep unde current of thought in The Marble Faun. “The Lily’s Quest,” tO( at first glance, may seem a tale of gloom, though, solemn as it i it finds its resolution confidently in the hope of immortality. I “The Sister Years,” an essay of established date (1839), the coi trast of gloom and light becomes more explicit in the remarl of the sisters, the departing Old and the coming New Year. Th Old Year, certain enough, looks for happiness only in Etemit The New Year, however, though sobered by the awareness that th Present must unavoidably be shaded by the Past, yet pursu( her earthly course with confidence. The author himself protes that, though he should live another fifty years, he should sti reckon upon receiving something worth living for—as might we be expected of a young man so happily in love. The final sent ment seems to be that of Emerson in “The Over-Soul,” “We gi\ up the past to the objector, and yet we hope.” Not always, however, is the mood so prevailingly serious. I another New Year’s sketch, “Time’s Portraiture,” the wearinei of Time—a patched old dandy—takes its proper place among th sentiments of pathos, love, geniality, and humor. In “Peter Golc thwaite’s Treasure” the reader is charmed not only by the skilfi telling of the tale, but by the prevailing humor, by the author sympathy for eccentric old Peter, and by the heart-warming pi( tures of cheerful humanity enjoying the pleasures of a New Enj land winter day, upon which Peter gazes longingly. The praise c the New England winter is, indeed, the theme of “Snowflakes, an excellent essay similar to “Night Sketches.” Here the snowbird which skim so lightsomely through the twilight tempest have al the vigor and courage and cheer of Emerson’s Titmouse. Simila health and soundness prevail also in the historical tales—in “Endi cott and the Red Cross” and in the four stories of “Legends of th' Province House,” all characterized by an essential balance 0 ntiments, their humor, solemnity, pathos, and patriotism—above 1 , their objectivity—seemingly reflecting the thought of a writer owing increasingly at ease, more and more adapting himself to le world of men and circumstances. All these tales and essays were written before Hawthorne’s sillusionment at the Boston Custom House and at Brook Farm before he had given up hope of finding reality and happiness L action and labor among men. It might seem that these disil- isionments would be reflected in the fiction written during or ^mediately after his disappointment, though such is not the case, he children’s stories comprising Grandfather’s Chair and Bio- ■aphical Stories show nothing of his personal unhappiness, and ight have been written by the calmest, happiest thoughtful per- in imaginable. In the life of his imagination, as in world of time id place, Hawthorne’s unhappiness had been resolved by love id faith, all the disillusionments transfigured in wisdom beheld trough pensive recollections. In the prefaces to the separate little volumes now collected i one, the author protests that his stories have been composed ith a deep sense of responsibility, that he regards children as cred, and that he would not for the world cast anything into le fountain of a young heart that would embitter its waters, urthermore, as for literary reputation, he declares juvenile litera- ire as well worth cultivating as any other—and promising a nger immortality. There can be no doubt about it—he under- lok this writing with the highest intents. The tales belonging strictly under the title of Grandfather’s hair tell the history of an imaginary chair from its departure om England with the beginning of the Massachusetts Bay olony through the period of the Revolutionary War, thus pro- ding the author with the opportunity of introducing children 1 eminent personages of early American history and imbuing his laders with an appreciation of admirable traits of character, hough the moral tone is obvious, it never hangs heavily over te telling, relieved as the stories are by lively incident, humor, [^^ 7 ] and the excellent characterization of grandfather, the narrat( and the four young listeners. In his earliest tale published in The Token, “The You Provincial,” Hawthorne had imagined an old man sitting in , armchair before a fireplace telling a tale of old times to a groi of boys, though neither man nor boys were characterized. Wh he had written the Universal History for Goodrich, he had, course, inherited old Peter Parley and his juvenile audience, ai so he owed something to Goodrich. But armchairs, fireplac and storytelling were favored by Hawthorne and native to 1 most private thoughts. They were ingredients of his life in t othenvise dismal chamber in which fame was won, in his bachel quarters at Hillard’s when he gazed into the fire and thought Sophia, and when, sitting before the warm light of his firesi in the Mall Street house in Salem, he dreamed strange thir which shaped themselves to form the story of The Scarlet LetU Besides, the grandfather of Grandfather’s Chair is Hawthor himself, and the children are his own dream-children—as de cately, as imaginatively, as lovingly represented as Charles Laml “Dream-Children” in the Essays of Elia. When Grandfather looked at the fair, unworldly countenam of the children, a mist of tears sometimes bedimmed his spectad as he almost regretted that it was necessary for them to knc anything of the past or to provide aught for the future, wishii that they might always be happy, youthful creatures sportii around his chair. Still, he had the faith to believe and the wisdo to know that out of earthly experience—out of enjoyment, out suffering—could come a bliss not to be exchanged for the b( happiness of childhood, a bliss which formed a part of the susi nance for immortality. As for himself, he felt that the past had n been taken from him. The happiness of former days was a poss( sion forever. And there was something in the mingled sorrow his lifetime that became akin to happiness, after being long tre: ured in the depths of his heart. There it underwent a change, ai grew more precious than gold. Out of such depths he gazed up( the children with the tenderest affection and concern. The children, for their part, listen with the attention ar respect and love which the character of Grandfather deserv< Clara, the oldest, with feminine intuition, is sensitive to all imp [/< 95 ] tions of domestic sorrow and happiness. Laurence, a thoughtful ly, already has learned to look beneath surface meanings, Grand- ther wondering, sometimes, whether Laurence really knows lat true and profound things he has said. Charley prefers riding s stick horse to listening to stories, and is content only when aring a tale of action. So sweet a child is little Alice that it 2ms fit her infancy should be immortal. She loves to listen to randfather’s stories, though she is likely to be fast asleep in randfather’s arms before his tale is done, as sleepy as her little How kitten, which lies upon the hearth rug and basks in the irmth of the fire. So it is that the children learn of their heritage, learn what in is good and admirable, and learn what in it to live by, Grand- ther’s reproofs and praises of their interjections gently guiding eir thoughts. It is Grandfather’s trust, however, that a pro- under wisdom than his own will guide the children to extract, Dm the flowers and weeds of Time, a fragrance that will last ;yond all time. The reader, surely, may hope that the children ill become the better men and women for having listened to randfather—so calm is he, so inwardly happy, so assured of the ^ableness of life. [189] The dream of a cottage from which, on summer evening Sophia and he could hear the rippling stream that ran throug Brook Farm had proved to be of baseless fabric. Hawthorne w; weary, weary, and thrice weary of waiting so many ages to 1 united with Sophia, but what could be done? Then, perhaj emboldened by the fact that James Monroe and Company ( Boston were publishing a second and enlarged edition of Twic Told Tales in two volumes, the lovers determined to wait r longer, were married at Sophia’s home on July 9, 1842, hastene at once to the Old Manse at Concord, and there found themselv( unspeakably happy. There had been other hindrances besides financial difficu ties. So long had he and his mother and sisters lived each in h *own seclusion that it was not easy for Hawthorne even to te his mother of his intended marriage. When Sophia, in Februar 1842, had urged him to speak at home of their engagement, h had hesitated because of the strange reserve, the incapacity of fre communion in his family, which, he thought. Providence doub less meant to be a retribution for something wrong in their earl intercourse. But when, months later, early in June, he spoke t his mother, he found her quite agreeable to the marriage. The it was that he assured Sophia that thereafter, in all matters c heart and soul, he would take her for his unerring guide an counsellor—that, though he might, sometimes, perversely folio [190] s own follies, he would always, in the end, acknowledge her perior wisdom. Now when all finite obstructions between them seemed so 5 t flitting away, when fear and doubt were dissolving and yield- g to a holy awe, as when an immortal spirit draws near to the te of Heaven, there was another delay. In the blissful fortnight lich Sophia had spent at the Emerson home in Concord in June, I40, among sympathizing hearts and beautiful scenes, they had ready had their hopes of a cottage there. Then, on May 7, I42, both had gone to Concord to look at the Old Manse, which id been vacated by the death of Dr. Samuel Ripley, the aged inister of the First Church. Three days later, in the midst deep and absorbing emotions, it was decided that they were to re. in Concord, their friend Elizabeth Hoar having been the ;ent of their engaging the Old Manse. They were to be married 1 the twenty-seventh of June, the month of roses and perfect 00m, as Sophia wrote to Margaret Fuller in announcing the ent. Then, on the very day originally appointed for the wedding, awthorne received a note from Sophia saying that she was ill. here was delay after delay, Hawthorne eager to know when the inister was to appear for the ceremony, and yet assuring Sophia at he would patiently bear the postponement, and counseling ;r to keep her heart quiet—not to excite herself in this removal of T household gods. A thousand ages hence they would be only the honeymoon of their marriage. Nevertheless, he was him- If restless, and he had a night haunted by ghastly dreams in rich he dreamed that Sophia had been hypnotized, and so litated was he that he awoke in an absolute quake. He wanted morning wedding, for it would be strange and wearisome to live If a day of ordinary life at such an epoch. He would be like body walking about the city of Boston without a soul. It was, iwever, almost noon before a carriage came to pick up the Rev- md James Freeman Clarke of Boston to take him to Sophia’s ime to perform the simple ceremony. The next day Hawthorne d recovered his composure sufficiently to address his sister uise facetiously as “Dear Louse,’’ to write her that the execu- in had taken place the day before, that he and Sophia had made Christian end, and that they had come straight to Paradise. [^91] Concord town lay enfolded in great rural beauty. From hilltop opposite the Old Manse—on Peter’s Field, where Emer; and his brothers had played as boys when they came to visit th grandfather Ezra Ripley, and where Emerson as a young man 1 dreamed much of the rhapsody of Nature—this quiet beauty m spaciously manifested itself. There one looked down at the Ic extent of the river as it swept in a semi-circle around the 1 through a course of several miles, the central line of a broad v on either side, a landscape of expansive and peaceful meadt that stretched out like a small infinity, yet with a secure hoi liness on which the heart might trustfully repose. Hills horde; these meadows, hills which were wide swells of land or lo gradual ridges, some densely covered with woods. To the L at some distance, the white village of Concord appeared to embosomed among wooded eminences. Immediately below, ( caught a glimpse of the Old Manse itself among its embower: trees. Along the horizon gathered masses of those deep cloi in which the fancy might see images of all things that ever exis or were dreamed of. It required only a gentle flight of fancy to some of these clouds take the form of an immensely gigar hound crouching down, with head erect, as if guarding the g gabled roof of the old mansion. After the copious showers summer, the freshness of the encompassing verdure suggesi a world just created. Beauty hovered everywhere, though here and there it seen to scatter its charms with a special prodigality. Southward a lit from Peter’s Field, in the midst of the woods, so secluded t hardly anyone ever went there, was the solitude of Sleepy Hoik On the verge of the hollow, skirting it, shadowy oaks stretcl their long, knotted arms between the earth and sky, and shac the terraced pathway at their feet. There were chestnut trees, t and pines—a place to lie in quiet at one’s ease on a summer’s c all in a mist of one’s own musings. There one might hear the < of the catbird, or follow its shadow as it flitted across a sui spot. There the striking of the village clock came softly with disturbing the tranquillity, and the tinkling of a cowbell ming with the general harmony. There clouds—many, voluminous, ; ivy—might be scattered about the sky, like the shattered ruins a dreamer’s Utopia. In Sleepy Hollow, what a broad tide of 1 emotions and ideas might flow through the haunted regions the imagination! And still further southward—two miles, perhaps—past the age center, past Emerson’s home on the Cambridge Turn- e, and hidden among wooded hills, was peaceful Walden id—beautiful and refreshing to one’s soul. Though not very ensive, it was large enough for waves to dance upon its sur- 2, and to look like a portion of blue firmament, earth-encircled. • within its depths, its bottom of pure white sand sparkled ough the transparent water, the very purest liquid in the world ater such as only angels should bathe in. It was impossible to ine the impression made by Walden Pond and the repose and ctity of the encircling old wood. In a small and secluded dell t opened upon the most beautiful cove of the whole pond w oaks and walnuts and white pines. The dell was deeply over- dowed by these trees, though enough sunshine might penetrate shrubbery to light up the whole picture with the effect of a !et and melancholy smile. It was as if these shrubs had a spirit- life—or as if spirits were there. But it was the winding river, flowing so near the Old Manse, ich provided the greatest variety of interest—altering its en- ntments with the shifting lights and shades of day and night, nging with the changing seasons, answering many a mood, 1 leading the mind where the senses could only uncertainly 'ow. It was a sluggish stream, so slow-moving as hardly to reveal I direction of its flow. Its torpor nowhere permitted a bright ;bly shore, nor so much as a narrow strip of glistening sand in part of its course. It seemed, sometimes, too lazy to keep itself n. It was as soft as milk and always warmer than the air—so il and listless as to dissolve and steal away the vigor of those t> bathed in it. But such impressions alone would do it injus- ' Looked at from directly above, it had a slight tinge of gold. IX among the green meadows and woods, a blue gleam from urface seemed like an open eye in Earth’s countenance. At a mce, too, its water was like a strip of sky. When a north- !em breeze curled its surface on a bright, sunshiny day, it as- [^ 93 ] sumed a vivacity not its own; and when moonlight shone uj it, it was undeniably beautiful and lovely. It acquired new beauties as it slumbered along between bn meadows, or kissed the tangled grass of mowing-fields and j tures, or bathed the overhanging boughs of elder bushes and oL water-loving plants. Flags and rushes grew along its shallow rr gin; the yellow water-lily spread its flat leaves upon its surfi and the fragrant and spotless pond-lily exhaled its perfume to the region round about; the pickerel weed shot up its long st crowned with a blue spire; cardinal flowers kindled their circl flames and illuminated the dark nooks among the shrubbery. ! up stream, the river became more beautiful than any pictr with its dark and quiet sheet of water, half-shaded, half-sun between high and wooded banks. A little way below the Old Manse, down along the riversi where the elder bushes dipped into the water from the wee oozy margin, an unpretentious spot, one might see the awaken: of day over the water with undiluted delight. The coolness in air, the clear sky, the fog across the lowlands and on the surf of the river, the gentle breeze which sometimes condensed i vapor into wreaths—these were the elements of a summer morni along the Concord. At first the opposite shore of the river coi barely be discerned; but, as the sun arose, the mists gradua dispersed until only a warm, smoky tint was left along the wat( surface. The farmhouses across the river came out of the dui cloud; the voices of boys unseen shouted to cattle being driv to pasture; a man whetted his scythe, and set to work in a neij boring meadow. Another summer day had dawned along t river. Adam in Paradise could scarcely have known a grea pleasure. Still, the most beautiful river scene in Concord was that the North Branch. Though the black stream that flowed past Old Manse might, after a heavy rain, be dimpled all over w little eddies and whirlpools, the breeze blowing billows, and water weeds stretched out in the tawny current, looking as they were holding on to their roots with all their might, the No Branch, sheltered from the breeze by the woods and a lofty 1 was tranquil, and flowed quietly through the midmost privacy : deepest heart of a wood—calm, gentle, and unobtrusive. Ti [194] re rooted on the very verge o£ the water, and dipped their adent branches into it. Vines here and there twined themselves >ut bushes or aspens or alder trees, hanging their clusters of ipes over the water. It was a scene of complete and lovely se- ision. The sky, and the clustering foliage, and the effect of sun- ht as it found its way through the shade, bringing lightsome es in contrast to the quiet depth of the prevailing tints—all ?se seemed unsurpassably beautiful when beheld in upper air. t when they were seen reflected in the still water, repeated even the minutest detail, etherealized and idealized, one could see w much more beautiful reflection is than what is called reality— i reflection assuming the ideality which the soul always craves the contemplation of earthly beauty, as Socrates had explained young Phaedrus centuries ago. During a freshet, the Concord might be seen in one of its hter moods. Then the banks of the river actually laughed len the sunshine fell upon them; and the river itself was alive d cheerful, and, by way of fun and amusement, swept away my wreaths of meadow hay, and old, rotten branches of trees, d all such trumpery, which came floating downwards, whirling and and round in the eddies, or hastening onward in the main earn, to be carried into the Merrimack and onward to the i. In spring, in still another mood, after its winter imprison- ;nt, when the whole visible universe was still covered with snow, ; river broke its fetters, and then large cakes and masses of ice ne floating down the the current, which hurried along now a much swifter pace than the ordinary one of the sluggish river d. Then the river took on a noble breadth, rushed over stone lls and encroached upon fields and meadows. Trees stood in water up to their knees or their middles, and, on the surface of ; stream, tufts of bushes emerged, thrusting up their heads as o breathe. But it was impossible to capture in words all the multitudi- is facets of the ever-changing, wonderful river. It was lazy and :tle or frolicsome; it was beautiful and beneficent and, para- :dcally, threatening; but mostly there arose from it an almost inolent atmosphere of peace and quiet and repose. Sometimes, ■are and sacred moments, it awakened fleeting visions of the d—of those spiritual intangibles which satisfy the soul more [^95] than all the beauties of an actual scene. Perhaps, however, never seemed more friendly, more nearly a part of hearth ai home, than when glimpsed from the old-fashioned, many-pan western windows of the upstairs study in the Old Manse, as mirrored surface shone between the branches and foliage of t large and beautiful willow which swept against the overhang! eaves. On a drizzling summer day, when the old unpaint shingles and boards of the outbuildings behind the Manse w£ black with moisture, the breadth of the river was blurred by infinity of raindrops. Early on a winter morning, when the ancie willow stood bare and yellow, and when the earth was blanket with snow, the scene from the study windows was no less a hap wonder. Then, as the sun emerged from behind the hill of Pete Field, the firmament became a vast rose, the blush of which v reflected in the meadow-sea of river and snow and ice. If from the study windows of the Old Manse the river seem so much a part of the affairs of man, it was from the river tl the Manse might best be seen, most warmly welcoming back ir the system of human society one who had spent the day in t solitude and wildness of nature. As, on a summer’s day, c drifted his boat down the stream from the juncture of the Noi Branch, there, above the reeds and among the treetops, rose i red chimneys and the gray gabled roof of the Manse. Then, one came up the path from the river, there stood the Old Man overshadowed with its willow and environed about with 1 foliage of its orchard. Once the house had had a coat of wh paint, but the storms and sunshine of many summers had most obliterated it, and produced a sober, grayish hue entir suiting the antique form of the structure. Ancient lilac busl reached up to the northern window of the study, and a veil woodbine crept over a large part of the southern face of i house. The front door looked toward the highway througi stately avenue of balsam and ash, along which, on either side, i a wooden fence, luxuriantly covered with moss sprouting fr( the half-decayed wood, as if incorporated with it. Long gr and other herbage grew rank along the seldom-trodden avert over which sunshine mingled with a hallowed shade. An air mellow antiquity hovered over the Old Manse and its enviro There wedded pairs had spent their honeymoons, there childi [196] ad been bom, and there people had grown old and died. For le newly married Hawthornes, it offered a blissful seclusion, le more sanctified by all the life that had been lived there. But now, in preparation for Hawthorne and his bride, the [anse, in its interior, had been made, as Emerson had gayly lid, all bright and new again as a toy. The rooms which Dr. ipley had occupied for sixty years, apparently with never a coat E paint, the walls and panels and the large cross-beams having :quired a venerable and most dismal tinge of brown, were now ansformed into comfortable modem quarters. The old minister’s edroom, at the front of the southern portion of the house, be- ime, with the aid of cheerful paint and paper, a gladsome carpet, ictures and engravings, new furniture, and a daily supply of awers, one of the prettiest and pleasantest rooms in the whole orld. Directly above was the bridal chamber and, across the road passageway of the hall, a guest chamber containing the most resentable of the Doctor’s Revolutionary furniture. Upstairs, )0, in the northwest comer, was the study, which Sophia fur- ished with loving care. There she hung the pictures which she ad painted for Hawthorne in his bachelor days in Boston. There, ver a mahogany center table, covered with a crimson cloth, she png her prized astral lamp. On one of the secretaries she placed .statuette of Ceres, and opposite it a bronze vase which her friend fargaret Fuller had given her. Hawthorne sometimes wrote ated in an antique elbow chair, an heirloom of the house, which merson, too, had used while he was living with old Dr. Ripley ;id writing much of Nature. In the evening, when Sophia joined lit husband in his study, she enjoyed having him read to her while !ie sewed, he sitting the while in the ancient rocking chair with !,ulptured back inherited from his grandmother, with light of le astral lamp shining down, so it seemed to her, upon the no- lest head in Christendom. Her own studio, where she painted iid sculptured while her husband wrote, was directly beneath his iiidy. Among these cheerful and lightsome repairs and improve- [^ 97 ] merits in the interior of the old house, the exterior of whic retained the same appearance as in the Doctor’s day, they ca off all care and lived on with as much easy trust in Provident as Adam and Eve could possibly have felt before they learned th; there was a world beyond Paradise. It was good, Hawthorr thought, to live for a few summer weeks as if this world wei heaven. Presently, perhaps, a flitting shadow of earthly care an toil might mingle itself with their realities. In the meanwhil they would make it their business merely to live and to enjoy. There was no lack of events, no dulness of thought to mj the days. There was the Old Manse itself to explore, with its dai closets, and strange nooks and corners, where the ghosts of foniK occupants might hide themselves in the daytime, and stalk fort when night concealed all the sacrilegious improvements. Thoug Hawthorne and Sophia saw no apparitions, they heard stran^ noises at night, as of somebody thumping and pounding in th study, or of someone ironing in the kitchen—with a spiritu: flatiron! There was a huge garret, an arched hall dimly lighte through small and dirty windows, a twilight obscurity of cobweb where the trumpery of generations still was stored, including part of the Doctor’s library, best browsed in while the rain pa tered on the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty garn windows. At the south end of the attic, approached beneat beams and rafters roughly hewn and with the bark still on then past the rude masonry of a chimney, was one little whitewashe room known as the Prophet’s chamber, where visiting ministei had been lodged, and where the only ornament on the wall Wc a forcibly wrought picture of a clergyman, in wig, and band, an gown, holding a Bible in his hand, and staring with an eye c authority from the tattered and shriveled roll of canvas. There wa a dungeon of a cellar, too, with an outside entrance, which Lee the dog, would not enter, but where he would stand at the hea^ of the stairs and howl when Hawthorne descended. Out of doors were ample space and objects for further explora tion. The noble avenue glimmered with shadows half asleep. T its right, as one faced the highway, was the vegetable garden where bean vines clambered up the poles, where tomatoes am potatoes and squash and other plants luxuriated in the sun, am where the corn waved in the wind. To the rear were the outbuild [198] The Old Manse This sketch, found among Hawthorne’s letters, is believed to be from the hand of Sophia Hawthorne. Courtesy of the Tssex Institute. ngs, all evidencing the dilapidations of time—the barn, once tiled annually with hay, a woodshed, a hen-house, a pigeon house, nd an old stone pigsty, the open portion overgrown with tall treeds. To the rear, too, was the ancient orchard, long uncared or, yet providing an unusable abundance of apples, and peaches, nd pears, and cherries—once, probably, the old Doctor’s pride, fo the north of the Manse was an open field where an Indian vil- age had stood long ago, and where relics of the Red Man might till be found. Beyond that lay the Revolutionary battleground, v^here the embattled farmers had fired the shot heard round the vorld, though the Old North Bridge itself had long since been wept down the dark stream. All around was the bloom and fra¬ grance of nature, which, however, was secondary to the lovers, or they saw in each other’s eyes a fairer world. Days and events unfolded leisurely. In the morning Haw- home customarily repaired to his study to write, Sophia to her tudio to paint. At mid-day Hawthorne walked to the village )ost office, and perhaps spent an hour reading at the Athenaeum n the vestry of the First Church; later in the afternoon, he and Sophia walked during what seemed to them the happiest hour of he day. In the evening Hawthorne read to Sophia—Shakespeare ind Milton, and other English classics, or they studied German ogether, an occupation wherein Sophia excelled her husband, rhe garden occupied some of the day. Sophia’s mother and ather and sister Elizabeth came to visit at various times, as lid Hawthorne’s sister Louise. Friends from Boston came to call »r to remain overnight or for longer periods. Neighbors dropped n to offer helping hands. Hawthorne was invited but declined 0 lecture to the Concord Lyceum. Concord, in town meeting, ook cognizance of his presence by electing him to the office of ogreeve, a distinction facetiously bestowed upon such benedicts s it wished to honor, though the official duties of hog-catching ad ceased long ago. New friendships—Concord friendships—were lade. Hawthorne could now regard himself as a man with a ousehold—a man having a tangible existence and locality in the 'orld. The dream which he had dreamed in the hot sun of the earning docks of Boston—a dream of an escape from all weary )il, and of a never-ending companionship with Sophia—had at ist become realized. [m] Though Hawthorne had spent many years in total seclusioi from all human society, and though next to being with Sophi he still most enjoyed being alone, the years at the Old Manse wer enriched with friendships, old and new. There were Sophia’s friends who came to see her in he Paradise, or to share something of her Elysian life. Elizabetl Hoar, whom Sophia had known since Emerson had introduce! her in the days of the Charter Street home in Salem, came earl^ as Hawthorne said, to welcome the newlyweds to the etherea world, she herself so slight as to be more at home among spirit than among fleshly bodies. In Sophia’s eyes, she looked like th Rose of Sharon. She seemed ever cheerful, though she lived alwa)i in the vivid recollection of her dead fiance, Charles Emerson, witl a deep and abiding recognition of things unseen and an assuranc of reunion, and with a most unaffected sympathy with the present She had the clearest mind imaginable, the most charming mar ners and way of saying things, sang like a bird, and conducte( herself with dignity and grace—an exquisitely lovely woman Hawthorne and Sophia were indebted to her for having foun( the Old Manse for them—a bond at once material and spiritual There too, was, Margaret Euller, to whom Sophia had earl announced the intention to live in the Old Manse. Hawthorni had joined Sophia in inviting Margaret to spend part of the timi with them when she came to Concord to visit Emerson, an in vitation which Margaret accepted on a number of occasions Margaret came one day with Emerson’s friend, Sam Ward, who like Margaret, was a guest at Emerson’s home. Margaret an( Ward and Hawthorne and Sophia went down to the orchard or the river bank, where Ward and Hawthorne laid themselves or the grass while Margaret and Sophia sat on rocks. There Margare talked very brilliantly, dismissing Sophia and Ward to the housi while she continued her conversation with Hawthorne. One nigh Hawthorne walked back to Emerson’s with her after a visit, anc they stopped for some time to watch the moon struggling witl the clouds. He confided to her then that he was much more will ing to die than two months ago, for he had now some real pos session in life, though he really never wished to leave this earth or it was beautiful enough. One day, on entering Sleepy Hollow, dawthome perceived a lady reclining near the path. It was Mar¬ garet herself, who had been there all afternoon, meditating or eading. They had a long conversation—about Autumn, about the )leasures of getting lost in the woods, about the experiences of :arly childhood and their influences remaining after the recollec- ion of them had passed away, about the sight of mountains from L distance, and the view from their summits—and about other natters of high and low philosophy, when they heard footsteps, a ^oice call, and then Emerson emerged from the green shade. He lad been rambling in the woods. There were Muses in the woods oday, he said, and he heard whispers in the breezes. Margaret found the Old Manse very pleasant. Once, when her losts had gone to bed, she went out and walked until near twelve, he embowering trees standing in solemn black, hushed, and not a eaf stirring, and the moonlight filling her heart with peace. She )roposed to Sophia that her sister, Ellen, and her husband, Ellery Dhanning, be accepted as boarders at the Manse, a suggestion vhich Hawthorne declined on the grounds that the boundless reedom of Paradise would at once become finite and limited by he presence of another couple. As for Margaret herself, although le had earlier spoken of her facetiously to Sophia, he recognized ler gift of intellectual power, such as a strong man might struggle mder, and the necessity which she felt to act upon the world, and te was happy that the Old Manse cast over her, at least for a time, he spell of its tranquil spirit. Sophia, on the other hand, envel- )ped more and more in her domestic happiness, had her growing loubts about Margaret’s efforts in behalf of women’s rights. It eemed to Sophia that if Margaret were truly married, she would 10 longer be puzzled about the rights of women. Home, Sophia vas persuaded, was woman’s great arena. In the second summer at the Manse, Sophia was visited by ^nna Shaw Ward, the wife of Emerson’s cherished friend, Sam A^ard. She came in the full glory of her golden curls, which lowed free over her neck and brows, so that she looked, thought lophia, like the goddess Diana, or Aurora. To Hawthorne, she uggested the delicate pink, the grace, and the sweetness of the rethusa which he had found in Concord meadows. In the warmth •f the afternoon, guest and hosts went out upon the lawn under [ 207 ] the shady trees, Anna extending herself on the grass, leaning hex arms upon a low stool, tvhile showers of sweet discourse fell upon them all. At sunset, and in the lingering twilight, they walked to their favorite spots, the terrace on the bank of the river, and thence to Sleepy Hollow. Afterward, they repaired once again to the lawn for more conversation, while the brilliant stars came out over their heads and over the roof of the Old Manse. How different was all this from the loneliness of the third-story room of the ugly house on Herbert Street, Salem! Hawthorne still saw some of his old acquaintances. There was, for instance, Horace Conolly, who had revealed to Hawthorne the original plot of Evangeline. Conolly came to the Manse for sev¬ eral days while Sophia was visiting her parents in Boston. He was Hawthorne’s cook during the visit, and Hawthorne had to ac¬ knowledge that he could prepare the best dish of fried fish and potatoes imaginable, though he smoked constantly at his cigar, something, of course, which Sophia would have frowned upon had she been there. Conolly was an oddity, a monster—a poor monster—and a real blackguard, as Hawthorne had often told him quite frankly. Still, he was amusing, though less so now than usual, for he had a bad cold, and so was more troublesome than amus¬ ing, and Hawthorne saw him go with unspeakable relief. He and Hawthorne had dined at Longfellow’s, where the story of Acadie was probably discussed once more, Longfellow not yet having begun his poem. Perhaps Conolly responded to something in Hawthorne’s nature which gave him a Puckish interest in the grotesque, which he had once expressed in “The Haunted Quack” and in “Mrs. Bullfrog.” It may be, too, that he owed to Conolly, as to Susy Ingersoll, some of the Hathorne family legends and therefore tolerated his society. To the Manse, too, during one of Sophia’s absences, came Frank Farley, a strange, lonely man with whom Hawthorne had first discovered the secluded walks at Brook Farm, and with whom he had worked at the wearisome gold mine. Now, at the Manse, the first thing Farley did was to wash the dishes, and to [ 202 ] Dok such admirable meals as Hawthorne could not provide for imself. Farley was in the seventh heaven at the Manse, and talked nd talked and talked, while Hawthorne listened and listened and stened, with a patience, he wrote to Sophia, for which, in spite of 11 his sins, he expected to be rewarded by admission to the man- ions of the blessed. Hawthorne found an amused yet serious and itisfying contentment in making comfortable this poor, forlorn, rorld-wom, hopeless, and half-crazy man. Indeed, ever since is boyhood at Raymond, when he had played on Flatrock with Villiam Symms, or when, at Bowdoin, with Horatio Bridge, he ad visited the friendless John Russwurm, he had been drawn 5 the lowly and the unfortunate. Another Brook Farm associate who came to the Manse, and ame frequently, was George Bradford, with whom Hawthorne ad one day strolled out to the glade where the Brook Farmers 'ere entertaining themselves with that masquerade picnic which ad left such a fantastic impression on his memory. Hawthorne lought Bradford perhaps the rarest man in the world, and ophia agreed that his beautiful character made him of perennial iterest. Though a graduate of Harvard College and of the 'ivinity School, he chose, for a while, after his Brook Farm ex- erience, to spend his days in hard and earnest bodily toil by iltivating vegetables, conveying the products of his labor, in wheelbarrow, to the public market, and then retailing them out a peck of peas or beans, a bunch of turnips, a squash, a dozen irs of green corn—something that few men without some eccen- icity of character would have the moral strength to do. Yet he pssessed such strength, combined with the utmost gentleness and iiicommon regularity of nature—a perfect original, to be felt and nderstood, but almost impossible to describe. He was a valued liend of Emerson, whom he came to visit often. Sensitive, shy, :id quite unworldly, he sought one day, when he and Hawthorne lere alone on the river together, to explain his melancholy, which »parently had its seat in some hopeless, never-to-be-consum- lated affair of the heart, but Hawthorne did not encourage m, and so the secret forever remained untold. Yet Hawthorne ivited him to become a part of his household, an offer which i'adford, with a reticence equal to Hawthorne’s own, avoided i delicate delays. A bond between the two men was a mutual [205] silence. It told something of the character of Bradford that 1 edited selections from Fenelon, and wrote an essay on the phi] sophic thought in Boston, his main accomplishment being, simp] the intangible fragrance of his life. It was when the Hillards, George and Susan, came to vii at the Manse that Hawthorne felt that he and Sophia were tru being received into the corps of married people, a sanction I no means essential to their peace and well being, but yet agr( able enough to receive. It was, without doubt, a welcome sen: tion when, in the dusk of an August evening, a coach rumbli up the avenue, wheeled round at the door, and there were tl Hillards!—to be ushered into the newly furnished parlor, to su per, and, in due season, to bed. Then it was, indeed, that Ha thorne was most keenly and happily conscious of his new relatic to the world. How sweetly and pleasantly the night flitted ov them all, and passed away, to merge into a grey and sullen mor ing, the darkness hardly perceptible to Hawthorne, however, tl sunniness of his wife shining into his heart and making all war and bright. After a splendid breakfast of flapjacks and whortl berries and perch, and bream, and pouts, Hillard and Hawthon set out for a walk to Walden Pond. They stopped for Emerso who accompanied them, though, because it was Sunday mornin he scrupulously detained them till after the people got in church. At Walden, Hillard and Hawthorne bathed in the brig] waters of the pond. After dinner, again at the Manse, all went take their several siestas during a showery afternoon. When the guests left at seven on Monday morning, Sophia and Hawthon felt pleased with the visit, though they were pleased, likewis to be left again to each other. For Hillard, Hawthorne had tender affection—this melancholy shadow of a man, whose care^ of perpetual action was impeded and harassed by the rarest i his powers and the richest of his acquirements—his literary talen —so that he was left a weary and world-wom spirit. With Longfellow, as with Hillard, Hawthorne retained his ol intimacy. When Hawthorne’s tale “The Birthmark” appeare in the short-lived magazine of James Lowell and Robert Carte the Pioneer, Longfellow urged his friends to read this remar] able story, well recognizing that the tale culminated in an id( which he himself had ardently advocated in the first years of h [204] endship with Hawthorne. In the year following Hawthorne’s irriage, Longfellow, after a long and often unpromising court- ip, had married Frances Appleton, and then had found the ace so bravely but restlessly sought after in “Footsteps of igels” and “A Psalm of Life.” At last, so it seemed to Haw- orne, his friend had bloomed forth and found solidity and bstance. Never was there a man of happier aspect—apparently rfectly satished, and no more conscious of any earthly or spir- lal trouble than a sunflower might be—of which lovely blossom, iwthorne knew not why, Longfellow reminded him. In the years at the Manse, too, Hawthorne began his friend- ip with James Russell Lowell, who, leaving a law office in Bos- a, had ventured with his equally youthful and idealistic friend, jbert Carter, upon the editorship of the Pioneer, which ran r three excellent issues and then collapsed, leaving Lowell bank- pt, and his creditors long unpaid. Hawthorne had contributed a etch and a tale, “The Hall of Fantasy” and “The Birthmark,” d had found it necessary, in the midst of increasing financial [Acuities, to wait for payment as patiently as possible. But Lowell d been so forthright in the statement of his embarrassment that ere could be no barriers of unpleasant feelings, the common erary struggle of the two men becoming a bond of understand- g and friendship. When Lowell had recovered enough hope in e future to marry Maria White, one of the very first journeys the young couple was to Concord and the Old Manse. On this occasion, on a wintry day in December, Lowell and iwthorne had wandered down to the site of the old bridge, the ittleground, and the grave of the two British soldiers who had den in that early skirmish of the Revolution. As the friends lod over this grave, Lowell told Hawthorne a tradition of b inhabitants below—how, the British having retreated, and If Americans in pursuit, the scene of strife was thus deserted, ly^outh employed chopping wood at the Manse hurried down to f battlefield with axe still in hand. There he found one Briton forpse, another painfully raising himself upon his hands and ees and giving the youth a ghastly stare into his face. With- thought, the boy uplifted his axe and dealt the wounded idler a fatal blow upon the head. Though Hawthorne had some abts about the truth of this story, he wished that the grave [205] might be opened to know whether one of the skulls had the mt of an axe in it. It would be an interesting intellectual and mo exercise, he thought, to follow that poor youth through his si sequent career to observe how his soul might have been tortui by that bloodstain. That one circumstance bore more fruit i Hawthorne than all that history told of the fight, a valued g which Lowell had so casually given him. At the Manse, moreover, life-long Concord friendships w( made, friendships for ever affecting Hawthorne’s personal 1 or providing suggestions for sketches or stories immortalizi these associations of his early maturity. Ellery Channing, even before Margaret Fuller had spoken his behalf, had come with Emerson to dine at the Manse, Ell< having long been known to Sophia. Hawthorne’s first impressi was that Ellery was a gnome. A month later Ellery, who had be staying at Emerson’s while looking for a place to live in Concoi called at the Manse one evening, early in September, to consi Hawthorne about contributing to the Boston Miscellany^ of whi he mistakenly assumed that Hawthorne was to be editor. Ha thome had a better opportunity upon this occasion to obser Ellery, who was fourteen years his junior, and whom he thought as a mere lad. He saw Ellery now as one of those queer and clev young men whom Emerson was continually picking up as a ge ius, though Hawthorne saw little or no originality in his int lect, whatever he might have in his character. Ellery, too, it a peared, regarded himself as a genius, and ridiculously held his ov verses as too sacred to be sold for money (not that anybody wou be likely to offer gold for them), though his prose he was willii to sell to the highest bidder. Nothing, thought Hawthorne, w more wearisome than such false originals. Still, he liked Elle well enough. He liked Ellery well enough to contemplate inviting him stay at the Manse during one of Sophia’s absences; but on secoi consideration he thought the idea hazardous. Indeed, he regard Ellery, sometimes, as little better than an idiot, who ought to ha [ 206 ] )een whipped often and soundly in his boyhood, so whimsical vas he and so prone to quarrel. Still, when Emerson called and poke of a volume of Ellery’s poems presently to be published with evisions by Emerson and Sam Ward, poems which Emerson egarded as “poetry for poets,” and when Emerson, on another lay, read a letter of Ellery’s written in a style of very pleasant lumor, Hawthorne listened patiently and not without sympathy, -le agreed with Emerson that Ellery, though much of the time a 'ery common and unedifying sort of person, was nevertheless iften very good company. On a fishing excursion, when he and Lllery sat waiting expectantly for their corks to go under, or when hey turned their boat aside into the North Branch, they cast away 11 irksome forms and straitlaced habitudes, and had strange and lappy times. What wild, free hours they knew then, and, when hey had landed at some sheltered spot and sat beside their fire of alien boughs, in what fantastic speculations they then indulged! Ellery had moved to Concord, attracted, not by the village, mt by Emerson, living first in what he called the Red Lodge, n the huge marsh below Emerson’s home, and, later, in the (Vidow Barrett’s cottage below Ponkawtasset, the lonely hill where le sought to be what Emerson had called “Man on the farm,” ather than a farmer. And so he and Hawthorne saw a good deal »f each other. One July night, in the last summer of Hawthorne’s esidence at the Manse, Ellery knocked at the door to fetch Haw- horne and his boat to go in search of the body of a young woman /ho, in a fit of melancholy and misery, had drowned herself in the iver. Ellery took the oars and Hawthorne the paddle, and thus aey went rapidly down the stream a good distance below Hunt’s '•ridge, where they saw lantern lights on the bank and the dim gures of people waiting for them. There they took two other len into the boat, and then Hawthorne paddled back and forth ast the point where the unhappy girl was supposed to have itered the water, while Ellery and the other men, with rake id hooked poles, probed the river depths. When the body was aally brought to the surface, dimly in the starlight, the hair inging down and the wet garments covering limbs perfectly in- exible, the whole figure the very image of a death agony, Haw- Lome thought that he had never witnessed or imagined a wilder lidnight scene, a spectacle of such perfect horror. It was a scene [207] which he never forgot. Seven years later, in the mysterious mi gling of Hawthorne’s memory and imagination, Hollingswort Miles Coverdale, and old Silas Foster hastened at midnig through darksome fields and pastures, and across a portion of t] meadow of Blithedale Farm, to the black pool where lay, her fa upward, the tragic Zenobia, once so lustrously beautiful, so full warm and mirthful life, her last struggle against Providence nc ended. She had done with playing at philanthropy and progre but had become a part of immortal literature in the pages of Ti Blithedale Romance. Henry Thoreau, too, was among the first visitors at the Man; charmed by Hawtho rne’s mu sic box^ and delighted when Soph offered to lend it to him at the very moment when he had sui moned the courage to ask for it. When he came to dine late August, Hawthorne saw him as a singular character—as ugly sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with rustic yet courteoi manners which corresponded very well with his exterior. The was much of wild original nature in him, he was a keen and de^ cate observer of nature, and to engage him in conversation w like listening to the wind among the boughs of a forest tre though there was a high and classic cultivation in him, to Thoreau’s essay on the “Natural History of Massachusetts,’’ whk appeared in the Dial, Hawthorne considered a good article—! true, minute, and literal in observation, yet giving the spirit : well as letter, revealing the ^vild beauty of the scenes describe and including passages of cloudy and dreamy transcendental met physics, as well as passages showing the real poetry in him. Thei was good sense and moral truth in the article, too. Though Ha^ thorne presently came to see that it was probably best to meet sue a sturdy and uncompromising person only occasionally in th open air and not as an intimate in one’s family, he found Thorea on the whole, a healthy and wholesome man to know. Thoreau, poor fellow, Avas in want of money, and offere to sell Hawthorne his boat, in which he and his brother Joh had some years before rowed doAvn the Concord and into tl Merrimac, an excursion of Avhich Thoreau told someAvhat t HaAvthorne. So a bargain Avas struck for seven dollars, and HaA thorne became OAvner of the “Musketaquid,” a name Avhich 1 changed to the “Pond Lily,’’ as appropriate to the beautiful floA [ 208 ] rs which grew along the river’s weedy shore below the Manse, 'horeau volunteered to give the new owner a lesson in rowing ad paddling, and Hawthorne was amazed to see how the boat, hich in his own hands seemed bewitched, turning in every di¬ ction except the right one, under Thoreau’s management be- )me as docile as a trained steed, Thoreau assuring his friend lat it was only necessary to will the boat to go in a particular irection, and she would immediately take that course. Other expeditions on the river in the “Pond Lily’’ followed, id walks, too, in Thoreau’s favorite rural haunts—saunterings id conversations which Thoreau was to remember with nostalgia, ; having occurred in old heroic times, along the banks of the :amander, amid the ruins of chariots and heroes. In the first inter at the Manse, Thoreau and Emerson joined Hawthorne ae afternoon in skating down the river. Sophia, who watched the io, regarded Thoreau’s dithyrambic dances and leaps on the e as very remarkable, but very ugly—not comparable to the ately and grave movements of her husband, who, wrapped in is cloak, moved like a self-impelled Greek statue. Emerson, who ailed behind his companions, pitched head-foremost, half lying n the air, as if, Sophia thought, too weary to hold himself erect, /hen the Concord Lyceum had opened its winter season, horeau took Hawthorne, and Hawthorne’s publisher friend, I’Sullivan, who was visiting Hawthorne, to hear a lecture by harles Lane, one of the Englishmen whom Amos Bronson Alcott lid a few months before brought home with him on his return bm England. Lane, in Hawthorne’s eyes, was one of those queer lortals with which the poor little village was infested, a bore of :very intense water. Much more agreeable to Hawthorne, in the it summer at the Manse, were the hours which he spent with horeau in his hermitage at Walden, when Thoreau talked about ;ae trees and Indian relics, subjects about which Thoreau knew lich and spoke infectiously. Hawthorne himself came to find a 'Id interest in the former site of the Indian village adjacent ' the Manse—found his imagination more excited by it than the historic celebrity of the battleground itself, and took ' exquisite delight in picking up for himself an arrowhead that [2op] was dropped centuries ago and never handled since. The Mans( and its environs were made better known and dearer to hin through the enthusiasm of his friend Thoreau. Thoreau and Channing were younger than Hawthorne by i dozen years or more, and, though excellent companions at Walder or on the river or on walks along secluded woodland paths, wher the conversation might be as wild and free as the heart could de sire, neither, whatever his secret aims, had yet attained anything beyond a faint promise of literary accomplishment. In their pres ence, therefore, Hawthorne could feel an ease bom of mature] years and of a knowledge that, after all, he had done something and was on the way to further attainments. With Emerson, matters were somewhat different. Emersor was a year older than Hawthorne, with a considerable literary reputation. His little blue volume. Nature, had set some youth ful minds aspinning; his address “The American Scholar,” before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, had established a new and higher standard for such addresses; his address before the graduating divinity students at Harvard had aroused a tempest in theological and philosophical circles, and had made his name known; his poems, it seemed to some of his readers, had a tone that promised immortality; and, more recently, his volume ol Essays, with its discourses on “Self-Reliance,” “Compensation,’ “Love,” “Friendship,” “The Over-Soul,” and other topics, hat firmly established his literary standing. Abroad, as well as a home, his genius was recognized. In Boston the mantle of Intel lectual leadership, long worn by the revered Dr. Channing, hae fallen upon Emerson’s shoulders. Thoreau, reading Nature whil a student at Harvard, found it the guide for his future thinkinj and living. Ellery Channing had but one reason for settling ii Concord—because he regarded Emerson superior to any mai he knew, living or dead. There was no doubt about it: Emersor as man or author, had a compelling magnetism. Harvthorne, how ever, ever since his days at Bowdoin, had declined to move ot of his own orbit. Norv, in Concord, his natural reseiw'e, his ol [ 270 ] ibits of solitude, and unwillingness to be anything but himself emed, for a time, to be a barrier between himself and his famous iwnsman. Sophia, of course, had known Emerson for some years, and garded him with admiration that amounted to adoration, awthome’s acquaintance was of more recent origin, though he ust have seen Emerson in Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore in oston. Once he had declined a ticket to a lecture by Emerson 1 the grounds that he never had the good luck to profit by at- nding lectures, and that his evenings were very precious to him. he two men saw each other, also, at Brook Farm, where Emer- n was an occasional visitor. Neither man, at this time, seems I have made on the other anything but a passing impression. Two :ars or more after the publication of Twice-Told Tales Emer- n had read nothing from Hawthorne’s pen. But when, in the first week in May, 1842, Hawthorne and )phia, sent by Elizabeth Hoar, came to look at the Old Manse id called at Emerson’s home, the atmosphere had greatly altered, ow, seeing the man face to face, Emerson liked Hawthorne well, id cordially and enthusiastically welcomed him to Concord—a elcome all the warmer because of Emerson’s affection for Sophia id his admiration of her talents. He was greatly indebted to her r the admirable medallion which she had made of his beloved other, Charles, and which had been the first link, too, in the iendship between Sophia and Elizabeth Hoar. Emerson was the more elated over Hawthorne’s proposed sidence in Concord because he was cherishing the hope that Concord might be formed a neighborhood of unrivaled com- .ny, so that those who did not believe in communities like l ook Farm might have their hearth and home in Concord with ;e belief that of such neighborhoods the kingdom of heaven ight be built. There, in Concord, one might find a solid social iiisfaction, instead of the disgust and depression of living thickly :gether. In the Concord neighborhood there should be metes and - unds, instead of the confounding and chaos of visiting. In such meighborhood they might find that each was more completely •lated and sacred than before. What kings and queens would .mcord not have with the Hawthornes there, and Ellery Chan- ag, and Thoreau, and Alcott! And if he could induce, also, [211 ] his friends Margaret Fuller, George Bradford, Charles Newcoml and Frederic Hedge to come. Concord would have fair prospec indeed. When, therefore, the Hawthornes were established at tf Manse, no Concord visitor came more frequently than Emersoi He was one of the first mortals, as Hawthorne said, to ventui within the sacred precincts of their Paradise and to be feaste on their nectar and ambrosia. He did his best, too, to indue Hawthorne to return his visits. When Alcott returned from En; land in the autumn, with the Englishmen Charles Lane an Henry Wright, Emerson invited Hawthorne to his home to hee these men unfold their doctrine of social life. George Ripley an Brook Farm came in strength, too; and so Hawthorne saw mar of his former companions. On what Emerson called the Goo Friday after Thanksgiving, when it was his custom to gather h family and a few friends for dinner, Hawthorne and Sophi were invited, a gesture which welcomed his guests into the mo intimate regions of his family life. There were other dinners : Emerson’s, too, and Sophia came sometimes to see Lidian, Erne son’s wife, and borrowed books from her. There were visits and walks and talks. It was Emerson wh introduced Hawthorne to Walden Pond; they enjoyed togethe the silences of Sleepy Hollow, and the infinite variety of th river. Once, in delicious Indian-summer weather, when the da^ were mild, and sweet, and perfect, they went on a walking « cursion to Harvard Village, twelve miles away, and were gon two days and a night, to see the Shaker community there. Thoug their walk had no incidents, it needed none, for both had s much to say that they could have filled with conversation muc longer days. They talked about the domestic romances perhap taking place in the cottages which they passed, much as Hav thorne had mused upon such matters in his lonely walks in th Berkshires; they spoke of unhappiness in love, and of hotv poei were taught to write well of such matters by their own disappoin ments; they spoke of Walter Savage Landor, whom Emerson ha visited during his trip to Europe, and of Sir Walter Scott, whor both had read eagerly as boys. It was good talk, Emerson thoughi and pleasant to have one’s fill of walking and sunshine. For Hav thorne the event was colored by his memory of some fringo [212] jntians which they saw growing by the roadside, so beautiful lat he longed to turn back and take them to his wife. The night )ent at the tavern in Harvard Village, where the landlord had ven his best attention to their wants, was the first and only night lat he had slept away from Sophia. It was the first time in his fe, too, he recollected, that he had ever come home, for he had ever had a home before. There were other hours of good talk. Early in April one day, hen the ground was yet covered with snow and slush, the Manse npty and desolate because Sophia was away in Boston, and hen Hawthorne was trying, by sawing and splitting wood, to ;lieve his inward unquietness, Emerson came with a sunbeam i his face, and there follow'ed much conversation. Emerson was ill of praises of Margaret Fuller, whom he regarded as the great- ,t woman of ancient or modern times; he spoke of Channing’s Dems, and of Thoreau’s approaching departure for New York, id of the benefits that Henry might derive therefrom, and of harles Newcomb, and of the strange turns of his mind. There as talk of Brook Farm, of its singular moral aspects, and of the eat desirability that its progress and development should be ob- rved and its history written. In taking his leave, Emerson threat- led to come again, unless Hawthorne should call on him soon, lawthorne had gone back to chopping wood, not sorry for the iterruption, for the talk had been as good as he ever remembered :,ving with Emerson. In the interval, he had, for a little while, :rgotten the emptiness and desolation of the Old Manse. He had, ;o, grown closer to his friend. Beyond doubt, the two men found each other congenial com- mions; still, they were both individualists, repellent particles aching only at tangents—or so it seemed. When it was that rnerson first began reading Hawthorne’s writings does not ap- ;ar; but, in early September, after the Haw'thomes’ arrival at the nnse, Emerson entered into his diary a statement indicating that I had experimented with reading his townsman’s fiction. Haw- brne’s reputation as a writer, it seemed to Emerson, w^as a very );asing fact, because his writing was not good for anything, and I'S was a tribute to the man. It may be a puzzling statement, though out of it comes evi- ace of impatience with Hawthorne’s writing, and a distinction between the writing and the man. To be sure, in weighing Emf son’s judgment, the concept that art is something aloof fro life, not to be confused with it, and somehow superior to it, mu be put aside, for Emerson believed nothing of the kind. Rathe he belonged in the tradition of Plato and Plotinus and Milton believing that character is nature in its highest form, that art is bi initial, that the sweetest music is not in the oratorio, but in tl human voice when it speaks, from its instant life, tones of tende ness, truth, or courage. If Emerson was expressing a lack of i terest in Hawthorne’s fiction, he was nevertheless praising Hai thome himself in the highest terms he knew, and this sentimei he expressed publicly and in the privacy of his diary over ar over again. If he thought his friend and neighbor a better crit than writer, he nevertheless thought that one of the greate honors of the little town of Concord was the presence of Ha^ thome. Never had he had a moment’s regret or uneasine since Hawthorne’s arrival. In the person of Hawthorne, natui had given him a precious sign. How cloistered and constitutional sequestered was Hawthorne from the market and gossips—ho tme and genuine! Hawthorne’s fiction itself, however, did not leave Emersc untouched. Rather laughably, when the Emerson family was d bating the replacement of the dining room fireplace by a stove, was the influence of Elizabeth Hoar and the appearance of Hat thome’s essay “Fire-Worship,” in praise of fireplaces and in di paragement of iron stoves, that saved the dining room fireplace and sent the stove into Emerson’s study, greatly to his advantag he thought. But in the second summer of their Concord con panionship, on a day early in June, when the woods were drean ing, when the river was all circles and dimples and lovely glean ing motions, and when the whole sky was opal, the two men had walk and such talk as sent Emerson, on his return home, to reading of Hawthorne’s “Celestial Railroad.” It was a tale whic Emerson had not read before—a charming dream-allegory, a amusing satire suggested by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, an gayly ridiculing some aspects of contemporary thought repr sented in part by Giant Transcendentalism, a miscreant impo sible to describe and shouting in a phraseology so strange th: the hearer could not know what was meant, nor whether to I couraged or affrighted. In that sketch, thought Emerson, what ene strength did not Hawthorne attain! It was something, in is low life, which one could not afford not to praise. And when, : editorship of the defunct Dial behind him, Emerson was lin toying with thoughts of an ideal magazine, Hawthorne’s me was among those of writers whom he would choose for his atributors. Hawthorne, on his part, approached Emerson’s writing with ual hesitancy and questioning. His first expressed opinion, when ; Concord acquaintance began, was that Emerson was a mystic, etching his hand out of cloud-land, in vain search for something il, a great searcher for facts, which seemed to melt away and come insubstantial in his grasp. Nevertheless, rather astonish- yly even in his own eyes, he went to hear Emerson lecture len the Concord Lyceum season opened in the fall. Though he ne to believe that Emerson was a poet of deep beauty and great idemess, Emerson as a philosopher, he protested, had noth- y for him. In the past, perhaps, he might have come to aerson for the master word to solve the riddle of the universe, t now, that riddle having been solved through his love for phia, he was perfectly happy, and had no question to put to is prophet and sage. Eurthermore, Hawthorne was, beyond radventure, annoyed by the hobgoblins of flesh and blood lich were attracted to Concord by the influence of this great ginal thinker—the young visionaries and the gray-headed the- sts, the bats and owls and a whole host of night birds drawn ther by the beacon of Emerson’s intellectual fire. It was difli- It, under the circumstances, to view the world as it precisely s. Nevertheless, as for the man Emerson, it was good to meet him the wood-paths, or in the avenue of the Manse, with that pure lellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the garment a shining one. He was so quiet, so simple, so unpretentious, :ountering each man as if expecting to receive more than he aid impart. It was difficult not to yield to his kindling smile— It to feel and share his repose, what Sophia had called his oceanic ;m. Eor Sophia he remained one of the noblest of men, always cdially received at the Manse, where his presence, despite her • 'asure in being alone with her husband, was no more of an in- [2^-5] trusion than a sunset or the warbling of a bird. Admiration, i spect, and affection—these were the sentiments with which Em( son was greeted when he entered the door of the Old Manse, all the friends its most honored and welcome guest. It was no wonder, then, that when time had obliterated '< petty annoyances, when perspective had arranged all things t cording to their proper proportions, and when memory and t] ideal had become one, that this most eminent of Hawthom( friends should presently appear fictionized as Ernest in “Tl Great Stone Face,” that greatest and noblest personage of f time reflecting the same quiet, the unobtrusiveness, the simplicit that brightening intelligence, and that shining presence as of oi who had been talking with angels which Hawthorne had i marked in Emerson. But “The Great Stone Face” is not only tribute to Emerson as a great and noble personage: it embodi some of Emerson’s most characteristic and cherished convictior Nothing could be nearer the essence of Emerson’s ideas thj the revelation that Ernest’s words had power because they a corded with his thoughts, and that his thoughts had reality at depth because they harmonized with the life that he had alwa lived, or that being and character are nobler than any strain ^ poetry written by the grandest of poets. How perfectly, after all, had Hawthorne comprehended tl thinker as well as the man, and with what imagination and syr pathy had he entered into his thoughts! When Hawthorne gai to his friend Longfellow the plot of Evangeline, a generous dec provided the genesis of a story which has entered into the vei fabric of our literary heritage. “The Great Stone Face” has no le been absorbed into our national life, read by every boy and gh and lingering in the adult memory with a pleasant and augmente understanding of character and literary ideals—a beautiful an wonderful token of a friendship that flowered in walks to Walde Pond, in Sleepy Hollow, along the river, and in many a conve sation in the Old Manse in Concord. Other friends came to the Manse. J. L. O’Sullivan, publishc of The Democratic Review, to which Hawthorne was contribu [216] y, spent several days in Concord. Horatio Bridge and Franklin erce, Hawthorne’s Bowdoin College friends, came also—they d O’Sullivan, with their political connections, yet to be very Ipful to Hawthorne in quite worldly ways. There came, also, iwthome’s Salem friend, David Roberts, a bachelor and a law- r, a writer on legal subjects, participating a little in local poli- s, but quiet and detached, a lonely man who had apparently ver found his proper niche, and whose bonds of friendship with iwthome neither ever revealed. Young George William Curtis, ^outh at Brook Farm after Hawthorne’s departure, now living the country in Concord, walked over sometimes to enjoy the icid influences of the Manse, to sit an hour with Hawthorne, d to enjoy Sophia’s tender solicitude for her husband. There ;re neighbors who were kind and friendly, with no reference to erary or intellectual affinities. Mrs. George Prescott was per- tually doing what she would not allow Sophia to pay for, and lat Sophia often could not pay for. She papered the kitchen th her own hands and employed her man to do some carpenter )rk about the house. She sent Indian cakes and big loaves of imemade bread. Her small son, George, ran errands, and took re of Leo, the dog, while the Hawthornes were away in Boston Salem. In short, a new family had been gathered, with the stomary associations of abode, of friends, and of all the old niliar human relationships. Hawthorne had at last found a me. The truth was, however, that both Hawthorne and Sophia re happiest when friends and guests had gone, and when they ire left alone to enjoy each other’s companionship. In the first i/s at the Manse, they wandered down to the sleepy river, where ^ was so silent and so solitary that they seemed the only persons iing, a new Adam and Eve. They sat beneath their stately trees, •ling that they were the rightful inheritors of the old abbey, die the leaves seemed to rustle a welcome. They ran races down avenue, and Sophia danced before her husband to the ac- :npaniment of the strains of their music box, as joyful as two Idren. The seasons and the years offered them new delights. They c aged on the river constantly, gathering pond lilies and cardinal [217] 1/ flowers, luxuriating in the warmth of the summer sun, or enjoy the cool of tree-shaded nooks. Often they walked to Sleepy F low. In the autumn, summer seemed to linger there, and thoi scarcely a green thing could be seen save the pines, the yoi birches still retained their yellow leaves and the oaks were sti deep, dusky red. Millions of leaves strewed the woods and rust underfoot, though enough remained on the trees to m; a melancholy harping as the wind passed through them, the meadow there were fringed gentians, some blighted, otf still perfect. Sleepy Flollow, after the first snowstorm, was wonc fully beautiful, and provided slides where they slid and climl and shouted in abandon. When deeper snows came, they were often confined to house, Hawthorne shoveling paths to the woodshed and the w while Sophia, with wadded dress and muff and tippet on, prc enaded, for exercise, in the upper hall, where winds rusl through a broken windowpane. On the long winter evenings tl preferred to sit in the study, and Hawthorne read from Sha speare or perhaps spoke of his boyhood in Raymond, thor sometimes the roaring and the whistling of the wind thror and about the Old Manse made reading or conversation imp sible. Almost daily, in the afternoon, Hawthorne walked to i village post office and read for an hour at the Athenaeum, Sopl occasionally braving the wintry winds to accompany him. Sor times, in the dead winter, the snow of their avenue was untn den for weeks by any footsteps but those of Hawthorne alone. But when winter had gone, when the river had broken and the last cake of ice had disappeared, and the last vestige snow had melted from gullies and hollows; when sheltered patcl of land had become a beautiful and tender green, and the tre though still leafless, appeared full of life, ready to burst foi their foliage, the long months of confinement were forgotten the hope and promise of spring. Then it was Hawthorne’s i pulse to lie in the sun, or wander about and look at the revn of Nature from her deathlike slumber. In the orchard the bii presently went sweetly mad, the rage of their song driving th( hither and thither in a tornado of fine music. On such a spri day Sophia walked in the orchard, persuaded in ecstasy of 1 ippiness that there never was such air, such a day, such a sky, id such a God. In the second year at the Manse, while Hawthorne, on winter Tnings, was reading through the plays of Shakespeare, Sophia as sewing small garments. It became a little game between them lat when she had finished one, she would hold it up for his Imiration, and he would say, “Pray, who is that for?” Mornings, eanwhile, Sophia was busy in her studio copying Emerson’s “En- ^mion,” and in her painting was finding a record of these happy, Dpeful days. Presently, on the morning of March 3, 1844, after n awful hours in getting across the threshold of life, Una was im, and Hawthorne experienced the sober and serious happi- ;ss that springs from the birth of a child, realizing that now ; had truly been woven into the somber texture of humanity. His study became very different when, one morning, his ttle two-week-old daughter was carried up to him, as pretty as white rose. Indeed, the whole routine of his life was altered, )r, when their maid left them, he volunteered to do the house ork, while Sophia, babe on arm, stood by to watch and give di¬ ctions. He was a marvel, Sophia thought, at getting the baby to eep. Presently, when Una was older, when he stretched out on le floor to entertain her, Sophia thought it the prettiest sight lat ever was, and could have danced at any moment. They taught IT nursery rhymes, Una insisting on marrying Bobby Shafto, lOugh her father told her that he would never allow Bobby to ive her. One winter evening, when the trees were crystal chande- l;rs, it gretv dark before the lamps were lighted, and the moon ise up from behind Peter’s Hill, brightening the crystals like fining scimitars, while Una stood transfixed with her hand tward the window and the winter beauty. They lighted no lamp tat evening. In the last spring at the Manse, when Una was out : her leading strings, she ran over the green grass of the avenue 1 continual exultation, as if she possessed the earth, or as if she i^re in the first Paradise. In Sophia’s view, Una was astonish- gly beautiful, so lofty and grave, her gray eyes perfect and ■ifathomable. Hawthorne himself could scarcely believe that he ns the father of this beloved child, the thought coming to him i-th a mighty and incomprehensible rush of wonder. Sophia, of course, had long been reading Hawthorne’s stori< Now, after her marriage, she regarded it a rare privilege to he her husband read his manuscript aloud to her, as he sometim did, with such true expression and in a voice of such swe thunder. Nevertheless, in his tvritings, the man she knew as h husband was only faintly shadowed, the half not being told thei He echoed no one, but was himself and nobody else. She did n pretend to have searched out his intellect, but she reposed in it upon some elemental force which always seemed just create Though his shyness was very evident, he faced occasions like man. Though his manner was regal, obviously he was not boi to mix in a general society, for he lacked the gift of speech, h vocation being to observe and not to be observed. Though h will was strong, it was not to govern others, his love of power b ing as little as that of any mortal. She was charmed by his frol wit, by his simplicity, his sweetness, his magnanimity, his wisdor his unt\"orldliness. The panoply of his reserve she saw as a prot dential shield to the delicacy of his nature. She saw, too, wii tenderest reverence, that he -waited upon God like a child. Sophia’s thought might not compass her husband, but he sati fied her beyond all things, and she thanked Providence for sue a destiny as hers. She had discovered a true -wife’s world in tl profound shelter of her home. To gratify her husband’s taste, si would daily put on a velvet robe, and pearls in her hair. It w; beyond tvords enchanting to be alone with him, to look up an see his arch glance, his radiant smile, his look of love and syr pathy upon her—his brow white and serene, his large lids ca down. She esteemed herself the happiest of women. Etemit heaven, and God were all around her. She could not conceive ( a separation for one moment from him who was so transfuse with her otvn being. If, for a little while, a shadow should t\Ta his material form from her sight, she prayed that she might n( doubt the eternity of their love. As for Hawthorne, it was Sophia’s cheerfulness of which li most frequently thought tvhen he contemplated the blessings ( his maiTiage. Since he himself had lived so many years in s elusion, it tvas no -wonder that all his desires should be satisfif I his associations with Sophia; but since she had come from e midst of many friends and a large circle of acquaintance, he anked God that he sufficed for her boundless heart. When they ere confined to the Old Manse by an endless number of rainy lys, and when he gazed disconsolately upon the sombemess of iture from the study window, feeling little other than a cloud mself, the gloom could not pervade her. Rather, she conquered and drove it away, and got into the recesses of his heart, and one all through him. So, too, in the depths of wdnter, when eir avenue remained untrodden for weeks. During her absence, hen he sat in Grandmother’s Chair after supper, in meditation Don his writing for the morrow, and thinking of many things, e great thought of her was among all other thoughts, like the ^rv'ading sunshine falling through the branches and boughs of tree. She was like Spring itself—fresh and det\ry, full of hope id cheerfulness, and, with a bird-like voice, always singing, and mce renewing and recreating the weary spirit. He had, indeed, arried the Spring. He was husband to the month of May! But, as in the days of courtship, when he had pondered the ystery of their love, and when he had thought of Sophia as a aman, yet as an angel, too, his basic feelings about her still sted upon his religious convictions. When, on a Sunday mom- g, she read aloud the Sermon on the Mount, he thought that e read it so beautifully that even the author of it might be satis- d with such an utterance. He respected her religious sentiments, id the Sabbath seldom went by without some observance, Dugh, while she was at church, he might be worshiping in a nple not built with hands—perhaps under an oak tree in Peter’s P=ld with Leo, the dog. One evening early in April, in their lit year at the Manse, when they sat together in his study in the jlden light of sunset, he inscribed on one of the windows, with ►phia’s diamond, some words of Sophia’s—“Man’s accidents are .*d’s purposes.” It was a religious conviction which he shared, I ich he associated with Sophia, and which joined him to her at h depths of their beings—something that he never forgot, even this very darkest hours. In his most solemn and sacred moments, ^en he was most aware of his love for Sophia and of his own I plessness in a world of time and apparent chance, his thoughts iher blended inevitably with his religious faith. [221] She was, however, a fellow human being, a woman, and wife. When Sophia was away in Boston, and he returned to deserted and lonely old parsonage, it was with no such heart-spr as if he were to be welcomed by her loving smile. At night, wl she was not there, he sought her, in his sleep, in the empty va tude of their bed. Wherever he went, with whomsoever he i talking, his thought was of her. How their hearts would n together when they met again, how they would clasp one anotl in their arms and be silent! He shivered to think of how mi he loved her. Soon, soon, she would be coming back home—w their beloved baby in her arms! Life heaved and swelled neath him like a brimful ocean. What a happy home they h; Never was he so happy as now—never had he such a wide capac for happiness, yet overflowing with all that the day and ev moment brought. Long ago, when his mother was contemplating a departi from the home in remote Raymond, the boy Hawthorne h pleaded that she remain there where he had been so very hap] With her children about her, shut out from the world, and wi nothing to disturb them, how delightfully the time would pa So to live would be to live in a second Garden of Eden. No after his marriage, he seemed once again in Paradise, though, ( ternally, the Manse in which he and Sophia lived had very mu the aspect of a pleasant old domicile on earth. They seemed, li Enoch, to have been translated to a heavenly state of being, wii out having passed through death—perhaps in the deep and qui rapture of some long embrace. There was, indeed, something mo awful in their happiness than in any sorrow, sorrow being eart ly and finite—happiness being composed of the texture and st stance of eternity, so that, as spirits really still embodied, th might well tremble at it. They were, however, on earth, and just notv Hawthorne f that he would rather be on earth than in the seventh Heav of the poets. Now it was as if the original relation between M and Nature were restored in his case. The fight tvith the wor [ 222 ] e struggle of a man among men, the agony of the universal ef- rt to wrench the means of life from a host of competitors—all is was now like a dream. Life and the world seemed transformed. 3W, after a week of rainy days, when the sun shone forth again, was as if the world were newly created. The dreariness and aviness of earth’s spirit flitted away before one smile of the be- ficent sun—ample proof, it seemed to him now, that all gloom but a dream and a shadow, and that cheerfulness is the real ith. Now it seemed to him that the human heart might be al- jorized as a cavern, a short distance inside of which is a terrible Dom, with monsters of divers kinds, a place like Hell itself; but inder farther within, and a bright light appears, and presently region of flowers and sunny beauty—the depths of the heart, ight and peaceful. Gloom and terror may lie deep; but deeper 11 lies the eternal beauty. He had, in a very large measure, a satisfied heart. Now, on a irm, bright, and glorious autumn day, such a day as he espe- illy loved, when a heavenly breeze came to the cheek with a d kiss, a pervading blessing was diffused all over the world. 1 such a day it was good to be alive, and he thanked God for ?re breath. On such a day he looked out of his window and ought, O perfect day! O beautiful world! O beneficent God! ch a day, too, must be a promise of a blissful eternity, for our eator would never have made such weather, and given us the i;p hearts to enjoy it above and beyond all thought, if he had It meant us to be immortal. Such a day opens the gates of raven, and gives us glimpses far inward. No wonder that, being happy, he asked of the prophet Emerson i' master word that would solve the riddle of a universe, for :re was no longer a riddle to be solved. It was good, Hawthorne had said, to live for a few summer '•;ks as if this world were heaven. It might, indeed, be a sin and tame, in such a world as ours, to spend a lifetime in such a liner. He had, however, anticipated that in a little while a ling shadow of care and toil would mingle itself with his apiness. [22s] The toil manifested itself early—not truly obnoxiously at fir but by degrees. For a while his chief anxiety consisted in watchii the prosperity of his vegetables, how they were affected by the ra or sunshine. By and by he observed that he was forced to cat on a continual warfare with the squash-bugs, and he wonder why Nature had provided such a host of enemies for every usel esculent. The yard, the garden, and the avenue required a grt deal of labor, too. In the winter, the stoves demanded an endl sawing and splitting of wood. True enough, physically he h never been in such good condition—owing, doubtless, to a satisfi heart, and to a fair proportion of intellectual labor mingled wi manual labor, which had been one of the unfulfilled aims at Bro Farm. Still, as at Brook Farm, gardening demanded manure, a after a bout with that golden ore he reflected again that he hat all labor, though he hated less that of the hands than of the he: Though, at Brook Farm, he had wanted to write, even t nearly idyllic circumstances at the Old Manse could not who soothe the sting which was a part of the actual toil of compc tion. Oh, that he could run wild-put himself into a true relati with Nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elemen How blest he should be if there were nothing to do! Then should be free to observ^e and feel and think—to watch every in and hair’s breadth of the progress of the season. The clouds of a one day rvould be material enough, alone, for the observation an idle man or a philosopher. It was pleasant, in the dusk of ea evening, to sit and meditate, sometimes shaping out scenes oi tale, at the same time thinking of many other things of this woi and the next. But on many of the mornings which he devot to writing, his glimmering ideas failed to materialize in wor his mind idly vagrant and refusing to tvork to any systema purpose. When his thoughts ceased to flow, there was no recou but to throw down his pen and set out on his daily walk to t village. Since the burden of the continual task of compositi left him without the freedom of obseiwation necessary to writii he felt often on the brink of defeat. Writing required a contini freshness of mind, or a deterioration of the product would be p ceptible. Though long periods of unproductiveness and appan idleness might result, he must be patient and wait for his inspi tion. There were moments, among all these hindrances, when [224 ] yed God that he might never really be a writer for bread, since, :or himself, he would rather starve. Furthermore, when their )y had come, and when Sophia was without a maid, Hawthorne formed most of the household tasks, and so there were long iods when he did little or no writing at all. It was during the summer months that he found writing most icult. The weather then affected his temper and spirits very 'avorably—an irksomeness, a restlessness, an incapacity to bend mind to any serious effort making the summer an unprofitable e for literary production. It was during the autumn and the Iter that he made amends for the idleness of summer. Then it ; that his muse urged him on, and he wrote in earnest. In the days of December, 1843, when there had been a mighty snow- rm, when clouds had shrouded the sun, and the wind had vied and swept about the study of the Old Manse, he was deep the composition of “Earth’s Holocaust,” never on any one day ing felt so much like writing. But if, as he had long ago said in “The Devil in Manuscript,” lelicious stream of thought would sometimes gush out upon page at once, the act of writing nevertheless largely remained oil that demanded for its successful accomplishment a fine ance of leisure to meditate and to await a wayward inspiration, L such physical conditions as most stimulated his vigor. What muse craved, too, was a freedom from care, the press of out- i d circumstances always being distracting and stultifying. But I shadow of care which he had anticipated in the first weeks at I Old Manse soon fell over Paradise with consequences far ce disturbing than all the toil of household life or of writing. Once, when Goodrich and The Token were almost his only (hum of intercourse with the world, the simple wish to be recog- ;d as a writer had filled his horizon. Now, as he himself face- ;sly perceived, nobody’s scribblings seemed to be more accept- ' to the public than his, words of praise coming from across (Atlantic as well as from readers at home. The trouble was £ he found it a tough scratch to gain a respectable support by >pen. [225] The literary magazines for which he wrote were always ski ing the verges of bankruptcy, if they did not actually fall into When the Pioneer of young Lowell and Carter failed, Hawthoi was not astonished, for he had expected it to fail, though not soon. When Edgar Allan Poe invited him to contribute to proposed new magazine, there was a momentary ray of ho though it soon went aglimmering, for the Stylus never even r terialized. O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review presently became poor that it could offer only twenty dollars for an article of wl length soever. All authorship in America, of course, labored under gr handicap. No international copyright law yet prohibited j publisher from publishing without cost to him the choicest w ings of any popular writer of Europe. Any newspaper might w impunity reprint the story that had made its first appearance i. magazine. Hawthorne, for instance, took some pleasure m wide reprinting of the “Rill from the Town Pump’’ in a misi lany of newspapers and elsewhere, though he received not a c for such reprintings. The concept of revenue from advertis had not yet come fully into the magazine world, sustenance pending mainly upon the subscription list, rarely very large. No wonder, then, that Hawthorne was poorly paid, or t the magazine people tvere slow in paying, or paid not at all. Wl he was disappointed in three or four sources in close success! his difficulties became sharp and embarrassing. The system of si payments he found most reprehensible. It made it impossi for any individual to be just and honest and true to his eng£ ments. All publishers with whom he dealt were alike. On part, he was compelled to disappoint those who put faith in engagements, and so the evil tvent round. The devil take sue system! So it was that as early as the first spring at the Manse the pii of poverty made itself felt. Eor a lack of cash Hawthorne could come to see his friend Horatio Bridge in Boston. He could afford to buy a stock of paper beyond his immediate needs, : wondered why Providence kept them so short of cash. If only t could get what 'svas coming to them! ’When Sophia was away, went to bed at dusk out of a tender consideration for the oil c [ 226 ] le only way they could make money was to save it. When bills esently mounted disconcertingly at the local stores, Sophia took la with her to Boston for refuge at No. 13 West Street, with r parents, and Hawthorne went to live with his mother and ters, where he might find temporary freedom from conscious- ss of debt and the difficulty of providing even for the day’s ints. Still, they feared to delay their return to Concord long lest be said that they had run away from their creditors. Being in debt was an experience that Hawthorne had not own since he was a youth at college, when Uncle Robert had :t his school bills long unpaid. Now his responsibility to his nily weighed heavily upon him. Nor was his embarrassment hid- n from the world. Emerson advised him to let his creditors go listle for it, for everybody was in debt. Not all, however, were so npathetic as Emerson, for when Charles W. Upham of Salem d visited in the village of Concord, he had returned home with s most pitiable tales which made it appear that the Hawthornes :re actually suffering for lack of food. It irked Hawthorne to be aresented as a pauper in public gossip by a man for whose writ¬ es on Salem witchcraft he had predicted, in “Alice Doane’s Ap al,” a lasting renown. In later years, in days of despondency ter almost beyond endurance, Hawthorne was to know the true ng of Upham’s tongue. Just now it was irritating enough to be subject of unkind gossip. I He could not, do what he would, wholly escape from thoughts his adversity. He obser\'ed that, when the heart is full of care, tr summer, and the sunshine, and the moonlight, are but a iam and glimmer—a vague dream, which does not come within, »t only makes itself imperfectly perceptible without. Even into 1 recesses of his life of the imagination did his anxieties pene- rte. He contemplated representing a man in the midst of all :ts of cares and annoyances—with impossibilities to perform— rl almost driven to distraction by his inadequacy. Then, in this iposed story, death would come quietly and release the man :ai all his troubles; and at his last gasp, he would smile, and :gratulate himself on escaping so easily. But in his own life 1 smothering weight w^as not to be lifted off his breast in any ih manner. In this period of need he turned, therefore, to his [227] friend Horatio Bridge, who in another time of crisis had so ui selfishly subsidized the publication of Twice-Told Tales. Froi Bridge he borrowed enough to pay his local indebtedness and t supply his immediate wants—a measure so very unnecessary ha others met their obligations to him. In his desperation, too, whe there were no prospects of relief from his want, he engaged h lawyer friend, George Hillard, to bring suit against George Riple for recovery of some five hundred dollars for which Ripley ha signed a note in the October after Hawthorne’s marriage. He ha dunned Ripley often without avail, poor Ripley himself being i financial straits at Brook Farm, where both men had once worke together so hopefully in greatest amity. It does not appear th: Hawthorne recovered his money in this unhappy affair. It was a pity that they should be so pinched by poverty hei at the Old Manse, to have their first home darkened by such a sociations, the home where their dreams had become realitie where their love first assumed human life in the form of the darling child. Though they were being weaned away from tl Old Manse by the perplexities which were so vexing and painfi to Hawthorne, the three years spent there would nevertheless a ways be, they were confident, a blessed memory. There were time too, when they could laugh at their annoyances. Sophia, remen bering an old Mother Goose jingle. Hark, hark, the dogs do hark The beggars are coming to town, wrote gayly to her mother that she supposed the dogs would b gin to bark soon; and Hawthorne, contemplating an appallin vacuum in his dressing gown, lightly remarked that he was a ma of the largest rents in the country. Nor, when poverty came i at the door, did love fly out the window. Sophia esteemed he self the happiest of women. She regretted their difficulty only ft him, observing that it had brought out the fine temper of h honor, his figure all the more dazzling to her because of th shadow behind him. As for Hawthorne, he was sure that nobod but he and Sophia ever knew what it was to be married; if oth( people knew it, this dull world would have a perpetual glow roun about it. But they alone knew the bliss and the mystery. [ 228 ] Outward circumstances were weaning Hawthorne away from e Old Manse, and compelling him, at least for the time being, abandon such hopes as he had cherished for supporting himself id his family by writing. Time and circumstance were contin- illy bringing changes, shattering illusions, and, if giving some- ing, yet taking much away. It was a very long and arduous task— at utter abandonment of everything else for a noble self-devo- m to the cause of literature, the ideal which had inspired him len he was a college senior. Once, too, he had sought to escape am the shadowy world of his obscure youth, sought to find a Qse of reality through action, sought his place as a man among en in physical toil, though these hopes seemed to vanish in the )t sun, the coal dust, the steaming docks, and among the thick- ited and contentious men with whom he had labored at the aston Custom House. At Brook Farm the brethren had fancied at they were leaving behind them the false and cruel principles 1 which human society had all along been based—the weary eadmill of the established system—and that they had glimpsed irbingers of a golden era which was to be accomplished in re- rms during their own lifetime. There, in the unity and friend¬ less of brotherhood, labor was to be spiritualized, the earnest il of bodies to be offered up as a prayer. It had all been a de- sion. Labor was, truly, the curse of the world, and their own etime was to see Antiquity replace its tattered garments only patchwork, and by no sudden exchange of new clothing. Such wisdom had life and time brought him, a wisdom which was presently to embody and dramatize in The House of the wen Gables and in The Blithedale Romance. But if the years and :perience had taken something away, they had given something, o. He had not lost faith in man’s brightening destiny, though 1 recognized man’s helplessness in his own behalf, for it had be- :me his conviction that God is the sole worker of realities, man’s )5t directed effort accomplishing only a kind of dream. He and iphia had expressed their common faith when he had scratched h words on his study windowpane with Sophia’s diamond: Ian’s accidents are God’s purposes.” Besides, the sense of reality, h freedom from loneliness and emptiness, which he had once [229] sought in toil among men, he had found in abounding measui in his love for Sophia, in his beloved child, in the privacy an sanctity of his home. These were his treasures, the higher enc of his life, for the preservation of which he must do what he coul with his own individual strength, by whatever honorable mean and, if need be, in the old conventionalism, in the rusty iro framework of society. Hence, the earning of bread by creative writing proving ii effectual, Hawthorne turned to such means of livelihood as wei suggested by his past experience. Though he contemplated hac writing such as he had known as magazine editor and as write of the Universal Hiiiory—translation, concocting of schoolbook newspaper scribbling, etc.—he chose rather the hope of politic< preferment prompted by the prospect of greater emolument an by the urging of his friends with political connections. The prospect of appointive political office he had, it is tru( entertained during the very first months at the Old Manse, an earlier, though with no feelings of compulsion. In the course c six months or so, he had been promised, something satisfactor would be provided him. In the meanwhile, he was very well cor tented to remain in the idyllic surroundings of Concord. I: March, 1843, when a lack of cash prohibited him from visitin his friend Bridge, because the magazines did not pay promptly he confessed that he sometimes sighed for the regular monthl payments at the Boston Custom House. At the same time h recognized that he might have earned more had he written morf though his need was not yet so great as to cause anxiety. An offic would remove him from his present happy home, and he wa confident that an office, despite the fact that none had yet ma terialized, would come in ample time. He was, in short, not ver eager to ensconce himself in office, though a good one would cei tainly be desirable. For three years, with alternately rising and falling hopes an( enthusiasms, he entertained the prospect of obtaining the pos office at Salem, though he never got it. Once, indeed, he undei stood that President Tyler had actually appointed him, though th President had been induced to change his mind, with the decisioi to let his successor. President Polk, make the choice. Some office Hawthorne believed, he would get with the election of a Demo [240] ratic president. Otherwise, he could only hope that God would )rovide for him and his in some other way. The continued dila- ory payments of the magazines made it simply impossible to re- aain at the Manse. The need to do something besides writing had )ecome extremely acute. Happily, in this exigency, some of his friends with worldly onnections came to his aid. Indeed, they had all along exerted hemselves in his behalf, though they redoubled their efforts as the risis approached. It was Bridge who probably first bestirred him- elf in Hawthorne’s behalf, though O’Sullivan of the Democratic Review did all he could in New York and Washington to aid iawthome’s cause. It was Bridge, now prospering as paymaster or the U. S. Navy, who once more interceded with the politically ctive George Bancroft, and it was Bridge who brought to Con- ord and the Old Manse Hawthorne’s college friend, Franklin Merce, the most powerful of Hawthorne’s political friends, who vas in a few years to be President of the United States. That May day in 1845, when Bridge and Pierce came to joncord, brought seemingly solid hope to Hawthorne and Sophia, lophia, at the parlor window, saw the two men as they came up he avenue of trees. Bridge, noticing her there, took off his lat and waved it in the air, as if in anticipation of the cheer nd triumph that he and Pierce were bringing, his white teeth hining out in a smile. Sophia raised the sash, and through the pen window Bridge introduced Pierce, whom Sophia had never een before, though at once he struck her as a person of delicacy nd refinement and truth of character. Hawthorne, in his old lothes, was in the shed, splitting wood. When Bridge caught a limpse of him, he began an exaggerated waltz toward him, and fierce followed. When the three men emerged from the shed, ierce’s arm was encircling Hawthorne’s old blue frock, which had een a part of his apparel at Brook Farm. Bridge was perfectly wild ith good spirits, dancing and gesturing in his glee, and giving Ina such a resounding kiss as almost to frighten that fastidious Dung lady. It delighted Sophia to see how her husband’s friends )ved him. Bridge’s attachment she had of course long known. It as Pierce’s affection, therefore, which most engaged her interest, ad she noted with wifely concern and approval how Pierce called er husband “Nathaniel,” and how he spoke to him and looked [23^] at him with peculiar tenderness. In the evening, when the thre( men retired to talk of business—of finding a position for Haw thome—the atmosphere was vibrant with hopeful expectancy. The realization of all these bright hopes was, however, t( be deferred for another year of fitful and anxious waiting. Ir the meanwhile, Bancroft, with renewed political influence a the result of the election of Democratic President Polk, offeree Hawthorne an office in the Charlestown Navy Yard at $900 which Hawthorne declined in the hope of finding some bette: position than he had had at the Boston Custom House. In th( meanwhile, too, the owner of the Old Manse wishing to live in it himself, the Hawthornes were obliged to leave, their de parture occurring on October 2, 1845, with no permanent abode in view, with their prospects all uncertain, but still sustainec by love and hope. An episode had ended. The friends acquired in Concord- Channing, Thoreau, Emerson—were for the time being to be left behind. There were to be dull years before Hawthorne was again to experience that invigorating charm of Nature which used to give him such freshness and activity of thought the moment that he stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse Never again, was he to enjoy the spell of the tranquil spirit ol the Old Manse itself, where he and Sophia had known the first happiness of marriage, and where their first child had been bom, Nor was he again to have such a cheery little study, where the sunshine had glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches into his western windows. [/ It had been Hawthorne’s hope, when he came to the Manse, to write a novel which would have, in his own view, more sub¬ stance than the short stories which he had previously written. The novel-writing was, however, to be postponed. Other than editing and probably rewriting The Journal of an African Cruiser of his friend Horatio Bridge, his literary efforts at the Manse were limited to tales and essays later gathered, with other items of older and newer vintage, in Mosses from an Old Manse. [232] Sophia had said that the man she knew as her husband was Dut half revealed in his writings. Hawthorne himself protested ;hat what he wrote at the Manse was but a shallow stream com- aared with the broad tide which swelled around him in that pe¬ riod of his existence. He protested that almost nothing that he rad written was tinctured with any quality that was exclusively lis own, and that he had appealed to no sentiment or sensibili¬ zes save such as are diffused among all mankind. As far as he was i man of individual attributes, he had veiled his face. Moreover, re felt his usual dissatisfaction with what he had written, felt ;hat his tales had little of external life about them, and could :laim no profoundity of purpose—that they were trifles affording ro basis for a solid literary reputation. But these are the thoughts of a shy and modest man. In ;he largest sense, the great writer may be he who sounds those depths which are common to all men. Indeed, Hawthorne’s dis- :laimer is one of the best of arguments for the profundity of the lerious tales. Nor, as his friend Emerson remarked, is it possible for a man to jump out of his skin. In going down among his rwn thoughts to find what is true for himself, he is likely to find Eat what is true for him is true for all men. So it was, in large part, for Hawthorne. By and large, the tales and sketches written it the Manse are intensely autobiographical. If something is /eiled, more is confessed—often, indeed, transformed by art, ;hough retaining the warmth and power of personal conviction 'requently enforced by the very language of the personal ex- Dcrience, whether of outer or inner nature, as recorded in letter )r diary. It was with the inner life with which Hawthorne was chiefly loncerned in his writing, the inner life, in his view, being the pring of all action and best indicating the true nature of man. Vnd what comprised the nature of man was a subject no ess engrossing to him than to his Puritan ancestors, though the ;ulf between his beliefs and theirs was as wide as the world. It m a theme in “The New Adam and Eve,” one of his first pieces >f writing while at the Old Manse—a sketch echoing with over- ones of the happiness which he and Sophia were enjoying—as it is theme dominating much of his writing. The mystery and the wonder which are all around man may [233] be beyond his intellectual comprehension; but his instincts an intuitions (in the Coleridgian and Emersonian sense), his dir yearnings, his consciousness prolonged from a past etemity- all tell him that his soul has come from afar, just as the grea beauty of Nature prompts him to adoration of an unseen Create; Objects and circumstances, however, are in contrast to this inne life, and, as the soul becomes aware of the incongruity betwee its circumstances and itself, it realizes that it has strayed awa from its home, that it is now a prisoner, and that there will b no escape until it returns to its perfect source. All this, of cours( is suggestive of a general trend of thought at least as old a Plato, revivified poetically in Wordsworth’s “Intimations of In mortality,’’ and told again in Tennyson’s assurance that tha which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home. The prison in which man finds himself, with its accumi lated heaps of earthly wrongs, artificial institutions, perversion sophistries, and false wisdoms, is in part of man’s own making the consequence of weaknesses from which no one is free, thoug to rid himself of his imperfections is the great difficulty whic God has given man to solve. Beyond this heavy duty, there r< main the pleasures of the earth, which reside mainly in huma; affections and in the beauty of Nature. But for Hawthorne the shaking off of man’s imperfection was not, as for Socrates, to be attained through knowledge, b getting rid of his ignorance, for the imperfection is a mora one, and will yield to no such remedy. Indeed, no theme er gaged Hawthorne more completely, in these earlier years, thai the belief that in intellect alone man can never find his salva tion, a theme powerfully and beautifully developed, for instancf in “Rappaccini’s Daughter.’’ Into that short story, written afte Hawthorne himself had profoundly experienced the liberatin; and joyful force of love, he poured his most intense conviction* In that tale Doctor Rappaccini, who sacrifices his own daughte to science, is the very counterpart of Goethe’s Mephistopheles- the embodiment of intellect divorced from love or moral pui pose—with consequences devastating and unspeakably shocking But even moral purpose may be ineffectual in bringing abou the redemption of man. This thought, too, deeply engaged Haw thorne’s reflections at the Old Manse, the result of his own dis [^34] lusioning experiences at Brook Farm. Sometimes man has de- aded himself into believing that his imperfections, which he has ideed recognized, can be overcome with no great trouble. With rhat calm but withering satire, in “The Celestial Railroad,” re the passengers represented as taking their ease, on their jour- ey to the Celestial City, in a modern railway train! How con- enient has charity been made by modern methods—through he manufacture of an individual morality by throwing the in- ividual’s quota of virtue into the common stock, and letting tie president and directors take care that the aggregate amount j well applied! How different are these modem improvements rom the case of poor Christian, in Pilgrim’s Progress, who had D carry his heavy burden on his own back! Supposing, however, that man acknowledges his imperfec- Lons and the difficulty of removing them—sees how he has been bwarted and warped by the errors of the past, and bends his est efforts to a reform of the institutions of which he has be- ome a prisoner? What then? Well, let him gather all the wom- ut trumpery with which he has been overburdened and bum it a one vast fire of reform, as in “Earth’s Holocaust.” In that ex- ellent story, however, there is one spectator of the holocaust who > unimpressed by this effort at purification—a personage of fear- ully dark complexion, with eyes that glow with a redder light ban that of the huge bonfire. He observes that the wiseacres ave forgotten to throw into the fire the one object which is most a need of purification—the human heart itself. Without a change 1 it, the world will be the old world still. Of institutional re- Drm, in short, Hawthorne had become extremely skeptical, lOugh the fruit of his most mature doubt was still to appear in 'he House of the Seven Gables and especially in The Blithedale '.omance. But the dark-complexioned personage with the portentous dn was not to have the final word. Present at the holocaust, )0, was an individual who had weighed for himself the true due of life and its circumstances, and therefore felt little per- )nal interest in whatever judgment the world might take of lem, an observer of singular calmness—namely, Hawthorne imself. It was his position to be of good courage, nor yet exult 'O much. The remedy for the evil in the world is not to be [^ 35 ] found in the intellect, for the employment of that feeble instr ment to discern and rectify what is wrong will accomplish on an unsubstantial dream. The true remedy lies in the purificati( of the heart. Nor is this task wholly impossible, however short every ( fort may fall of perfection. The total depravity of man, pred( tination and election—the doctrines which so disturbed his Pu tan ancestors—were no part of Hawthorne’s beliefs. Rather, it w his conviction, voiced as early as “The Wedding Knell,” recall at the midnight scene of the Concord suicide-drowning, and i peated after Zenobia’s tragic ending, that so long as man possess a living soul, all may be restored to its original freshness. I calculable is the redeeming power of love and forgiveness, hum; or divine. No Bosom Serpent can withstand their gentle influenc Let man but purify his heart, and the many shapes of evil th haunt the outward, and which now seem almost our only rea ties, will turn to shadowy phantoms and vanish of their ov accord. Much must be left to God. If some wrongs suffered seem bitter and blighting as never to be righted here, the sufferer c; hope that tvhen he has crossed the borders of Time his hurts c: be soothed in some fount of Paradise, and his grief forgotten the light of immortality. The New Adam and Eve doubt not th another mom will find them somewhere beneath the smile God, and that they will always be together. But Hawthorne is not always so grave. He had told Mj garet Fuller, in one of their ^valks at the Manse, that he nev wished to leave this earth, it was beautiful enough. The sen ment is echoed in “The Hall of Fantasy,” which is ample e^ dence of his enjoyment of the world, of his freedom from tl misanthropy, the morbidity, the pessimism which have been < tributed to him. In writing unexcelled by Addison or Lamb Irving, his peers as informal essayists, he celebrates the deligl of the earth—the fragrance of flowers and of new-mown hay, tl magnificence of mountains and seas and cataracts, the fallii snow and the gray atmosphere through which it descends, cou try frolics, and the broad roar of laughter, in which body at soul conjoin so heartily. If only the great, round, solid ear might endure interminably, and still be peopled with the kind [2^6] ice of man! “The New Adam and Eve,” based upon the as- irance of the eternity of his joy in marriage, is a parable of mtentment and happiness in the present. “Buds and Bird bices” is a veritable marriage song. Now he lives, not to think r to labor, but for the simple end of being happy. Now it is iring, when gentle influences exercise their power, when the ghts and sounds of Nature are a prophesy and a hope. Who Duld now believe that beauty is ever a delusion? Rather, all that ?ems dark and barren is but a shadow and a dream. The de- ghts of spring—gulls flapping their broad wings in the upper sun- line among the clouds, and swallows chattering in the dim, sun- reaked interior of a lofty barn! O beautiful world! The writings of the Old Manse period look both backward to a earlier period, as might be expected, and forward to a more lature authorship. In “The Procession of Life” as in “The !hristmas Banquet,” for instance, there is a momentary autobi- graphical return to sentiments expressed in letters to Longfellow ad to Sophia—that the worst possible fate is to remain behind hile all the world is on the move toward eternity, that to par- cipate neither in the joys nor the sorrows of mankind is but to e like a shadow flickering on the wall. But it is “The Artist of le Beautiful” that may well serve as an example of an old leme developed in a new fullness. In “The Devil in Manuscript,” Hawthorne had written a 'himsical sketch of the pleasures and pains of authorship. In The Artist of the Beautiful” he went far beyond his youthful ;etch, now formulating a theory of art ranging over the req- isites of the artist, the sources of his inspiration, his rewards, id, most searchingly examined, the aims of art. Like Emerson’s leal scholar, the ideal artist must possess a delicacy of sensibility, lought and imagination, and, at the same time, a force of char- ::ter, a self-reliance, which will permit him to keep faith in him- :lf while the incredulous world assails him with its utter dis- dief; he must be prepared to be separated from the common isiness of life—to experience his glees and glooms alone; and e must have the steadfast influence of a great purpose to guide j m. Among the ultimate aims of his art, he must seek to render i.neful the harsh dissonances of life so that each flitting moment lay fall into the abyss of the past in golden drops of harmony. [257] He must seek, not to copy Nature, but to find the beautiful ide< which Nature has proposed to herself but has never realized- that is, he must endeavor to put into form the very spirit c beauty. His reward must be found, not in the appreciation c the world, which can never say the fitting word nor feel th fitting sentiment, but within his performance itself. Nor wi the fate of his accomplishment be of great concern to him. Whe the artist has risen high enough to achieve the beautiful, th symbol by which he made it perceptible to the senses becomes ( little value in his eyes while his spirit possesses itself in the ei joyment of the reality. Playfully, in the introductory “Custom House” chapter ( The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorn imagines what the gray shadov of his Puritan forefathers may think of such an idler as himsel a mere writer of storybooks. He had, indeed, separated himse by vast differences from the sentiments on art expressed I Richard Mather in the Bay Psalm Book of Puritan times, with a those fearful trepidations in the contemplation of Beauty. Ii stead of drawing back from the beautiful, as if its charm migl be a snare of satanic machination, Hawthorne, like Critobulus i Xenophon’s Banquet, had cast his lot with the love of Beaut Somehow he had found the way to a Platonism as distinct : Emerson’s own. He had come to rest with Plotinus in the artist philosophy par excellence. In innumerable instances the writings of the Old Mans period point forward to Hawthorne’s mature art. There is, as h: already been indicated, a recurring concern with questions ( progress and reform, with doubts not unlike those expressed I Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell at one time or another. Occasioi ally there are momentary appearances of characters, brief sketched, which, in later years, will reappear—enlarged and altere —to walk across pages where reform is the theme. In “Tl Christmas Banquet,” among the unhappy guests seated at tl table with a black-mantled skeleton at its head, was a moder philanthropist, too sensible of the calamities of thousands an millions of his fellow creatures to have the heart to do the littl good that lay immediately within his power; a half-starved, coi sumptive seamstress; and a woman of unemployed energy, wh found herself in the world with nothing to achieve, and broo( [238] ig over the wrongs of her sex—the prototypes of Hollingsworth, riscilla, and Zenobia of The Blithedale Romance, as yet hardly Dnceived, and awaiting the gestation of Time. In the diary or notebooks kept at the Manse, too, appear ints and suggestions of what is yet to come. In reflections on le separation of the intellect from the heart, as in “Rappaccini’s laughter,” the grossness of such wickedness appears as the Un- ardonable Sin—one day to be joined, through the mysterious recesses of the imagination, with the limeburner, little Joe, ad others whom Hawthonie had met in the flesh among the erkshires years before. An apparently casual notebook entry ^cords “Pearl” as a pretty name for a girl. No more. A half- ozen years or so later, an almost crushing experience and an jnominy wrongly suffered, and a dark brooding of untraceable aurse, were somehow to merge this slight diary entry with recol- ;ctions of that young woman of no mean share of beauty who, 1 “Endicott and the Red Cross,” wore upon her bosom em- roidered in the nicest art of needlework, the scarlet letter “A.” tester Prynne and little Pearl, mother and daughter, were al- 2ady in the wings of the stage, awaiting their cue. [ ^39 ]: S/Ae idyl of Concord and the Old Manse so ui happily terminated, the problem became one of where to tun and how to live on practically nothing a year until such occasio as Providence might take their matters in hand. Years befor when the bottom had dropped out of the Magazine of Usefi and Entertaining Knowledge and when Hawthorne had decide that the world was full of rascals, he had left Boston to return i Herbert Street and the shelter of his mother’s home in Saler So, too, when Brook Farm had proved a delusion. Now, appa ently defeated in his effort to make a living by writing, and wit the appendages of wife and child added to his responsibilitii and cares, he turned once more homeward to the ugly old hou: on Herbert Street, where, in a few rented rooms, he and Sophi together with little Una, sought refuge while they bided the time. What Hawthorne was waiting for, to solve his dilemma, w the political appointment of which he felt confident—so confidei that he was sure his mind would now settle itself, after the lor inquietude of expectation, and thus permit him to make tl most of the interval in a literary way. A loan from Bridge ease his immediate needs. He cheered himself with the thought th he was relieved at having left the anxieties of Concord. Tl east winds of Salem were, indeed, very different from anythir that they had felt in Concord; nevertheless, he hoped that th( would have a happy winter in Salem. All that he needed w shelter, and clothes, and daily bread for Sophia and Una, withoi [240] e anguish of debt pressing upon him continually. The winter und him, therefore, in the old third-floor room in which, he d thought, he had wasted so many years of his life, and whence many of his stories had gone forth to the world. While wait- g for his fortune to mend, he busied himself by preparing a ilume of tales for Wiley and Putnam—gathering together old jries already published in the journals, and spending weeks id months, in the midst of many interruptions in a crowded )usehold, dreaming over the lost Paradise of Concord and re- rding his dream in the sketch which was to open the Mosses om an Old Manse and which was to immortalize the Old Manse lelf in one of the best pieces of place description in our litera- re. In his days of toil on the wharfs of Boston, Hawthorne had ritten to Sophia that a journal of his external life, from dawn night, would be but a dry, dull history. So, too, perhaps, would ; a telling of all the events—the efforts of friends, the party po- lical maneuverings—which preceded Hawthorne’s appointment surveyor of the customs in the Custom House at Salem, the :temal life of genius not being exempt from wearisome de- ils. But the reasons for his appointment were presently to be- »me the source of political charges cruel and disturbing; hence lat which had seemingly been merely tedious erupted in anxie- 2S eventually extending deep down into the life of Hawthorne’s pagination, with consequences affecting our literature. The de- ils which otherwise might be tiresome enough, therefore as- me a surprising significance. It is impossible to resurrect the record of letters, of innumer- i'le conversations, and of the shifting and wavering hopes inci- ntal to Hawthorne’s appointment as surveyor. When Bridge id Pierce had come to the Old Manse, in May of 1845, with pes that seemed so sure, matters were already far on their ‘y, though the destination was not yet in sight. It was not even I parent then that Hawthorne was to be a candidate for the I'A^eyorship, his aim for a long while being the postmastership >Salem. O’Sullivan did much by interviewing influential people [247] in Washington. The ever-£aith£ul Bridge invited Hawthorne an Sophia and Una to his spacious living quarters at the navy-yai at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, £or two or three weeks, there 1 meet people o£ importance in the Democratic party. Senate Atherton and Fairfield o£ New Hampshire and Maine and the wives, as well as Senator and Mrs. Pierce, together with Bridge two sisters and some Washington £riends—Bridge’s aim being i £urther the interests o£ Hawthorne, an aim clearly accomplishe in the sequel. It having once been determined that Hawthorne was to se< the surveyorship at the Salem Custom House, the party m chinery was set in motion by £riends o£ experience in such mj ters. The Salem Town Committee, o£ which H. L. Conolly was member, addressed a petition to President Polk in Hawthom( behal£; so did the Essex County Committee; and so did the Coi mittee o£ the Second Congressional District o£ IVIassachusetts, which Conolly was chairman. In its early stages the situation w complicated by the £act that two local men, George W. Mull and Richard Lindsey, had already announced their Candida £or the position o£ surveyor and naval officer. However, th withdrew their applications in £avor o£ Hawthorne and John Howard, Hawthorne therelore having the solid support o£ : the political groups immediately interested—an astonishing £a in view o£ Hawthorne’s mild interest in practical politics. Numerous letters o£ a personal nature were addressed W^ashington, too, by a variety o£ Hawthorne s advocates. T, publishers o£ the Salem Democratic AdvextiseT apprised Pre dent Polk that Hawthorne was the author o£ Twice-Told Tal a man known and respected, and, in principle, a pure and prin tive Democrat. Benjamin F. Browne, Salem postmaster to whe position Hawthorne had aspired, and with whom Hawthor since his return to Salem had begun a friendship presently £ructi£y in a literary way, reminded President Polk that tl was the same Hawthorne whose £ame as a man o£ literatu was coextensive with the English language, and that his charact as a man worthily supported his literary reputation. 0£ Ha thorne’s political activity, or even o£ his political affiliatic Browne said not a word. In view o£ the acrimonious charges made against Hawtlior few years later, it is interesting to observe the grounds on /hich his friends chose to approve his candidacy. Senator Fair- leld wrote of him as always being a Democrat in principle, feei¬ ng, and action, though never a warm partisan. More distinctly airfield praised Hawthorne as one of our best writers and as a nan warmly and extensively beloved. George Bancroft, now ecretary of the Navy, recommended Hawthorne unhesitatingly -but with no reference to politics. Frank Pierce, in addressing fie Secretary of the Treasury, wrote that he had known Haw- fiorne long and intimately, that Hawthorne was a man of genius, f great simplicity of character, of exalted worth, and that his ppointment would reflect honor upon the administration. Pierce lade no reference to his friend’s political interests. Even before ny of these men had thus written, Charles Sumner, who had net Hawthorne at Longfellow’s bachelor quarters in Cragie iouse some years ago, and who was now prominent in Whig ircles, pleaded with Democratic Bancroft to use his influence to lelp Hawthorne. He pleaded Hawthorne’s poverty and need, s well as his sweet, gentle, and true nature. There was no per- □n of any party who would not hear with delight that the author if such Goldsmithian prose had received honor and office from lis country. Sumner, as a Whig, of course had no interest in re¬ garding Hawthorne for his Democratic sympathies. Hawthorne regarded himself as having received his appoint- lent, when it came, not as a reward for political services, but ly his character as an inoffensive man of letters. Why he chose fie position in Salem in preference to other proffers, he found it ard to say. Nothing in the physical aspect of the old town of alem charmed him. Neither the stately houses on Washington quare and on Federal and Chestnut Streets, the handiwork f Samuel McIntyre and other distinguished architects, of which alem has long been proud, nor the beautiful Georgian front E the Salem Custom House itself, had the least appeal to him. hough he had invariably been happiest elsewhere, he yet had feeling for old Salem which, for lack of a better word, he was 'intent to call affection. What drew him to Salem was not, after d, love, but instinct—a sympathy of dust for dust, a sort of home- :eling for the past, the result of the long connection of his own fmily with this one spot. Here had lived his first American an- [^ 43 ] cestor, with all his Puritanic traits, good and bad. Here, too, had lived and died that witch-judge ancestor whose gravestone he had often seen in boyhood as he played in the old Charter Street burial ground. Here, in Salem, his own father and grandfather, as well as many others of his father’s family, had gone to sea, some of them never to return, and others to come home to mingle their dust with their native soil of Salem. In spite, therefore, ol his strange, indolent, and unjoyous attachment for his native town, Hawthorne had returned, as he said, like the bad halt penny. He had felt it almost as a destiny to make his home in Salem. On March 23, 1846, Hawthorne received from Senator Fair field a letter telling him that President Polk had nominated him Surveyor of the Salem Custom House, the salary to be twelve hundred dollars. His appointment, dated April 2, 1846, was tc be for four years. On April 8 he gave a bond for $1,000, and on the next day took the oath of office. Some days later he scrawled across a page of the manifest book the words Begun April 20 th 1846 Nath. Hawthorne Surveyor There the words still are, an object of interest to the thou sands of pilgrims who visit the Old Custom House in Salem, nov a literary shrine. Their livelihood assured, Hawthorne and Sophia were de termined to have a home of their own. Even in the days of thei most miserable poverty, when the surveyorship was only a hop( they had dreamed of building a house. David Roberts and Wi liam Pike, Hawthorne’s Salem friends, even went so far as t mark out the ground-plot of the house, in chalk, on Robert hearth, when Hawthorne came to visit him one day durin Sophia’s absence in Boston. It was to stand on a beautiful hil side, where there would be an ample view. Hawthorne strode there, of a winter afternoon, dreaming of their castle in the ai [244] id how happy they would be—happier than in Concord, on lany accounts. But, alas, his lack of the necessary fifteen hun¬ ted dollars or so left their dream only a castle in the air. Something had to be done, for Sophia was expecting their :cond child; they could not continue to live in the old house on [erbert Street with his mother and sisters and their innumer- ble cats. During the summer of 1846, therefore, when their son, Lilian, was bom, they lived in Carver Street in Boston, Haw- lome commuting by train to his "work, which required his resence only during the morning. That autumn they found an pstairs apartment in Salem at No. 18 Chestnut Street, in what as probably the oldest and the least attractive house on a street ow famed for its beautiful homes. There was no place for Una ) run or play, and so she and her mother had to find what leasure they could in the birds which visited their street. For lawthorne himself, the establishment offered one personal sol- ce. Up the little lane which ran beside the house, near where ; joined Main Street, was the apothecary shop of his friend Ben- imin Browne, with whom he shared antiquarian interests and bth whom he spent many an hour in pleasant conversation. It was not until October, 1847, that a house was found, at 200 per year, at 14 Mall Street, only a few steps from the Com- lon, and a short walk to the Custom House. Though it was ot to be their own, and though it was far different from the naginary castle on the hillside, it had its advantages. It was irge enough, and properly arranged, to accommodate Haw- lome’s mother and sisters in a suite of rooms wholly distinct, 'here was a small fence-enclosed yard, too, where Una, as Sophia lid, might have the splendid October to live out of doors on a niling earth. On the third floor, high above all noise, Haw- lome was to have his study. For a year he had spent his life be- veen the Custom House and the nursery—without a chance for le hour’s musing, and without his desk being once opened. )phia was inexpressibly happy for him. There was time for a little leisure now. Even at the apart- lent on Chestnut Street Sophia had a maid, who, together with Hawthorne’s sister Louisa, sometimes took charge o£ the tw children while Hawthorne and Sophia went out to enjoy sue social life as their interests prompted or their circumstancf permitted. One winter afternoon they walked over to visit Hav thorne’s Aunt Rachel, Mrs. Simon Forrester, who lived dow on Derby Street, opposite the wharf where her husband, no long dead, had once moored the ships whose cargoes had mad him one of the wealthiest merchants of Salem. Aunt Rach( owned an early edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia whic Major William Hathome had brought with him from Englan to the infant settlement of Salem. She was making out a gene: logical tree of the Hawthorne family, and from her Hawthorn doubtless learned something of his family history, a subject grac ually growing in his mind, and presently to take form in Th House of the Seven Gables. It was something of an occasion, to( when Hawthorne and Sophia spent their first evening out sine Una was bom—in a visit with the Frederick Howeses on Feden Street, where Emerson, come over from Concord, was a gue: for the evening also. Mrs. Howes was a sister of Miss Susan Bu ley, at whose Saturday night entertainments Hawthorne an Sophia had done some of their courting, almost ten years befon when the Peabodys had first brought Hawthorne out of his S( elusion to be lionized in a small way. Hence the bonds whic drew the group together were deep and of long standing. Ha\» thorne was a family man now, who had begun to live some c his life retrospectively. There were ventures into a wider social life than the one solitary Hawthorne had ever known. He and Sophia attended public ball, at the opening of a new manufacturing establisl ment, at which there were a thousand guests, and at which Hav thorne observed the unaffected and democratic mingling of vai ious levels of Salem society. They attended, by invitation, a grea ball given by Mrs. George Peabody, at which Sophia was er tranced by a magnificent Murillo picture, “The Annunciation, which she regarded as the greatest picture that she had eve seen. Neither she nor Hawthorne, probably, had ever befor been entertained in a home of such wealth and social prominenc( In quite another manner, when Amos Bronson Alcott came t hold a “conversation” in Salem, Hawthorne and Sophia wei [246] The Mall Street House After a photograph in the possession of the Essex Institute. E the small group who listened for an hour and three quarters hile Alcott kept up an even flow of thought, without a word eing uttered by any other person present. Alcott spent an /ening at their home on Mall Street, regaling them with tales E his youth and peddling experiences before his intellectual fe had really begun. Though Hawthorne had once told Sophia lat he had not found lectures profitable to him, he now con- :nted to become one of the managers of the Salem Lyceum, and resently its corresponding secretary, during the season when )me of the more prominent lecturers at Salem were Daniel /ebster, Theodore Parker, Louis Agassiz, Charles Sumner, merson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne’s own brother-in-law, Horace lann, prominent educator. How great had been the transfor- lation in Hawthorne, none was more aware than Sophia. When le wrote to her mother of her husband’s attendance at a lec- tre, she closed her sentence with two exclamation points. She membered, perhaps, that once, in their days of courtship, [awthome had declined a ticket to hear Emerson himself—Emer- )n, the prince of lecturers! Now, it is true, Hawthorne saw his Concord friends rarely Emerson, perhaps, most rarely of all. Nevertheless, Emerson as by no means forgotten, for it was during this last Salem eriod that Hawthorne wrote his high tribute to Emerson, “The reat Stone Face.’’ Nor did Emerson forget Hawthorne. When merson, in his friendly endeavor to find a publisher for Tho- au’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, wrote to ^iley and Putnam, he tried to say a good word in Thoreau’s ihalf by remarking that Thoreau was known to Hawthorne, 'hose Mosses they had published some months before—as if the iquaintance of Hawthorne were in itself an ample recommen- iition! In England, where Emerson spent the greater part of a ; ar in 1847-48, he was reminded of Hawthorne when he met ennyson. To his wife, Lidian, Emerson wrote that if she would iiagine Hawthorne without his bashfulness, and let him talk ssily and fast, she would have a pretty good Tennyson. When [^47] The Scarlet Letter appeared, stirring a good deal of local contro versy by its introductory chapter, Emerson found that introduc tion perfect in wit and life, and with no equal in the language As for Thoreau, who, like his more famous townsman, Emet son, was trying to earn a reputation as lecturer, he was twice ; guest at the Hawthornes’ when he came to lecture before thi Salem Lyceum upon two occasions, probably through Hawthorne’ connection as manager and corresponding secretary of the Ly ceum. Sophia found his first lecture, matter later to be incoi porated in Walden, very enchanting, so that her ears rang witl music, and she seemed to be wandering through copse and dingle Thoreau, she thought, had risen above all his earlier arrogano of manner, and was now as gentle, simple, and meek as geniu should be. Even his nose, which she had once thought must mak him uncomely forever, no longer troubled her—her attentioi now being centered on the shine of his great blue eyes. Haw thorne, however, still saw in Thoreau a certain iron-pokerish ness, an uncompromising stiffness in his mental character whicl was interesting, though it grew rather wearisome on close an( frequent acquaintance. Nevertheless, as when Hawthorne ha( visited at the hut at Walden, or as when Thoreau had come t( the Old Manse, Hawthorne found his friend a man of though and originality, well worth knowing. Ellery Channing came upon a number of occasions—once fo a visit of two weeks while Sophia and the children were in Bos ton. During the mornings Channing accompanied Hawthorni on the round of his duties on the wharfs of Salem, the latte perhaps with a proof-glass in his hands to test the rum to bi shipped by Salem merchants to Negroes on African shores. Ii the afternoons, they took immense walks, sometimes down Salen Neck, where lived Eben Hathorne, some of whose characteristic were one day to be refurbished and attributed to Holgrave ii The House of the Seven Gables. In the evening the friends sa up in the Chestnut Street apartment talking until midnight- all in all having a pleasant time. But Hawthorne was writing ii his diary scarcely at all now, and so their conversations went ur recorded. When Channing came later for a call at the Mall Stree house, Sophia thought him as entertaining and inexplicable a ever, the more welcome for his wonderful smile. Channing wa [248] mplaining about Emerson, whom he reported as becoming a m of the world, and not so easy of access as formerly, a com- aint which was to grow more pronounced as Ellery’s own ilures became apparent, until he felt that his friendship with nerson must cease, Emerson being so conservative and fortu- te, and Ellery so unfortunate. The once happy Concord days ;re threatening to end sadly for Ellery. Of all his literary friends, however, it was Longfellow, dur- g these Salem years, whom Hawthorne saw most frequently, d to whom he most freely revealed the burden of his thought, was Longfellow, after all, whom he had known longest, whose bane nature complemented his own shyness, and with whom : could, as of yore, most unreservedly discuss the problems of -iting. Early in June, and early in Hawthorne’s surveyorship, the Lends met one morning at Hillard’s office in Boston, and Haw- ome walked homeward with Longfellow to the bridge and ilfway across—the bridge over the Charles, a favorite spot of Dngfellow’s, where, in the restless and uncertain days of his urtship, he had often watched the ebbing tide, a spot the dearer him now for the poem he had recently written to ease the )od of his thoughts. There they stood, Hawthorne seemingly eary and assuring Longfellow that he would write no more, is devotion to literature at the Old Manse had proved an un- ofitable venture, and, at the moment, it seemed best to depend lely upon the prosaic duties of a custom’s office for a livelihood. f)ngfellow, however, advised him to continue writing—to write i least an even hundred tales, and then give them a good round ;le, such as “The Hundred Tales,’’ and let them go at that. But if Longfellow served to encourage Hawthorne in his iting, Hawthorne performed an equal service for Longfellow, cause Longfellow, too, had his hours of despondency. He was : despair at the swift flight of time, and the utter impossibility I lay hold upon anything permanent. His Harvard teaching ties took half his day, and with weak eyes, and with only the inning to work in, with interminable calls upon his time by ople who wrote him letters and sent him poems for his judg- I’nt and who made other endless demands and requests, he 1 hardly a moment to think of his own writing. He was com- [^49] pletely exhausted, and doing nothing of what he felt himse capable. If he meant to be an author, why should he not be or in earnest? It was at this time that Hawthorne advised Longfellow i give up his college teaching; and this Longfellow resolved to d in order to devote himself solely to literature, though sever years were to go by before he fulfilled his resolution. Neith< Longfellow nor Hawthorne, apparently, ever spoke of the boyis oration, in which, more than twenty years before, Longfellow ha pointed to the palms to be won by native American writers, ar to the great desirability of an utter abandonment of everythir else for a noble self-devotion to the cause of literature. Yet hei they were, both now in their prime, each in his own way see' ing to do what in youth he had fondly dreamed of, and each prop and stay to the other. On the twenty-seventh of October, 1847, Longfellow r corded in his journal that he had written the last lines of Evang line that morning. It was very shortly after its publication th; Hawthorne wrote that beautiful encomium of his friend’s poei already referred to. Longfellow was delighted by the review delighted and grateful to Hawthorne for resigning that legen of Acadie to him. His success with Evangeline, he said, he owe entirely to Hawthorne’s willingness to forego the pleasure ( writing a prose tale which many people would have taken f( poetry, so that he—Longfellow—might write a poem which mar people were taking for prose. He encouraged Hawthorne to wrii a history of Acadie, but, though the idea for a while took Ha\ thorne’s fancy greatly, nothing came of it. There were other incidents. More and more struck by Hat thome’s manly beauty, Longfellow engaged the Boston arti Johnson to make a crayon portrait of his friend. Sophia was d lighted, all previous efforts to picture her husband, in her viet having resulted unsuccessfully. Longfellow himself was so please with the portrait that he wrote to Emerson to take the troubl when he was next in Boston, to see it in the making. Nothing, however, revealed the intimacy between the tv men so much as Hawthorne’s letter to Longfellow, on June 1849, when Hawthorne was first apprised of the effort, on tl part of local politicians, to expel him from his Custom Hou [2J0] osition. He had written to Longfellow to express his pleasure 1 reading Longfellow’s recent novel, Kavanagh, and to explain fhy he had not reviewed it as he had reviewed Evangeline, in the alem Advertiser. It was because he had sent his review of vangeline and of several other books to the local Democratic aper, he said, that he was being charged with writing political rticles, and therefore subject, on political grounds, to being re- loved from his post. Then it was that he disclosed to Longfel- )w that he was stirred up by these political bloodhounds, and lat if they succeeded in getting him out of office he would surely nmolate some of them. This he would do, not as an act of in- ividual vengeance, but in behalf of authorship. He did not [aim to be a poet, yet he could not but feel that some of the icredness of that character adhered to him, and that it ought to e respected in him unless he stepped out of the immunities. If, lerefore, he were unjustly discharged on false political claims, e contemplated writing personal satire such as he had not Avrit- m before. These sentiments were obviously the inception of a part of the itroductory chapter of The Scarlet Letter, yet to be written, 'hey contained, too, elements still to take form in The House of le Seven Gables, and in the more remote fantasy of “Feather- )p.” Interestingly enough, the aim of personal satire, irritatingly ddent—to his political enemies—in “The Custom House,” little y little lost its personal tincture, until, in “Feathertop,” the tire became pure art and pure fun—a revelation of the mystery y which personal bitterness can be transformed into an imper- nal and universal beauty. And the beginnings of all these things, as they stirred form- 5 sly in his mind, Hawthorne chose to reveal first to his fellow- tist and friend, who would sympathize and understand. Though such hints for writing continued to flit through his ind, and though his friendships and his gradually expanding :ial life occupied much of his interest, Hawthorne was hap- ;^st in these years, as he had been at the Old Manse, in thoughts I home, of Sophia and the children. [25^] They were still very poor. How very miserably poor they wer when they had sought refuge in his mother’s house on Herbei Street, only he and Sophia knew. The surveyorship, however, ha brought relief, and presently they had enough to live on, fo which they were thankful. Nevertheless, their income, thoug tolerable, was a tight fit, and Hawthorne was troubled becaus he could not better provide for Sophia. She had done much amis he told her, to marry a man who could not keep her like a lad' as he should so delight to keep her. If only he might so provid that she might do only beautiful things, repose in luxurioi chairs, and have servants to come and go! She had but a hard k in life, it seemed to him; and so had he that witnessed it, sine he could do little or nothing to help her. But for himself, whatever his lot, he would not have changed for any added material advantages. When Sophia w; away—and she often visited her parents in Boston, or her siste Mary Mann, in West Newton—Hawthorne tried—as a muc younger lover might try-to tell her in his letters how very hapf he was in his marriage. But with his own letters he was as muc dissatisfied as ever. What a wretched mockery they were!-on a semblance of communication, though perhaps better than notl ing. If his hand would but answer to his heart, what letters 1 would write her! His own affections he tried to express by telling Sophia ho lonely he was during her absence. When she was gone, he sar down into the bottomless depths of quiet, while his life went c as regularly as the kitchen clock. His life then truly had no event and therefore no history. Now the rooms of the house seemc twice as large as before, and so awfully quiet that he was real half afraid to be alone, to enter their chamber when it was lightc only dimly by the moon. When the days were sunless, and whe the wind was a dreary bluster, no imagination could tell ho lonely the house was—how forlorn and melancholy. It absolute chilled his heart. He wandered solitary about the rooms, pausir to muse when he chanced to see a garment of Sophia’s, or some i the children’s playthings. What an eternity since she had got away. It was when Sophia was absent, and when he could step asic from his daily life, that he could best behold how fair was h [2^2] t. Then he could most clearly see how infinitely he loved her, w more and more absolutely essential to him she was every y they lived. She was the only person in the world who was cessary to him. Other people had occasionally been more or IS agreeable; but he was always more at ease alone than in ybody’s company till he knew her. And how wonderful was e growth of their love! A half-dozen years ago it was infinite, t what was the love of that epoch to their present love? Oh, for le kiss! He could no longer endure the loneliness of the house, e wanted, too, to hear the children’s voices. He needed their nshine. Even their little quarrels and naughtinesses would be blessing. She must come home, come home! When she did me back, it would be as the coming of an angel, with a cherub each hand. He confessed one day that he was desolate and miserable not ily because Sophia and the children were absent; he was exas- rated and depressed, too, by the dreary bluster of the wind, tiere was, furthermore, the matter of breakfast (the repetition yesterday’s) of peas and Indian pudding. If Sophia thought this strange miscellany of grievances, it was sufficient to do his busi- :ss—it made him curse his day. Hell, he was sure at the moment, is nothing else but eating peas and baked Indian pudding! He eaded with Sophia that if she truly loved him, never to let him ? either of these victuals again, but to keep such things only r his and her worst enemies. He hoped that God would for- /e him for ever burdening his conscience with such abomina- 'us, because they were the Unpardonable Sin and the Intoler- le Punishment in one and the same accursed spoonful. To such whimsical and comic turns of her husband’s expres- ns, Sophia had long since become accustomed. At the Manse ? had been amused by the picturesque manner in which he 1 blasphemed, as she said, the fierce winds and extreme cold dch penetrated the old parsonage while she painted and her iband wrote. As for herself, she found it unnecessary to stand irt from daily life to see how fair and blest was their lot. Not iry mother was like her, because not every mother had such a ler for her children. Even in the very center of simultaneous earns from both darling throats, she was as sensible of her Jipiness as when the most dulcet of sounds were issuing thence. She was so happy that she required nothing more. With such husband and such children, no art or beauty could excel h< daily life. Nor had she any desire to go out of her house to fin anything better. In his home, with Sophia and the children, the days and tl years seemed, for Hawthorne, to melt rapidly away. The presei had hardly substance and tangibility enough-the future too soc becoming the present, which before he could grasp it, alreac looked back upon him as the past. He seemed to dwell in tl shadow cast by Time, itself the shadow cast by Eternity. Since his custom-house duties occupied only his mominj he was much at home and saw much of the children. Sophia, her trips to Boston, might leave Una with her father and tl maid, Dora, while Sophia and little Julian visited at the Peabo home. During the days and days of Madame Hathome’s fat illness, it was Sophia who nursed her, while Hawthorne h: charge of the children. He not only took care of their needs ai played with them; but then, as at some other times, he record in his journal their every action in the greatest detail as a fami record. Sophia, too, in letter and diary, wrote vividly of t children. When, for instance, Julian was seventeen months old, he to his first walk to the near-by Common, with Dora, the mai There they met Una and her father, who were returning froni longer walk. Sophia, standing at the gate, saw them retumi together, Julian between his father and Una and holding a hai of each, Una shining with joy at taking her first walk with Julis Little Julian, it seemed to Hawthorne, was always the sai child, and never varied in his relations with his father. Juli had a great deal of force and physical well-being. Neverthele he had perhaps too much tenderness, love, and sensibility in 1 nature, which needed to be tempered and hardened, lest the ha intercourse of the world blight the first growth of his love a benevolence. But now, in the evening, as he sat with book befc him on his father’s knee, awaiting bedtime, his face brimm [25^ ] er with good humor and fun, so that it threw a light down on e pictures he was looking at. There was a good deal of the comic him, and he delighted in causing laughter, putting himself in »surd postures, and making the queerest grimaces with no other id in view. He loved the whole world, he said—for which rea- n, among others, Sophia, overwhelmed with admiration, ought him the splendor of the world. It was Una, however, who apparently most often engaged ;r father’s interest, perhaps because she was older, and perhaps ;cause her temperament was the more complex. He thought of ;r, sometimes, as a streak of sunshine, and sometimes he called ;r Little Tornado. There were times, surely, when she was very mely—her auburn curls coming down over her shoulders with itreme grace, and floating golden in the sunshine as she flew »out like a petrel in the wind. As to her delicate little phiz, its irit, grace, and sensibility eluded the efforts of her father’s pen describe. Yet her beauty was the most flitting, transitory, most icertain and unaccountable affair that ever had a real existence, beamed out when nobody expected it, but it had mysteriously issed away when one seemed sure of it. If one glanced sidewise her, it seemed illuminating her face; but, if one turned full und to enjoy it, it was gone again. When really visible, it emed to her father as rare and precious as the vision of an gel—a transfiguration. On these occasions, he thought it but It to conclude, he saw her real soul, though one manifestation longed to her as much as another. Una was inexplicable, and even to other children she was a /stery. Much of her time, in summer weather, she spent hang- g on the gate of the fence which enclosed the little yard and shut off from Mall Street. There she stood, on the cross-piece of the e, clinging to the pickets and peeping forth into the great, un¬ own world that lay beyond. Ever and anon, without giving the jhtest notice, she took flight into this unknown, and when her ■ ents went to find her, she would be surrounded by a knot of Idren, with whom she had made acquaintance, and who gazed ther with a kind of wonder, recognizing that she was not al- ether like themselves. There was something about Una that almost frightened her aer. Often she seemed to have a rhinoceros-armor against senti- ment or tenderness, as if she were marble or adamant, though th sentiment of a picture, tale, or poem was seldom lost upon hei There seemed to be something supernatural about her—whethe elfish or angelic. She stepped so boldly into the midst of ever; thing, shrinking from nothing, had such a comprehension c everything, seemed at times to have but little delicacy, and y( presently showed that she possessed the finest essence of it—no^ so hard, now so tender; now so perfectly unreasonable, soon agai so wise. In short, Hawthorne now and then caught an aspect c her in which he could not believe her to be his own huma child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haun ing the house where he dwelt. Still, there were periods when she behaved like a little ange without showing the slightest willfulness or waywardness. Fath( and daughter often took walks together, walks during which thf had veiy loving times. Una was, her father thought, at such time a noble child. Unmistakable in Hawthorne’s observations of his little daugl ter, of course, is the fact that Una sat for some of the portra of Little Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. True enough, it would 1 folly to say that Una and Pearl were one, just as it would be fol to say that a Salem minister-turned-politician was Judge Pyi cheon in The House of the Seven Gables, or that a Salem mam facturer was truly the pumpkin-headed Feathertop. There enough of Una in Pearl, however, to give the latter the life-b stowing semblance of reality, though Pearl may also seem to 1 as poetic a creation as Goethe’s Mignon in Wilhelm Meiste The poet’s pen, indeed, gives to airy nothing a local habitatic and a name; but the poet’s eye glances from earth to heaven, well as from heaven to earth, before his pen bodies forth tl forms of things unknown. From his home on Mall Street, it was, for Hawthorne, on a few minutes’ walk to the Custom House-across Salem Commc and Main Street, and then down to the head of Derby wha where stood that spacious brick edifice, with its high flight [ 2 ^ 6 ] p-anite steps, its imposing portico of white Corinthian pillars, and ts enormous gilded American eagle hovering over the entrance md looking toward the sea. To the left of the entry, above the light of steps, was Hawthorne’s own office, from the front win- lows of which he commanded a view of Derby wharf. In the eighteenth century Derby wharf had supplanted Union /harf as the principal scene of Salem shipping, and at the turn tf the nineteenth century it was a bustling site, though Dr. Bent- ey, as he had watched the erection of the grand new building, lad already fearfully anticipated signs of a decaying commerce, 'low, as Hawthorne looked down the wharf, he saw the realiza- ion of Dr. Bentley’s fears. All about were signs of dilapidation nd disuse—decaying wooden warehouses, bordered by patches of nthrifty grass, the wharf itself so ill-cared-for as often to be over¬ owed by the incoming tide. Only insignificant vessels, for the aost part, now moored at the wharf—a brig or bark discharging ides, or a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of fire- rood. Only occasionally was the dullness of the scene enlivened y the arrival, on some unusual morning, of three or four vessels rom Africa or South America. Salem Harbor was too shallow for le big clipper ships which, in the climactic period of sailing ves- sls, had supplanted the smaller ships such as those in which lawthorne’s own father had sailed. The shipping industry had tierefore moved to the deeper waters of Boston and New York, ffiile the harbor at Salem fell more and more into neglect. It ^as therefore a sluggish scene upon which Hawthorne gazed from is office windows, and it was so because Salem shipping Avas dy- ig an ignominious death. His office itself reflected the prevailing atmosphere of decline om a more vigorous and active day. The room was cobwebbed id dingy with old paint, and its floor strewn with gray sand, in a shion elsewhere long fallen into disuse—everything giving evi- mce of a lack of care. His furniture consisted of an old pine esk, with a three-legged stool beside it, as well as two or three ooden-bottomed chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm—relics, oviously, of an earlier and better era. There was an iron stove 'ith a voluminous funnel, and a library of a score or two of vol- mes of the Acts of Congress, as well as a Digest of Revenue [257] Laws. Through the ceiling ascended a tin pipe, which served as ; medium of vocal communication with other parts of the building In such surroundings, Hawthorne occupied himself as sui veyor, the chief administrative officer of the port. Sometimes indeed, he was busy enough, as when there was the unusual bust! occasioned by the arrival or departure of vessels from afar—: busyness which he welcomed for the sake of the additional fee then earned. On payday, too, there was a stir. Very often, how ever, there was little work to do. So he whiled away the time pacing from corner to corner of his room, and pausing at hi windows now and then to look out upon the shops of grocer; block-makers, and ship-chandlers along Derby Street, shop around the doors of which generally were clusters of old salt and other wharf rats, laughing and gossiping. Or he lounged o; his long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk, his eyes wandei ing up and down the columns of the morning newspaper. Occa: ionally, too, he leaned over his little pine desk, pen in hand, t write, for the Salem Advertiser, the review of some current bool a commentary on a theatrical performance at a local theater, o a notice of a grand public ball—fruits of his official hours o: which he did not at all pique himself, written as they were i fits of tedium. In such unoccupied hours, too, he wrote letters- to Sophia, when she was visiting her relatives, to Longfellov and to other literary acquaintances. Without such incidents i was difficult, sometimes, to fill the dull mornings at the Custor House. The prevailing air of decline, the suggestion of languor an drowsiness, which permeated the area of the Custom Hous emanated, not only from the decay of business at the port, bt also from the patriarchal body of veterans employed there. Th Collector of the Port, the highest ranking officer, once the hero c Ticonderoga, was now far in the decline of life, with step s palsied that only with the aid of a servant, and by leaning heavil on the iron balustrade, could he slowly and painfully ascend th long flight of Custom House steps and make a toilsome progre; to his chair beside the fireplace in his room across the hall fror Hawthorne’s office. There he sat, seemingly hardly aware of th rustle of papers, the discussion of business, and the casual tal of the office. Some of the other men were ancient sea captain: [255] The Salem Custom House From the collection of the Essex Institute. /ith furrowed, weather-beaten cheeks, who, after being tossed on very sea, had finally drifted into the quiet nook of the Salem lustom House. In the summertime, on a listless day, these ven- rable figures might be seen in the entry sitting in old-fashioned hairs, which were tipped on their hind legs against the wall— ometimes asleep, but occasionally talking together, in voices be- ween a whisper and a snore. The whereabouts of the Oldest In- abitant was at once settled when one looked at them. Not all the employees, it is true, were elderly men. The head lerk, Zachary Burchmore, by virtue of his business talent, was ctual head of the establishment, and for him Hawthorne had a ood deal of admiration. Hawthorne felt kindly, too, toward Villiam Mullet, who had stepped aside to permit Hawthorne 0 become candidate for the surveyorship. Mullet was a kind, uiet, gentle fellow, a great reader of poetry, and able to recite housands of lines from memory. Nor were all the veteran ship- aasters sunk in the lethargy of age. Captain Stephen Burchmore ad such a marvelous gift as a storyteller that Hawthorne was ure that could he himself have preserved the picturesque force f Burchmore’s style, he could have produced something new in iterature. When Burchmore told a story, the company of listen- rs roared with laughter, and none was more convulsed than lawthorne. Burchmore, for instance, told a tale of an immense Id turtle, Bellysore Tom, twenty feet long, longer than a ship’s Dngboat, so large that the lookout at the masthead mistook it Dr a rock. All the sailors who voyaged to Batavia knew Bellysore "om, according to Burchmore’s tale, and between Tom and the ilots there sprang up a mutual friendship. It was evidently a ind of Mark Twain yarn, perhaps of the order of the tale of Tom >uartz, the sagacious cat—something quite different from Haw- Dorne’s own prevailingly serious stories. But in spite of such diversions as Burchmore’s narratives, time ung heavily on Hawthorne’s hands, and he grew increasingly issatisfied with his surroundings. His motive in assuming the mstom House position had been simply to earn a living, the ork itself having no attraction. Long gone was the brightness ; his youthful dream to take his place among the sons of toil, lough if any such ideal lingered, he found it unrealized at the ustom House, for there one could hardly share in the united [ ^59 ] effort of mankind. It would have been ludicrous, of course, t think of offering up his Custom House labors as a kind of prayei as had once been the hope at Brook Farm. The truth was tha the surveyorship provided a living, but nothing more. What irked him, for one thing, was the wretched numbnes which held possession of him, a torpor which accompanied hir wherever he went. Though he still took occasional walks, alon the sea or in the country places where he had played as a bo) the charm of Nature—of earth and sky and ocean wave—no^ seemed to be hidden from him. His walks were for the most par evening strolls from Mall Street to Buffum’s Comer at the uppe end of Main Street, beyond the Quaker burying ground, a mile’ walk which stirred his body, indeed, but left his imagination ur awakened. In the years at the Old Manse, he remembered, Na ture had given him freshness and activity of thought the momen he had stepped across his threshold to wander along the river o to seek solitude in Sleepy Hollow or at Walden Pond. Besides, the prompting to write was renewed, making hin restless and dissatisfied with the dreary outlook of a life spent ii the Custom House. When he sat alone or walked alone, he founc himself dreaming about stories, as of old. Sometimes, as of old he jotted down hints for stories in his almost abandoned jom nal. At the Custom House he meditated many an hour upoi themes for his pen, pacing back and forth across his office o traversing, with a hundred-fold repetition, the long extent fron the front door of the Custom House to the side entrance, am back again. His situation at the Custom House, however, anc his customary associates were so anti-literary that he despairec of any literary accomplishment. In the quiet of his home, too, after all the family were in bed he sat sometimes of an autumn evening, in the sitting room, with out light, except from the coal fire and the moon. He enjoyed th( beautiful effect of the moonlight falling so white upon the carpet and showing its figures so distinctly, and making all the room s( visible, and yet so different from a morning or noontide visibility There were all the familiar things—every chair, the tables, th( couch, the bookcase, all the things that he was accustomed tc in the daytime; but now, in the semi-light, it seemed as if he wen remembering them through a lapse of years. Then the dim coa re threw its unobtrusive tinge through the room—a faint ruddi- ess upon the wall, with a mild, heart-warm influence which had not unpleasant effect in diminishing the colder spirituality of le moonbeams. Between these lights such a medium was created s was fitting for ghosts to glide noiselessly in, and sit quietly own. In such a medium, sitting there alone, he might hope to ream strange things to be put to pen. But to little avail. His Drenoons at the Custom House undid all that his evenings had one. It was a vexatious predicament. If he were but free from the reary duties of the Custom House—free, once more, to write! till, the Custom House provided a living, which, in the face of is family responsibilities, he dared not give up. It seemed a ilemma which only Providence could resolve. Providence, indeed, may move in mysterious ways. Though lawthome naturally thought of his problem as a personal one, nd sought, if vainly, to solve it in personal terms, there were broad forces and events over which he had little or no control »ut which were to take his problem in hand after a fashion lardly dreamed of by him. He thought of himself as an inoffensive man of letters holding n insignificant little government office by virtue of his modest iterary accomplishment; hence the political agitations of the day aight be assumed to have no relation to him save as their mur- lur entered his consciousness hardly noticed, and faded away s he thought of his private affairs. That the Whigs had nom- lated as their presidential candidate General Zachary Taylor, )ld Rough-and-Ready, military hero of the Mexican War, seemed f no great concern to Hawthorne. Taylor’s election, even if it lould come about, would not affect him in his little government osition, for if Taylor had made any pledge it was that if he were lected there would be no political proscription. He would come ) the Presidency with no friends to reward, no enemies to punish, nd nothing to serve but his country. Nothing could be more )othing and reassuring than Taylor’s promises. [261] There were in Salem, however, those to whom the p>ossibl election meant much, and who participated in Taylor’s campaig; after the manner of the time: namely, with torchlight parade with fireworks, and with oratory in which flags flew, screamin eagles spread their wings, the rhetoric soaring into the empyrea; and showering down golden promises—a beguiling prelude t the division of the spoils to follow when the tumult had die away. On his election to the presidency of the Salem Taylo Club, Charles Upham, who had left a local pastorate to ente politics, revealed to his audience the hopes which the Whigs ha pinned to the election of General Taylor. A distinctive principl of the Whig candidate, said Upham, was his oft-reiterated n mark—that if elected he would not be the mere President of party. Rather, he would endeavor to act independent of part denominations, and feel bound to administer the governmen untrammelled by party schemes. It was because the Whig party had endorsed this sentimen of General Taylor at its National Convention, said Upham, tha they in Salem might well be proud to belong to that party, whid had thus given evidence that it was not held together, nor stimi lated to action, by the prospect of the spKDils of office. It hai higher objects than the advancement or emolument of indivic uals. At the same time, however, Upham assured his listener; General Taylor would undoubtedly surround himself with cabinet of Whigs who concurred with him in his principles, an; that he would take care to do justice to his friends in the exei cise of his patronage, as occasion should arise. Nevertheless, ii his general administration, Taylor would be the President, no of a party, but of the people, treating all with paternal and im partial kindness. General Taylor’s great heart embraced, witl true benignity and with noble liberality, all in every station am of every name who were faithful to their trust. The Whigs migh well be proud to have their banner borne aloft by Taylor’s bravi and invincible arm. If the Salem Whigs would but do their dut) General Taylor’s brows would be encircled with the wreaths of triumph more decisive and glorious than had ever been exhibite; even on his own immortal battlefields. [ 262 ] So it was made to seem that General Taylor was to be all ings to all people. It was, after all, at least in politics, a simple itter to have one’s cake and eat it, too. But Upham’s oratory IS only a beginning of an excitement that was yet to reach its :al crescendo. It was in the September evening rally that the lem Whigs demonstrated how awake they were to their polit- il possibilities. Then it was, when delegations from Boston d Danvers and Lawrence joined the Salem demonstrators, that lem witnessed such exciting scenes as it had not witnessed he¬ re—the delegations counter-marching by the glare of Bengola fhts, amid the clash of the brazen instruments of the Salem nd and the roar of thousands of voices. Then—the treat of the casion, a speech by the distinguished Rufus Choate in Me- anic Hall, greeted by a roar of voices, the waving of handker- iefs by the ladies, a sea of upturned faces, the singing of Whig ngs. It was a speech adorned with all the charms of eloquence, id all the charms chanted the praises of that plain, brave old an who had filled the measure of his country’s glory—General aylor. The excitement was to rise still higher. The climax came with e Whig victory in the November elections, and it found its pression locally in the Great Jubilee. Then cannons roared daybreak, at noon, and at sunset. Flags flew from masts of ssels in the harbor, from stores, across the streets, and from veiling houses. The night was brilliant with hundreds of flam- g torches and the blaze of fireworks. Magnificent bonfires shot ) from Castle Hill, Buffum’s Corner, Bentley’s Hill, and Nor- ey’s Point. There was again a grand parade of great numbers : marchers, though their number was as nothing to the moving iiss which filled the streets. The Whigs were celebrating a great volution, their victory setting the seal of reprobation upon the rrupt practices of the Democratic administration. No more, ireafter, would there be President-made wars for the extension I slavery, no more abuses of the veto power, no more tariffs to lure northern interests, and no more corrupt and corrupting L* of official patronage. [26^] If, as he went his quiet way, Hawthorne believed that all the local demonstrations had nothing to do with him, he was spec ily and rudely disillusioned. Hardly had the warm assurances President Taylor’s inaugural address been uttered in the ch of a March day, when Hawthorne learned that there was afoot strong effort to remove him from his office. He was disappointe angry, and frightened—assured as he had been that he had i ceived his appointment for no political reasons and might thei fore hope that political causes would not remove him. Much he had disliked his work, he had faithfully fulfilled his duti( and he could ill afford to lose his source of livelihood. In haste he wrote to his Whig friend Hillard, pleading f his intercession with other leading Whigs. The political machir however, continued to move onward, crushing its victims aloi the way. On June 2, 1849, the Salem Gazette announced tweni four new appointments in the Boston Custom House. On Jui 8 Hawthorne received official notice by telegraph that he h: been turned out of office. However guileless General Taylor m: have been when he made his pre-election promises of no proscri tion, inexperienced in politics as he was. President Taylor h; early been persuaded to emulate President Jackson, once derid( for the ruthlessness of his policy of proscription. How the Salem Whigs so quickly brought about Hawthom( dismissal is no longer a matter of clear record, though a proi inent leader in the movement was Charles Upham, President the Salem Taylor Club. That dismissal, however, stirred up hornet’s nest of opposition, not only among Hawthorne’s Dem cratic friends, but also among his Whig friends and acquaintanc( The very day after the press had announced Hawthorne’s i moval, Rufus Choate, who had apparently honestly praised Ge eral Taylor in his Salem address, petitioned the Secretary of tl Treasury, William Meredith, to retain Hawthorne, not on because Hawthorne was a man of genius, of pure character, ar a writer of rare beauty, but because it was in the best interes of the public and the Whig party to do so. George Ticknor, er inent historian, and long a Whig, wrote Mereditli, an old frieni how pained he was by Hawthorne’s dismissal, which would no [264 ] irow the author back again to poverty. George Hillard, in a mg letter to Daniel Webster, pointed out how harmful to the /higs was the ill-considered dismissal of Hawthorne, who had ) many warm friends and admirers in the party that their dis- leasure might affect the autumn elections in Massachusetts. •’Sullivan, long-time friend of Hawthorne, pleading Hawthorne’s ight connection with politics, assured Meredith that Hawthorne ad never written a political line for his Democratic Review. He iked for a recall of the dismissal. He warned Meredith that Haw- lorne’s removal would do more harm to the administration than we hundred ordinary cases of removal. Hawthorne’s case, wrote •’Sullivan, was a matter of national interest. And so it proved to be. Before all these letters, as well as thers, from Whigs and Democrats alike, had been delivered in /ashington, the press had taken up Hawthorne’s case, an as- mishing evidence of how widely and favorably known \vas the lodest author of the Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old lanse. Though the Salem Whigs were not without their vig- rous defenders, the press. Whig and Democratic alike, pre- ominantly favored Hawthorne and expressed a lively indignation ; the administration’s turn of coat as its defection related to [awthorne. The indignation reverberated not only in New Eng- nd, but echoed among the woods and prairies of the then Far Zest. What a strange turn of events it was that coupled the name ; a mere surveyor of the customs with that of the highest officer L the land—the President of the United States himself! This coupling of names took many forms, in language heated I' restrained, though it was prevailingly not to the advantage i' President Taylor. The Boston Post spoke of Hawthorne’s dis- lissal as one of the most heartless acts of a heartless adminis- lation. General Taylor, said the Post, had never achieved half i much glory with his sword as Hawthorne had achieved with s pen; yet, now, there stood the mere soldier, and there lay the ad of the poet and scholar, stricken off to gratify some parti- in. In New York William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post cem¬ ented editorially with an effort of calm appraisal. It recognized ither Hawthorne’s need nor his writings as entitling him, of emselves, to an office, the duties of which he had discharged with i.elity and efficiency. Still, if General Taylor was pledged to any [26^] principle of policy, he was pledged against removal for opinion’ sake. Since Hawthorne had received his appointment as a tribut( to his literary accomplishments, a more flagrant violation of Tay lor’s pledge could not be imagined than the removal of Haw thome—a wrong which it was in the power of the government t( repair, and which it ought to repair immediately. The widespread and recurring nature of such criticism o the administration was not without effect. The commission o Hawthorne’s successor at the Salem Custom House was suspended and Hawthorne was temporarily permitted to continue in hi office. Originally, it appears, in spite of the party’s slogan of n( proscription for opinion’s sake, the Whigs’ plea had been tha Hawthorne deserved ejection because, they said, he was an activ Democrat, one who had been on the Salem Democratic Towi Committee, a committee particularly active and peculiarly viru lent, and one who had contributed to the Democratic Review an( the Democratic Salem Advertiser, not to mention walking ii Democratic torchlight parades. They hinted darkly, too, at myi terious machinations in Custom House affairs, but without de veloping the subject. The aim was, mainly, to show that Hat\ thome had originally received his appointment on politica grounds, his literary merits having little to do with it. To thes accusations, which were published in the Boston Atlas, Hat\ thorne replied in a letter to his friend Hillard, who obtaine( publication of it in the Boston Advertiser, a Whig journal. Thert in a careful marshaling of his answers to these charges, all o them false, Hawthorne successfully answered the accusations. T show his confidence that the falsity of the charges against hin would be apparent to anybody who knew him, Hawthorne n quested that the Atlas article be published in the Salem Advertise without comment by him, and so it was. This rebuttal of Hawthorne’s, together with the almost ovei whelming objections to his expulsion expressed by the news papers, made the opposition pause, but it did not end its efforts It merely made it change its course. If, after all, it proved to b a touchy matter to expel from office one who could not easil be proved to be a politician, especially when the Whig electioi slogan had been “No proscription,’’ some other means might b [ 266 ] found more consistent with General Taylor’s promises. Before the end of the month of June, the Salem Whigs had agreed upon 1 means and were pursuing it with vigor and determination, rheir aim now became, simply, to attack Hawthorne’s character md his conduct as an officer of the government. The opening lay in General Taylor’s qualification of his re¬ mark regarding no proscription—namely, that removals from ap¬ pointive offices should follow only from dishonesty or incompe¬ tence. It was an opening seized immediately upon the appearance Df Hawthorne’s rebuttal. Publicly the local Salem Whig journal maintained that Hawthorne was not so innocent as he had been represented, and that his rebuttal was a purported answer merely, a cunningly devised and ingeniously worded letter, the merest subterfuge, an illustration of Hawthorne’s craftiness. This Reg¬ ister article Hawthorne probably saw, with what emotions can be imagined. What he did not see was a letter written to the Secretary of the Treasury at Washington on the very day of the appearance of the Register article and signed by N. B. Mansfield, local merchant, Nath. Silsbee, Jr., Chairman of the Whig Ward Committee, and by Charles Upham. This letter made the new aim unmistakably clear. It apprised Secretary Meredith that there would shortly be laid before him papers and statements fully justifying the removal of Surveyor Hawthorne on the grounds of corruption in the Salem Custom House, a corruption which had been countenanced, helped out, and supported by all the talents which Mr. Hawthorne may have possessed. There followed a sequence of scenes and events not lovely o contemplate. It may well be that Hawthorne’s adversaries were nen not without admirable qualities, and certainly many of them vere men prominent in their community. Equally sure it is, lowever, that they demonstrated to what ends men may go when notivated by political ambition, by vanity, by stubbornness. It night, indeed, be well to draw the veil of oblivion over these cenes but for one reason: they were a part of Hawthorne’s life, itter dregs from which he miraculously distilled a transcendent rt. That a new set of charges was being concocted against him, lawthome suspected. If he ever learned the details of the plan, is bitterness could only have been increased, for, at the meetings [267] of the Taylor Club and the Whig Ward Committee that followed were some with whom he had long been on familiar or friendly terms. There, for instance, was the chameleon Conolly, witl whom he had so often dined at Longfellow’s home to discus Evangeline. There was Conolly, turned Whig and stabbing hin in the back, as Hawthorne was one day to tell him. There, too was Caleb Foote, in whose Salem Gazette Hawthorne had pub lished “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” as well as “The Siste Years,” and who, before the world knew Hawthorne at all b name, had prophesied for his young townsman a wide and endm ing fame. To Foote’s wife (“Dear, sweet, tender, loving Mary”) Sophia had written intimate and ecstatic letters of the idyllic lif at the Old Manse, and had sent her husband’s love to Caleb. No\ the Salem editor had unhappily been drawn into the vortex of th local political whirlpool threatening a former friend. It was ; sad spectacle. But in the records of these meetings appeared the names o some whom Hawthorne had never regarded as friendly towan him. There was the name of Richard S. Rogers, Salem merchani who had apparently been one of the original instigators of Ha\\ thome’s ousting, and whom Hawthorne was one day, in “Feathei top,” to fix forever as the very prototype of the Man of Straw Very prominent at these meetings was the president of the Saler Taylor Club himself, Charles Upham, who had so irritated Haw thorne when, after a visit to Concord, he had returned witl the derisive tale that Hawthorne’s only alternative to a politics position was the almshouse. The fruit of these meetings was a “Memorial,” witten b Upham during a fortnight of labor, the purpose of which wa to state the Whig view of the situation at the Custom House ani to justify Hawthorne’s expulsion. Carried to Washington by Uf ham in person, it was a long and intricate document—fifteei pages of longhand still extant in the files of the Treasury D( partment. It advances and retreats, circles and backtracks, in course such as a fox might take to bewilder a pursuing hounc It is permeated by subtleties, innuendoes, truths, and untruth: Thought could hardly be more fluid, asserting and yet not a: serting, a very jewel of obfuscation, arguments tending to leai [268] the mind to conclusions for reasons vanishing in retrospect, a baneful opiate. It would be impossible, in brief compass, to review, if a re¬ view were desirable, all the complications of the long Memorial. It began in insincerity, and so it ended. It began in insincerity because it protested that from the beginning of the Taylor cam¬ paign and for some time after the election, there had been no slightest thought in the minds of the party leaders of the subject of offices—a patent untruth in the light of Upham’s own Taylor Club speech and of Hawthorne’s awareness, as early as the day after Taylor’s inaugural, of the effort to remove him. The cor¬ ruption which it alleged began, as it said, during the surveyorship of Hawthorne, and consisted of permitting Democratic employees to earn more fees than were earned by Whigs. It maintained, too, that the Democratic employees were compelled to contribute a large proportion of their extra fees to the support of their party, as well as to the support of the local Democratic newspaper, and that, when two men refused the latter assessment, they were im¬ mediately suspended by a notice signed by Surveyor Hawthorne limself, whose conduct was represented as all the more repre- lensible because one of these men was the father of eleven ffiildren. Such sinister evils the Whigs proposed to end by dis¬ placing Hawthorne, his superior, the Deputy Collector, and other Democratic employees, and by bringing in Whigs. Having thus presented its evidence that Hawthorne was, in he words of the writer, guilty of corruption, iniquity, and fraud, he evils which, according to the earlier introductory letter, had )een supported by all the talents which Hawthorne possessed, he Memorial went on to say that the Salem Whigs were, after all, isposed to believe that Hawthorne was the abused instrument of thers. They recognized that he possessed a true manliness of haracter, though ignorant of business and the stratagems of olitical managers. His literary friends, however, ought to be lankful that he had been delivered from connections unworthy E such a most amiable and elegant writer, whom none appreciated r cherished more than the Whigs of his native city. To these accusations Hawthorne replied in a letter to Horace lann, Whig Representative to Congress. How untrue was the lemorial as it related to him, he clearly revealed. But how [26p] little all these accusations meant to the Salem politicians had al¬ ready been hinted, in various circumlocutions, in the Memorial itself, though it was all sharply defined in Upham’s remark, quoted in the Register, that Hawthorne’s removal was simply necessary to vindicate the authority of the Whigs of Salem. Until Hawthorne, protected by his Whig superior, the Deputy Collec¬ tor, had been removed, none of Hawthorne’s inferiors could be touched. To show his avowed friendship for Hawthorne, and thus revealing his own lack of belief in the charges of fraud, or the small relevance of honesty in politics, Upham volunteered to find employment for Hawthorne elsewhere. Some such offer may actually have been made, though Hawthorne declined considering any such proposal as inimical to his self-respect, since acceptance would still leave his integrity in doubt. Justice could be done onl) by placing him exactly where he was before, a suggestion of course unacceptable to the Whigs. Though Hawthorne’s original notice of dismissal had been dated June 8, he actually remained in office until late in July, his successor apparently assuming his duties on the twenty-fourth By August 8, 1849, Hawthorne had resigned himself to the loss of the surveyorship; nevertheless, he and his adversaries assumed for months that his case would yet be taken up by the United States Senate, such a wide notice had it received. But nothing came of this plan. The W^higs of Salem had won their little vic¬ tory over Surveyor Hawthorne. In the vast fabric of government, it was no great affair; yet, as in Hawthorne’s own “Birthmark when Georgiana perished, the forces of earth had earned, like Aminadab, their gross, hoarse chuckle of laughter. [^] For Hawthorne, these months of uncertainty, while his for tunes were apparently being decided by men indifferent to hii interests and careless of his reputation, were a period of greal strain. Sophia, to be sure, rejoiced to see his friends come to hii rescue, to hear her husband’s name ringing through the land and to observe that he was becoming very famous. But Hawthorne himself cared for no such publicity, and shrank from thus career [270] 'ng through the public prints. In the end, though he had pre- lerved his integrity, he had, nevertheless, in the superficial view )£ the world, been discharged from public office on charges of iraud. It was a wretched time, the memory of which he could lever blot from his mind, but which, like the unhappy recollec- ;ion of his long solitude, continued to haunt and plague him wen after the world had accorded him its highest literary honors. The burden was the heavier because, when the charges against liim had become most intense, and when his discharge was im¬ minent, his mother lay dying a painful death in her quarters in lis Mall Street home, where Sophia was her nurse. When he went Lo see his mother one afternoon late in July, she still knew him, is he kneeled by her bedside and took her hand, though she could inly murmur a few indistinct words. Tears gathered in his eyes, ind he could not suppress his sobs. Afterwards, as he stood by an ipen window, the shouts, laughter, and cries of the children came ap into the chamber. Through the curtain he saw little Una of ;he golden hair, looking very beautiful, and so full of spirit and life that she was life itself. What a contrast to his poor dying mother! He seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, le himself standing in the dusty midst of it. What a mockery, if vhat he saw were all—let the interval between youth and age be illed with what happiness it might! He seemed to be in the larkest hour he had ever lived, though out of the very bitterness )f the scene before him he nevertheless gathered the sweet as- urance of a better state of being. Now, when he needed this issurance, he was comforted by the faith in which he had been lourished as a boy, and which, as a youth at college, he had re- ealed to his friend Bridge as they had watched the moonlight )lay on the falls of the Androscoggin. Once again Sophia and he were miserably poor. His income ad been hardly large enough for their simple needs, and, after e had paid his debt to Bridge, little remained. Sophia, indeed, ad saved something from her household funds, though her sav- igs could not compensate his lack of income as the months ragged on. Happily, at this juncture, in the midst of winter, help ame from funds gathered by his friends, Lowell in New York nd Hillard in Boston—enough money to smooth his path for a mg time. It was sweet, he wrote Hillard, who had sent the [27/] money, thus to be remembered by his friends, sweet to think that they deemed him worth upholding in his poor work through life. Yet he was ashamed to accept this money, for it was his creed that failure is at least to a large degree attributable to the man who fails. In thus availing himself of the generosity of his friends, he could retain his self-respect only by making their generosity an incitement to his utmost exertions, so that he might not need their help again. It was, perhaps, the most trying year of his life. His tread lost some of its elasticity, his face became wan and somber, his eyes filled with a shadowy light. It appears that he never fully recovered from the strain of this unhappy year. In after life he was the more easily affected by external circumstances, and he was tc age early. Still, he was to make his adversity an incitement tc greater exertions than he had yet made, as he had decided when, Hillard’s letter and money in hand, he had walked homeward from the post office, the sharp cold wind and his emotions bringing tears to his eyes. Besides, in the midst of all these troublesome days, he and Sophia were both sustained by a faith which they had early begun to share, and which they had ex¬ pressed when he had scratched Sophia’s words on a pane of his study window in the Old Manse: “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes.’’ They accepted what befell them as the choice of a Providence wiser than they—assured, as Milto n had been, that All is best, though we doubt. What the unsearchable dispose Of Highest Wisdom brings about And ever best found in the close. When, after his departure from the Old Manse, Hawthorne had returned to his mother’s home and was agnin established in the third-floor room where he had spent so many lonely years, he was determined to resume his writing with vigor while he waited for a political appointment. He at once began the mit- ing of “The Old Manse’’ as an introductory chapter for Mosses from an Old Manse, a collection of old tales to be published by [272] iley and Putnam, though he lingered over this writing for some onths, awaiting the mood and the inspiration to make the etch faultless. In the meanwhile, declining the request of Wiley d Putnam to write a history of witchcraft, he busied himself th editing, for the Democratic Review, the “Papers of an Old irtmoor Prisoner” of his friend Benjamin F. Browne, whose (sition as postmaster in Salem he had sought before their ac- laintance had begun. Who profited financially from this pub- ation seems not to be a matter of record, though it must have tablished a bond of friendship profitable to Hawthorne. Browne, awthome’s senior by some years, had known Dr. Bentley, lem’s famous diarist, and was himself an active antiquarian, hough his records for the most part were destroyed in a fire, me fragments remaining indicate that he shared with Haw- orne an interest in Thomas Maule, seventeenth-century Salem dividualist whose name and some of whose characteristics Haw- orne was to use in The House of the Seven Gables. Doubtless e two men devoted many leisure hours together in their com- on interest in research in local history, Hawthorne, of course, the introduction to The Scarlet Letter, referring to himself lien speaking of the antiquarian researches of his predecessor the Custom House, Surveyor Pue. But when the old tales for the Mosses had been collected and e introduction finally written, Hawthorne, now established in e Salem Custom House, made up his mind to be done forever ith writing, as he told Longfellow wearily that June day when e old friends had stood and talked on the bridge over the larles River. In the preceding March he had reviewed Mel- lle’s Typee for the Salem Advertiser, for which he was to write number of miscellaneous items; but it seemed that he was not lain to use his pen for any kind of creative writing. While he was mmuting to Salem from Boston, the conditions were of course isuitable for writing; nor were matters improved when the nily took quarters in the upstairs apartment on Chestnut Street, hen, however, the house on Mall Street was found, with a idy high above all disturbances, Sophia rejoiced that her hus- ;nd would again have unintenupted hours for musing. Pres- tly she reported to her mother that he was writing every after¬ ion. Hawthorne was, it is true, trying to resume his pen, as he [^73] wrote Longfellow; but, though he dreamed about stories as of oli the afternoons went by in fruitless effort. To be sure, in the ear days of November, 1847, he wrote that exquisitely beautiful r view of his friend’s Evangeline, an accomplishment of no sma measure. In his musings, too, he contemplated a tale of revenge how the effects of it might diabolize him who indulges in i and so, in his thinking, he moved closer to the still vague coi cept of The Scarlet Letter. Yet the dream remained elusive, an nothing was put to paper save, several months later, a caustic an ephemeral review of a local theatrical performance. It appearc that he was, beyond peradventure, finished with writing. Then, in September, 1848, some two and a half years afti he had written “The Old Manse/’ Elizabeth Peabody conceive the idea of publishing a book, to be called Aesthetic Papers, coi sisting of sketches and essays by various authors, and asked Hai thorne to contribute. It was to prove an important project, coi taining, as it did, Emerson’s essay “War” and Thoreau’s moi famous “Civil Disobedience.” At the time, however, Elizabet Peabody’s request seemed no great incentive to break Hawthorne long literary silence. But since she had risked the publication < his first volume for children, he was indebted to her, and i agreed to contribute, but not for pay. The result was “Etha Brand,” one of his most powerful stories—strangely so, comir from such an unused pen, and wrenched, as Hawthorne hir self said, by main strength from his miserable brain—the fra; ment of an idea, like a tooth ill-drawn, and leaving the roots I torture him. Elizabeth, however, did not find the tale suitable i her book, and returned it to its author. In December Hawthorr sent the rejected story to a New York magazine, which failed b fore the tale was published. When it finally appeared in anoth( journal, the author seems to have remained uncompensated. Fortunately, of these disappointments, Hawthorne knew : the time only of Elizabeth’s rejection; and so, in the late wi ntt of 1849 he busied himself with the writing of “Main Street”. f( Elizabeth’s book, which appeared in May. Already, however, I was writing not only against the hindrances of the usual ant literary associations of the Custom House, for while he was ei gaged in composing the sketch which was to immortalize the mai thoroughfare of Salem, the local politicians were already begii [^74] ng their campaign to oust him from his surveyorship, as he was ^are. He tried not to let himself be disturbed by these things, id went on with his writing as quietly as ever. But it was impossible not to be disturbed, and when, in the St week in June, it became apparent that his expulsion might ; effected, he wrote to Longfellow that letter, already mentioned, which he proposed to immolate some of his enemies by means personal satire should they succeed in getting him out of office, is first action, however, when he found his character attacked, IS to write the calmly stated defense of his conduct which Hil- rd had published in the Boston Advertiser—thus addressing the iblic in a way he had never employed before. After he learned the fabrications of Upham’s Memorial, however, he contem- ated doing his best to kill and scalp Upham in the public prints, i effort in which he was sure that he would succeed. In the end, wertheless, the letter in the Boston Advertiser was his only mment on his expulsion to appear in the newspapers. He was reserve his efforts at satire for impersonal expression in his :erary art. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that his literary t had to remain in abeyance while he wrestled with a seemingly diverse fortune. It was not easy to be tranquil while his char¬ ter was being maligned in high places; for several months he IS uncertain whether he was to be discharged or retained as rveyor; his mother’s illness and death were a great nervous 'ain; and he himself fell ill. Furthermore, he was again facing >verty. By the end of August, 1849, however, he had completed The Great Stone Face,” his tribute to Emerson, a piece of writ- g as tranquil as Walden Pond and the Concord River, where me of the initial observations for the story had been made. It true that Old Rough-and-Ready, now appearing as General ood-and-Thunder, is touched with the gentlest satire in being ered as a distinguished friend of peace, and that a certain for- 2r minister of Salem is amusingly introduced as the Rev. Dr. -ttleblast. If Daniel Webster, who declined to turn a hand in iwthome’s behalf when supplicated by Hillard, enters the story 1 Old Stony Phiz, a man of mighty faculties and little aims, he • ed no worse with Hawthorne than with Emerson or with Whit- r, neither of whom suffered personal grievances from the cele- [275] brated senator and orator. Only a close scrutiny can reveal Hai thome’s rankling wounds beneath the quiet humor and tl benignity of this wonderful idyl. Written, too, in the period following his expulsion, was “Ti Snow-Image, a Childish Miracle.” If “The Great Stone Fac( represents an inner tranquillity, “The Snow-Image” is almost ; serene as Heaven itself. Here, transformed, are the hours spei at home with his children, while Sophia tended his dying mothi after the surveyorship had been lost. Here is the Mall Street yar with its picket fence, its pear and plum trees, and the rosebush in front of the parlor window. Here is little Julian, still his a fectionate small self as Peony; and here is Una, not now an u: predictable Pearl, but Violet, the cherubic young lady who ha loving times with her father when they took walks together c May afternoons. Sophia enters the tale, also, as the mother wl keeps alive the strain of poetry in her character even amid ti dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood. And there is Hai thorne himself, humorously satirized as a hardware dealer, stu dily accustomed to take what is called a common-sense view of a affairs, a matter-of-fact, obtuse gentleman. Much has been tran figured. Summertime, when the story was written, is changed i wintertime, and the children fashion their snow maiden in pk much as Emerson’s master artist lent his hand to the vast soi that o’er him planned. That the snow-image, like Pygmalion Galatea, comes to life and plays with the children, seems the mo natural event in the world, and not a miracle at all. But behind all this marvelous charm lie, in the history ( the author, observations enforced by harsh circumstance. Men ories of Brook Farm and its disillusionments color the closin pages of the tale as the writer contemplates the dangers of benev( lence when good may become a mischief. So unobtrusive as to b scarcely perceptible save to an observant eye is an acceptance c the seeming triumph of the material. The beautiful snow siste in the end, becomes but a pool of water in front of the stove. Th acceptance, however, is quiet and resigned. Prospero-like, Hav thorne had recognized that we are such stuff as dreams are mad on. He had, moreover, tried to still his beating mind, to think c each thing well, hopeful of calm seas ahead. If he could not a [276] lys keep his footing on such lofty heights, he had nevertheless tained them. He was now writing immensely, as Sophia observed with some- ing like fright. Twice he sought relief from the strain in ex- irsions—in mid-September to Lenox in western Massachusetts to ok for new living quarters, and in late October to Temple, ew Hampshire, to visit Old General Miller, his former superior the Salem Custom House. He was driven to write by his family ?eds and by a wish to put his enemies to blush. He was driven, o, by the accumulated force of years of hope and habit and nbition. As a boy, carefully printing his sketches in the Specta- r, he had played at authorship; as a youth at college, he had ;dicated himself to writing; and to writing he had devoted the St energy of his young manhood. Writing had become his na- re. Now, unknown to himself, compelled by circumstances and 1 the powers possessing him, he stood at last at the very gateway his highest fulfilment. What he had in mind was a book not unlike Mosses from an Id Manse, a volume to be called Old-Time Legends: Together ith Sketches, Experimental and Ideal. It was to have an intro- iction telling of his life in the Custom House, much like the lapter which had recounted the years spent at the Old Manse, a lapter which had been received with much favor by his readers. And so with zest he set about to write the story of his three :ars in the Custom House. Enough time had now elapsed so at he could see those years in perspective, and control his own dings with remarkable restraint. It is, of course, a sketch very fferent from the chapter picturing the happy, idyllic years at e Old Manse. Now he had been in the world of which he had ice idealistically dreamed; but it had largely been a world of en bent on money making, a world of rough sailors, of the flot- m and jetsam washed ashore along the wharf, of tidewaiters unging away the hours at government expense; it had been a orld of petty and scheming politicians, mankind in some of its iloveliest forms. All these things are recorded with photographic id sometimes withering realism, with an eye to such unadorned ;t as he had cast upon the cattle-people, the butchers, and the untry loafers of Brighton Fair in Brook Farm days, or upon e drunken ruffians of the barroom in the tavern at North Adams [277] —such an undiluted realism as he never used in his fiction. Sti all is treated with an infinite good humor that sometimes brea out in hearty laughter. In the loss of his own head by the f litical guillotine he pictures himself as amusingly as did Irving 1 headless horseman in the story of Ichabod Crane. The bittern( he had known when charged with fraud, the fear of poverty f lowing the loss of his surveyorship—these are metamorphosed i to a representation of the pettiness, the laughable absurdity political proscription, a representation which was to sting 1 adversaries and to make them writhe, so ludicrous was the siti tion made to appear, though not a single man was named. Ha thorne had, indeed, turned to satire. Nevertheless, the sketch is not satire alone—any more than is the thought of an embittered man. If the characterization of t permanent Inspector—who possessed no power of thought, i depth of feeling, no troublesome sensibilities, but whose talk roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster—approach a naturalism painful to some modem readers as it was to Ha thorne’s Whig enemies, that characterization is more than b; anced by the portrait of the old Collector, General Miller, a pc trait of unflinching realism blended with an idealism showii at once the limitations and the virtues of an admirable and Ic able man. In short, in the custom house chapter Hawthorne i veals that, though he had been in the world, he was not who! of it. If, now, he had the worldling’s ken, he had, still, the ide: ist’s vision bright. While the custom house sketch was being written, or short thereafter, Hawthorne had begun a tale suggestions for which h: apparently flitted through his mind at wide and scattered inte vals. While he was still writing for Goodrich’s Token, he h: had a momentary imaginative glimpse of that young woman of i mean beauty, the letter A upon the breast of her gown, wl stood among the crowd on that day in Salem when John Endico rent the Red Cross from the banner of England. Now, at las the miscellany of seemingly unrelated ideas gathered togethi into a meaningful pattern. What Hawthorne seems to have co templated was a short story of some two hundred pages, simp another tale for the proposed collection, Old-Time Legends. He was writing more intensely than ever now, with co] [ 2 ^ 8 ] cting feelings, seemingly at once happy and dejected, his outer id his inner life apparently at odds, the man and the artist rangely and inexplicably meeting and parting. He was in a very ?rvous state, going through such a great diversity of emotion; ;t, as he strayed through the gloom of his sunless fantasies, he as happy, too—happier, he thought, than at any time since he id quitted the Old Manse. In spite of a lack of physical vigor id energy, he protested that he did not feel anywise ill. To iphia, who sermonized him on his present sedentary habits, he ;ver owned up to not feeling perfectly well. Yet he longed to :t into the country, to labor daily in a garden an hour or two, to mble in country air or on the seashore. He could not long and such a life of bodily inactivity and mental exertion. As r his prospects for public approval of his writing, he was in a ;sponding state of mind. He feared that no publisher would sk publishing a book for him, probably the most unpopular riter in America. At this juncture, when he had written only the first chapters ; the tale of the scarlet letter, he experienced a piece of great )od fortune, good both for himself and for the world. On a cold inter day of late 1849, as he hovered despondingly near the stove E his study, he was visited by James T. Fields, of the Boston Liblishing firm of Ticknor and Fields. Fields had come to see hat Hawthorne might have written that his firm might publish; ut Hawthorne, in low spirits over the sale of his earlier short ories, protested that he had nothing, though at last, after Field’s isistent solicitation, he confessed that he had something, though, hether it was very good or very bad he could not say. This anuscript Fields read on the train on his return to Boston, and ad enthusiastically, for he read the first chapters of what came I be The Scarlet Letter. At Field’s suggestion, fortunately, the short story which Haw- orne had planned was extended to novel length, an illustration how helpful a publisher can be, and a piece of good advice for lEiich Hawthorne always remained grateful. For another month so, therefore, Hawthorne continued to work at white heat, on bbruary 4, 1850, writing to Horatio Bridge that only the day rfore he had finished his book, one end of it being in press in )ston, while the other end was in his head in Salem, the story [^79] thus being at least fourteen miles long! But though he wrote thi facetiously to his old friend, he had brought his book to an er under a great strain. He was long to remember that, on the nigl of its completion, he had read the conclusion to Sophia, his voi< swelling and heaving as if he were being tossed up and dotv on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. Never before, in any ( his writing, had he been so nearly overcome by his own emotion Sophia, listening, said that the story broke her heart, and so wei to bed with a grievous headache. Fields had spoken of the book in tremendous terms of a] probation. Hawthorne himself, though believing that some po tions of it were powerfully written, doubted a great success, coi vinced that nothing that he could write would appeal to tl broadest class of sympathies, or obtain a very wide popularit Happily for Hawthorne, Fields’s discernment proved correct, fc the first edition sold in a few days, and for a number of reason There was, for one thing, the merit of the book. It was what tf Boston Transcript said it was—one of the most powerful, orij inal, and memorable books that America could boast. There wa too, something on which Hawthorne had not calculated. For hin all the newspaper publicity occasioned by his dismissal from th Salem Custom House, a publicity country-wide and months-lonj had only been a matter of embarrassment. He had always been lover of quiet and solitude; his early manhood had been sper in great retirement; his early writings had all been publishe anonymously; and nothing had pleased him more than the pa toral life at Concord. But now his name had been careerin through the public prints, and he had become a public figure, public figure whose stature had been contrasted to that of th President of the United States, and in his own favor. His frien O’Sullivan had said that his affairs had become a national issiK Sophia, in the midst of all the excitement and anxiety, had ot served that her husband’s name was ringing through the lane And so it was, though in a measure far greater than Sophia hai imagined. When The Scarlet Letter appeared so shortly after al these events, so bruited about in the public view, and so discot certing to Hawthorne, he suddenly found himself the best-know [ 280 ] Hawthorne in 1852 From the portrait try George P. A. Healey, painted for Franklin Pierce. Courtesy of the Essex Institute. ovelist in the land. Fame, which he had once hopefully thought ad come when his name first appeared in print, had now truly Tived. There happily followed such an interlude of calm as Haw- lome loved, such calm as nourished body and mind and heart, rengthening his imagination for further flights. Even on the jry day, early in June, when he had received the original tele¬ ram of dismissal, there had been family talk of removing to the )untry, perhaps to Lenox, where Sophia had friends, and near here, in the Berkshires, Hawthorne had spent, a dozen years JO, some delightful months while preparing himself to face his iture and to press his courtship. When, therefore, in August, it remed clear that he was to lose the surveyorship, and after his lother had died, there was no longer anything to keep him in ilem; and so he determined to leave as soon as possible. The cact choice of location remained uncertain for months; but at ist a little red cottage near Stockbridge Bowl and Lenox was losen. In mid-April, 1850, the Mall Street house was vacated, Dphia and the children going to live with her parents in Boston Qtil the removal to Lenox could be effected. That he was leaving Salem with complex feelings, Hawthorne d not deny. To hold in the palm of his hand at once the real id the ideal was no easy matter, or to do equal justice simul- meously to those dichotomies represented by ugliness and beauty, \! truth and falsehood, by good and evil. While witing “The ireat Stone Face” and “The Snow-Image” he had hushed his :)ubts with a soothing tranquillity, as in “The Custom House” • had subdued his unhappiness with a good-natured laughter, here had perhaps remained a dark dismay aroused by the shad- 7 s of seemingly irreparable ills. At the moment, he confessed an infinite contempt for those ople in Salem who had deliberately lied him down on two ;:asions, on two false indictments, as he WTOte to Bridge in a 'ter revealing his mixed reactions. Laughingly he wrote that he pposed he might consider himself lucky if he escaped town [281] without being tarred and feathered for writing as he did aboi his custom house experiences. Indeed, he wished that he wou be tarred and feathered, that being an entirely novel kind of d; tinction for a literary man, and, from such judges as his adv€ saries, a higher honor than a laurel crown. In a more serious mo( again, he was glad that his children had had other birthplac than Salem, and he determined that, so far as their fortunes we within his control, their roots should strike into other soil. Now, while Sophia and the children were staying with h parents, in what was at once a bookstore, apothecary shop, ai dwelling, in the midst of what he teasingly called turmoil, co fusion, and multitudinous chaos, Hawthorne himself found tl leisure which his soul craved, but which circumstances rare permitted. He journeyed to Portsmouth to visit Bridge for a we or so. At the hotel he was recognized and lugged into sociei taken out to tea and to dinner, and invited to a party, an inflicti( from which, however, he escaped into the quiet of Bridge’s hon In Boston he took lodging and board near the Peabody residen( hidden high in a back upstairs room from which he looked do\ upon the rear of the houses in Temple Place, over which tower the spire and weather-cock of the Park Street Church. In the intervals of writing in his journal, he glanced at t view before him—at the rear of houses of the better order, wi tokens of genteel families visible in all the rooms between t basements and the attic windows in the roof. There were, he c served, flower pots in some of the windows of the upper stori Occasionally he saw a lady’s figure, either seated, or appeari with a flitting grace, or dimly manifest farther within the c scurity of the room. Behind the houses were grass plots, alrea green, and fruit trees beginning to put forth their leaves ai almost in blossom. Birds fluttered and sang among the tre though in the heart of the city. Among the low outhouses a ( now and then stole along the roofs, descending a flight of ste into a brick area, investigating a shed, and entering all dark ai secret places—cautious, circumspect, as if in search of somethir and, noiseless, attentive to every sound. In the morning, the wh( row of houses was in the shade, though later in the day they wf altogether covered with sunshine, and continued so through t o afternoon, until, at evening, the sunshine slowly withdrew v [ 282 ] rd, gleamed aslant upon the windows, perched upon the chim- ys, and so disappeared. Quiet as was the prospect, from ad- :ent Washington Street came the continual and near thunder wheels. Now, abandoning himself to a generous leisure, he rambled out Boston, investigating its nooks and crannies much as he d sauntered among rural scenes at Bridge’s country estate years 0, or among the hills of North Adams, or the silent places of ook Farm. He visited the Athenaeum, not almost furtively as len he was a hack writer for the American Magazine of Useful d Entertaining Knowledge reading to abstract information ■ another uninspired article, but waited upon by the head irarian himself, and accompanied by that gentleman to the me of the distinguished scholar, George Ticknor, to ask a ques- n regarding the tales of Cervantes—evidence, as was the lioniz- I at Portsmouth, of his new recognition as a celebrated author, intervals, also, he sat for his portrait in the studio of a well- own Boston artist—as was becoming a Personage. What he most enjoyed in Boston, however, was life in its lower atifications—scenes of life in the rough. At the National The- ?r, a theater for the lower and middling classes, he took a seat e night in the hot galleries, surrounded chiefly by sailors in :turesque headgear. There, ignoring the pantomime of Jack j Giant Killer, he watched the scene about him—a young )ther unaffectedly uncovering her bosom to suckle a half-suf- 'ated child, and drunken young sailors who kept stumbling o and out of the boxes, calling to one another from different rts of the house, shouting to the performers, and singing the rden of songs. At Parker’s grogshop he observed an habitual at- dant—an elderly tatterdemalion of more than shabby general •ect, with a thin face and red nose, a patch over one eye, and ' other half-drowned in moisture, though having, withal, a sort shadow or delusion of respectability about him. Across the ^et from his lodging house was a livery stable—everything in interior dim and undefined, though with half-traceable out- i?s of stalls, and sometimes the shadowy aspect of a horse and a h in a white frock. He enjoyed the neigh of horses, the stamp their hoofs, and the odor of dung, and hay, and horse. As a ^ he could not but remember, he played in his grandfather’s livery stable, and as a youth he had traveled the countryside ( Connecticut and New Hampshire with Uncle Robert, buyir horses and gossiping with hostlers. How many scenes out of tl past did not this scene recall! Here the apparent head of the e tablishment was an unusually interesting man—sensible, though ful-looking, large-featured and homely—the image of earthy cor fort, and it was good and wholesome to look at him, to see h vivacity pervade all his earthiness, which was the more piquai because, as Hawthorne knew, this highly efficient hostler ffi been a boyhood schoolmate of Ralph Waldo Emerson! If, to a worldly and busy man, such a miscellany of exp riences might seem but an unimportant hodgepodge filling tl days of an idler, it was not so for Hawthorne. He was doii what he most loved to do: seeing, and thinking, and feeling, ai dreaming—enjoying, once more, a rich indolence. At a later tin he was to turn to his journal and to his memory of these leisure hours for matter for another novel. The Blithedale Romance. Of Hawthorne’s writing during the period of his last residen in Salem, something has already been said. In addition to T Great Stone Face” and “The Snow-Image,” there was, of cour: The Scarlet Letter. There were, also, a tale and a sketch, anter dent, in their composition, to The Scarlet Letter, and of great( significance in preparing and shaping Hawthorne s thought f the ’writing of that great romance. These were “Ethan Branc with which he broke a silence of more than two years, and Ma Street,” ’written when the first rumblings of his approachii expulsion from the Custom House reached his ears. In “Ethan Brand” Hawthorne resumed a theme which he h employed before and which he was to use again more than onc( the theme of the cold heari,, as in “Rappaccini’s Daughter ai in earlier tales. No topic had more engaged his interest, not or because the circumstances of his life had engraved it deeply his consciousness, but because it was an essential part of his F mantic theory of the function of art. Whether or not he kn( of Immanuel Kant’s effort to find some happy compromise I [284 ] reen Hume and Rousseau, he did know of Coleridge’s wish, in s revolt against eighteenth-century rationalism, to effect a proper ilance between intellect and feeling, between head and heart, tnong French authors, however, none had interested him more an the antipodal Rousseau and Voltaire, in whose works the con- ist was clear enough. In his reading of Emerson’s essays and rse, moreover—writings with which he was very well acquainted as well, perhaps, in his conversations with his Concord friend, ; encountered the thought, expressed over and over again in nerson’s conviction of the superiority of character over intellect, i another form, too, the relative claims of head and heart came rectly home to him, for, as a writer of fiction, he was perforce igaged in peering and prying and analyzing, with the constant tendant danger of a lack of personal sympathy, a danger the eater because he had chosen to write psychological romance. The idea was therefore an old one with which Hawthorne IS thoroughly familiar; but now it assumed a proportion and rce unknown, or at least unexpressed, by him before. Now, in s eyes, the sin of an intellect that triu mphed oyer the sense of •Qtherhood and rey eyence for God and sacrificed everything to > own mighty claims became the Unpardonable Sin. When, lerefore, Ethan Brand had~made Esther the subject o^ a psy- lological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps an- hilated her soul in the process, his was the one guilt beyond e scope of Heaven’s else infinite mercy. Hawthorne had, in Lthan Brand,” already anticipated his attitude toward the con- iict which so intimately bound together the lives of the hero d heroine of The Scarlet Letter. As for “Main Street,” that sketch likewise brought Hawthorne long step toward a conviction basic in The Scarlet Letter. Eor ^ most part, of course, “Main Street” is pictorial and narrative I character, and in these respects, together with “A Rill from k Town Pump,” it has made Salem’s main street the best-known oroughfare in American literature. The sketch is permeated th a delightfully caustic humor centered about a bespectacled itleman who makes it a point to see things precisely as they a humor culminating with a facetious reference to the grand limination in Salem on the night of General Taylor’s triumph, tis in its reference to the Puritans of Old Salem, however, that the sketch assumes its greatest significance in the developmei of Hawthorne’s thought and art. Of the stro ng and som berieatures of Puritan ch aract er Ha\ thorne had early expressed his admiration in “The Gray Chan pion,” an admiration continued in “Endicott and the Red Cross but qualified, for one thing, by the recognition that freedom ( conscience could scarcely flourish under the discipline of tl stern Endicott. Now, in the years at the Custom House, in h leisure hours, he had devoted himself more and more to r searches into the past of New England. Moreover, from Am Rachel Eorrester, from his cousin Eben Hathome, as well as froi his cousin Susy Ingersoll, he had learned much about his ow Puritan ancestry. H_e,c.Qiitiiiued to admire the f aith which burn t like a lamp within the the Puritan hearts, though more and moi he drew back from a contemplation of those soiabetzyisagcsri which sunshine was little more becoming than shadow. The system was, after all, hard and cold, and what they caTre 3 “Liber was much like an i ron cage. He thanked God for having give him such ancestors; but he now thought it appropriate, as 1 said in “Main Street,” for each successive generation to thar Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from the: in the march of ages. He was fully prepared now to stand apa from the faith of his ancestors, to recognize its merits and its limi —to be at once sympathetic and critical. Behind Hawthorne, when he embarked upon the writing ( The Scarlet Letter, was a long history of his thought and h artistry. There were not only his reflections on Puritans and tl Unpardonable Sin, but a thousand things—innumerable, reall and often too tenuous to describe. He wielded his brush now wii an accustomed skill, his forms and colors from sources long know to the artist. Out of his memory came a multitude of characte and ideas now transformed and shaped anew and to be put c his canvas with surer hand. Fanshawe and Rappaccini and Etha Brand and their lesser counterparts find a new life in the soUtai intellectual, and deformed Chillingworth. The Minis ter of tl Black Veil, his heart vibrating as of yore with the sympjdiies ( an erring brotherhood, his voice still trembling in sad ca denct his sensitivity grown more subtle in-the inLeivetimg_j[ear^^ appears as Arthur Dimmesdale. The young woman with the k [286] er A on the breast of her gown ._ unnamed among the crowd hat watched Endicott rip the Red Cross from the English flag, las become Hester Prynne, who has acquired not only a name, i)ut the rich voice and the redundancy of life, health, and energy Df Rappaccini’s daughter, Beatrice, together with other qualities irawn from her creator’s maturing imagination. As for little Pgaih-jt was she who, as Violet, had tried to keep pace with the itrange white-robed child as it danced lightly over the snow, :hough, much earlier, it was she who, as little Alice, had sat on [grandfather’s knee—grandfather hopeful, as Pearl’s f ather was, Eat she might b e spared the rough breezes of the world. Out of many of his old stories, in fact, Hawthorne drew mat- ;er to be employed with new force in The Scarlet Letter—irom. iuch early items as “The Haunted Quack’’ and “The Hollow of Ehe Three Hills,’’ from “Monsieur du Miroir,’’ from “The jentle Boy,” and from numerous other sources. Out of his per- ;onal experiences, too, came matters- hauntingly suggestive. The jabbling stream in the forest solitude where he had bathed a iozen years ago, on his visit to Bridge, jnqw sighed and mur- nured while Arthur and Hester lingered in thoughtful colloquy, talking of the past and planning for the future, diough the fallen gi ^ on Wh osFihossy trunk they sat had—old, dead, lonely and Q^ess—stood high above its neighbors when. Hawthorne had irst se en it in the Maine forest. Pearl, while her parents talked, athered violets and anemones which had probably had their rigin at Brook Farm, and columbines whose prototypes had once /aved in the breezes along the Concord River. The Scarlet Let- er had, indeed, had a long foreground. In it the college boy’s ream to tell the legends of his native land, as well as the young lan’s ideal of the Romance, had culminated in a mature master- iece. I But if The Scarlet Letter was a fulfilment, it remains to ask lore particularly the nature of that fulfilment. In his private life lawthome had resolved the perturbations of the time in a quiet xeptance of the will of Providence; but in his art, the fruit of le time, there has seemed, to not a few readers, to cling the bitter Ivor of unhappiness and gloom. His friend George Hillard psed the question when the book was being read in the first flush i its novelty. As he knew his friend, said Hillard, Hawthorne gave the impression of a man as healthy as Adam in Paradise yet, as Hillard yielded himself to the tragic power of The Scarle Letter, it seemed to him that the author was burdened with secre sorrow, as if he had some blue chamber in his soul into which h himself hardly dared to enter. In his own reflections on his book, Hawthorne seemed t concede the shadows. It wore, to his eye, a stem and solemn ai pect—too much ungladdened by genial sunshine, too little n lieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almos every scene of nature and real life. Though in the rvxiting c nothing else had his own emotions been so involved, he did nc regard it as wholly characteristic of his mind. He himself cam to prefer The House of the Seven Gables as more proper an^ natural for him to write. But a great book may contain many things, and a great write may say more and better than he knows—as Hawthorne agree with his friend Emerson, though so modest a man would scarcel have consented that this truth applied to himself. What Th Scarlet Letter seems to say, and how it reflects the man who wrot it, may be the more understandable with a knowledge of its fon ground, together with the perspective given by time. In its theme, broadly speaking, the book treats a questioi as old as the Book of Job—tvhat moralists and philosophers, posii ing a meaningful world, have called the problem of evil—not new problem to Hawthorne, surely, but a problem treated, fo' lowing his own harsh adversity, with a fuller, deeper probing thai anytvhere in his earlier tvriting. A wrong done, or suffered, wha follows? It was the kind of question which had long fascinate( Hawthorne, and which had come home to him with great impac when he and Lowell, years ago, had strolled from the Old Mans to the battleground, where Lowell had told him of the boy whc with his axe, had dealt the wounded British soldier a fatal blot upon the head. Upon that boy’s subsequent spiritual histor Hawthorne had mused many a time. The problem in The Scarlet Letter, specifically, relates to ; case of infidelity in mandage, which, as the story opens, is pre sented as a deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life the author’s intent being, as was Sophocles’ in Oedipus Rex, t( examine his general question in one of its most serious aspects lawthome examines his question in the severe and grim Puri- an society of new America, a society in which religion and law iTere almost identical—obviously an effort to tell his story in an tmosphere of strict reprehension. To be sure, the problem is qualified in a number of ways, fester’s marriage to Roger Chillingworth had followed from lO wish of her own, but from the will of her poverty-stricken >arents, and it had been made in the days of her youth and ig- lorance of the world. For Chillingworth, misshapen from his lirth, a man already in decay, and long devoted to the barren bstractions of knowledge, who selfishly took advantage of her ircumstances, Hester had never felt any love, nor feigned any. ler marriage w as an arrangement into which she, as an individ- lal, had never spiritually entered. As for her liaison with Arthur Tlmm^dale, which brought her the care and the solace of little ’earl, as well as the wrath of Puritan morality and law, that had )een an act of passion—quite unpremeditated, though at the time t had seemed to her and to Arthur that what they did had a onsecrafibii of itTown. Arthur, of course, had a quite different >ackground; hence whatever mitigations pertained to her may lot with equal relevance have pertained to him. But The Scarlet Letter, though philosophical, is art, and not hilosophy. It is first of all a story about a group of people, to he principals among whom basic individual traits of character are ttributed, those traits acting upon and being acted upon by cir- umstances in an intricate web colored by innumerable hopes nd fears—the gamut of human emotions. Only the perception lat each character has his own individuality, which grows or de¬ lines as the story unfolds, can give a true understanding of the lory, though its pensive beauty may charm even the most un- erceptive reader. Chillingworth, for instance, is not only deformed and elderly hen the story opens. He is a scientist possessed by an unquench- )le curiosity, his more siibtte faculties materialized in his re- larches, so that he has lost the spiritual view of life. No wonder, ten, that he has become a fatalist; and so excuses his own con- uct toward Hester. No wonder'that he resolves not to be pil- iried beside Hester, or that he devotes all his intellectual powers, ith dehumanized intent, to the excoriation of his rival, finally [289] becoming, like Ethan Brand, a veritable fiend, guilty o£ the Ur pardonable Sin, beyond the scope of Heaven’s else infinite mere] His revenge thwarted by Arthur’s public confession, he can onl shrivel away like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sur Hester and Arthur were, it might appear, not the worst sinnei in the world. As for Arth ur Dimme sdale, he was not without high intelleci ual accomplishments, standing, as he did, on the very proudes exhinence to whicK tHe giftVof intellect, rich lore, and prevailin eloquence could exalt a clergyman in New England’s earlies days. His library, which reflected his wide reading, was piled wit rich parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore c rabbis, and monkish erudition, as well as with the works of Proi estant divines. Nor was h e without true spirituality. H e hai been a true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sent ment largely developed. But in no state of society could he hav been called a man of liberal views. It was alwa ys essential to hi peace to feel the pressure of his faith about him, sup porti ng while it confined him within its iron Puritan_framework. li with tremulous enjoyment, he occasionally felt the relief of lool ing at the universe through the medium of another kind of ir tellect than his own, t he air was top fresh an d chill to be Ion breathed with comfort,^^_and he soon withdrew within t^_jimit oEwhat his church defined as orthodox. For him, therefore, witl his principles, there was no shirking of responsibility. Nor, one having stepped aside from his code, was there any real expects tion of escape from the consequences of his error—however mud his understanding and sympathy were widened, however deepe the subsequent bond with his fellow human beings. In his view in short, no evil of the past-could be redeemed in this world- even by better service, for, to him, inherent in all wrong was ; complete and unalterable finality. Arthur’s convictions told him that only by publicly confessini his transgression could he evidence a true penitence. His sileno was his weakness, a weakness augmented by the acid of Chillins worth’s revenge, until the minister was well-nigh destroyed, bod and soul. For Arthur, too, Hester’s plea to begin life anew i: some friendly foreign clime, to do anything save to lie down an die, was for him, when he reflected upon it, another temptatior [2po] ii’urthermore, when, at last, he stood upon the scaffold with Hes- :er, what the two of them had once regarded as having had a :onsecration of its own seemed to him but a violation of their reverence for each other’s souls, the very sin of Chillingworth vhich he and Hester had once regarded as worse than their own. de feared, also, that it might be vain to hope for an everlasting ind pure reunion hereafter with Hester. The certainty was his )wn utter unworthiness. In confessing his ignominy, and in yield- ng himself freely to the will of God, whatever that might be, here remained to him the one paradoxical triumph in his power -to accept in entire humility the ultimates of his creed. The Scarlet Letter is primarily Hester’s story; and so upon dester, and upon her Pearl, Hawthorne lavished his greatest care ind most apparent sympathy. Hester was a tall beauty, with deep alack eyes, and with dark hair so glossy that it threw off the sun- hine with a gleam, and so abundant that it was at once a light and i shadow. Such was her sex, her youth—the whole richness of her aeauty—that when a crimson flush mounted on her cheek, or ivhen a smile beamed out of her eyes or played around her mouth, :hese charms seemed to gush from the very heart of womanhood. Her every action, too, was marked with a natural dignity and force of character that indicated a strong will. But when Hester, baby in arms, stepped through the prison ioor into the Boston marketplace to encounter the gaze of the iron-visaged Puritan dames and their stem-browed men, there tvas something exquisitely painful in her beauty, and a desperate recklessness in her mood. It was a mood which was to become, for a long while, a settled state of mind in which she came to question whether there remained for her any happiness at all. Phere came a time when she wondered whether, among even the lappiest of the whole race of womanhood, existence was worth vhile. As for herself, she decided in the negative, and so dis- nissed the point. It is with Hester’s questionings, and with her gradual rise out )f a blank despair, that The Scarlet Letter mainly concerns it- elf. Ostracized, standing alone in the world, Hester assumed a reedom of speculation which, had they known it, her Puritan udges would have held a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by he scarlet letter. Such thoughts visited her as dared enter no [291] other dwelling in New England, thoughts which represented a latitude of speculation altogether foreign to Arthur Dimmes dale. Though her teachers—Shame, Despair, Solitude—taught hei much amiss in her early wanderings, they also made her strong and set her free. And so it was that Hester, weakened temporarily by her im prisonment and shame, acceded to Chillingworth’s demand that she keep secret his identity, harmful as her oath was to Arthur a violation of loyalty to the man she loved which she was long ir recognizing and long in correcting. And so it was, too, with re¬ turning courage, that Hester came to hope that out of her les sons, if futile for herself, little Pearl might some day be wisei and better than herself, that out of this elfish child might grow a noble woman. In time, though resentful because of her fortune in such a grim society, and increasingly confident that in that society was something as wrong as in herself, she learned, partly because of her absorption in Pearl, to resign herself to her cir¬ cumstances. In her resignation she even learned, after Arthur was gone, to accept the stigma of the scarlet letter, nor chose to remove it from her bosom long after the sternest magistrate would have imposed it. Indeed, Hester ceasing to live for any selfish end, the scarlet letter, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and unselfish years of her life, became, in the community where it had once been a stigma of scorn and bitterness, a type of some¬ thing to be sorrowed over and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence, too. Though she still lived in the shadow of an old sorrow, Hester had worked out another purity than the one she had lost. Therein lay her solemn triumph. Hester’s speculations had, in spite of her resignation to out¬ ward circumstances, carried her far from the moorings of Puritan dogma. She never surrendered her early conviction that her love for Arthur had had a consecration of its own. Nor, despite the dying Arthur’s fears, had she abandoned hope that, with all their woe, she and Arthur had ransomed one another for an immortal life together. When she had become Our Hester, and Avhen others, who, like herself, had gone through a mighty trouble, brought all their sorrows and perplexities to her, she comforted them and herself with her firm belief that at some brighter period, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed that rvould [2p2] stablish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer [round of mutual happiness. For Hester, too, there was a para- lox, though hers was quite unlike Arthur’s: out of her dusky [rief she had learned to look upon this world and the next not ifithout hope. Some of these speculative conclusions, obviously, Hawthorne lad long nourished. From the moment, in “The Maypole of derrymount,” that Edgar and Edith had truly loved, they had ubjected themselves to earth’s doom of care and sorrow and roubled joy, thus attaining a rich and rewarding humanity. In ‘The Wedding Knell” the souls of the aged couple had, in the ;nd, looked down upon their woe. In youth, Hawthorne was later o say, men are apt to write more wisely than they know, presently ealizing the wisdom which they uttered long ago. So here. The ieep distress of his Custom House experience had only added X)wer to what Hawthorne had earlier known or felt. Nevertheless, there is in The Scarlet Letter an area of thought lew in Hawthorne’s writing, something arising alike out of his )wn current doubts and perplexities and out of the spirit of the imes, and adding interest and substance to the story—largely naking it the provocative book that it is. Not unlike Hester, Haw- home had, in his researches in New England history, re-exam- ned the convictions of his Puritan forebears, from which he had leen separated by the cosmopolitanism of Salem’s seagoing mer- :hants, by the Age of Reason, by Unitarianism—in short, by two lundred years of history. Most recently he had been exposed, n his relations with Longfellow, with Emerson, with Thoreau, nd with others, to a body of thinking older than Christianity, nd, like Christianity, seeking—but without a Revelation—a spirit- lal basis for its interpretation of life. It was in the air—in various forms. Tennyson, transforming lis sources in “Ulysses,” after the death of his friend Hallam, ought courage in the ancient Greek hero for whom all expe- ience was but an arch through which gleamed the untraveled /orld, and who was strong in will [^93] To strive, to seek, and not to yield. Emerson, in the year of “Ulysses,” and only a few months befon Hawthorne had come to the Old Manse, had lost his beloved soi Waldo, a blow that caused him to examine anew the foundation of his beliefs; and so, setting his heart on honesty, he wrote “Ex perience,” that essay in which, putting aside, for the time, hi old optimisms, he sought what unadorned experience had to offer and found it in courage—never minding the ridicule, never mind ing the defeat. The immediate source of such reflective exhilara tion, which sought in experience a solace to sustain man in ad versity, whether from fortune or from his own erring ways, was of course, Goethe. In Faust the Lord, unperturbed by Mephis topheles’ jaunty self-assurance, quietly recognizes that While Man’s desires and aspirations stir. He cannot choose but err. Faust himself expresses a basic thought— O happy he, who still renews The hope, from Error’s deeps to rise forever! And so Faust goes on to a self-surrender that is the climax o; his salvation through experience, until the angels bear his im mortal part heavenward. Some such kind of thinking Matthev Arnold, somewhat later, but stirred by the same intellectual gusts tried to focus in his essay “Hebraism and Hellenism,” a recogni tion of those two streams of thought which, so apparently diverse both have a common end—the salvation of man. In making their respective choices, therefore, Arthur and Hester represent Hawthorne’s effort to dramatize the old Puritar faith in its encounter with the changing thought of his own cen¬ tury. If there was a kind of anachronism in making such a con¬ trast, that was not what disturbed Hawthorne’s unfriendly con¬ temporary critics, who, uncertainly aware of his intents, feared an offense to their orthodox faith. Even Sophia was shocked by the prevalent idea, as she understood it, of assuming that it was necessary to go through the fiery ordeal of sin to become tvise anc good. Such, of course, was not quite Hawthorne’s idea. Rather he sought to ask. Innocence lost, what can be redeemed? Hi; answer was that much can be redeemed. Character, paradoxical a: [m] ; may seem, can grow through error and adversity. As in Emer- m’s “Uriel,” In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn. lawthome had, in fact, embarked upon a course of thought to e still further developed in The Marble Faun, in the characters f Miriam and Hilda. But in thus seeming to confine The Scarlet Letter within a Deculative framework, we may do it wrong. The Romance is no loralistic or philosophical discourse. Sober and far-reaching loughts do inhabit there, and do entice the mind to enter their ensive vistas. Without these thoughts, surely, the book would )se its substance, as Hamlet without his soliloquies would lose luch of his charm. Nevertheless, whatever questions The Scarlet .etter raises, it remains essentially what its author modestly ailed it, a tale of human frailty and sorrow. As we linger among ;s twilight meditations, all about us are wonder and mystery and pparent ambiguity. Weakness and sadness hover among the ladows; still, there are also high rays of courage and hope— ranquil assurances that man may not be unworthy to dwell be- eath that glory which, according to the Psalmist, God has set pon the heavens. However remote the incidents in The Scarlet Letter may seem 3 be from anything in Hawthorne’s own life, the Romance is evertheless in the largest sense autobiographical; for, in it, trans- mted, are the shock, the doubts, and all the troubled question- igs following that brutal encounter with the world which Haw- lorne sought vainly to blot from his memory. Not merely had te petty politicians, by severing him from his livelihood, com- elled him to turn once more to his pen. Quite unknowingly they ad provided him with an interior drama of which The Scarlet etter is a kind of allegory. If, however, that story seems super- cially less serene than its contemporaries, “The Great Stone ace” and “The Snow-Image,” and if in it the author seems to have followed unaccustomed paths of thought, that thought nevei theless comes to rest in an affirmation. As a man, Hawthorne had found his peace, in conventiona phraseology, in an acceptance of the will of Providence. In an other manner of speaking, as The Scarlet Letter indicates, h had recognized, like Emerson in “Experience,” that although al things may swim and glitter, and that dream may deliver us t( dream, the value of life still lies in its inscrutable possibilities As an artist, moreover, Hawthorne had found his repose in tha affirmation of which beauty is the expression. [2p6] Berkshire region to which the Hawthornes moved about mid-May, 1850, seemed an ideal place for a writer ho longed for a daily ramble in country air and who sought an iprovement in his health, as well as a quiet place to write. Other riters had already given it literary distinction. In the mid- ghteenth century Jonathan Edwards, in Stockbridge, had made s last stand in defense of Calvinism in his famous essay on the eedom of the will. Catherine Maria Sedgwick, writing early in le next century, in Stockbridge, too, had attacked that Calvin- m in ^ New England Tale, the first of a long series of novels aking the scenery and life of Berkshire all her own. William ullen Bryant, in Great Barrington, had sung the charms of the ea, and had given a poetic immortality to one of its chief nat- •al features in “Monument Mountain.” Herman Melville had ent a year of his youth in his uncle’s mansion house, “Broad- ill,” in Pittsfield, and so, for the literary-minded, had associated at establishment with thoughts of Typee and the beautiful liyaway. At Pittsfield, too, Longfellow, tarrying on his honeymoon at e old-fashioned country-seat of his wife’s maternal grandparents, d heard the ticking of an ancient clock on a stairs, a solemn und which he had transformed into one of his most popular 'Cms. Near Pittsfield, on his grandfather’s farm, Oliver Wendell olmes was spending his summers and transferring from that m to his poetry the odor of pennyroyal and the freshness of adside blossoms. So Longfellow thought, and hoped some day turn a portion of the Housatonic River onto his millwheels. [m] But when he went there in the summer of 1848 to work on hi novel, Kavanagh, he found the country influences too soothin and slumberous for writing. It was much more pleasant to sit b his hotel window, or to walk down pleasant lanes in the woods, 0 to drive past the Lenox lake where the air was fragrant with min and clover. At the head of Lenox lake, too, was the home of Sari Ward, where one might hear played the music of Chopin an( Mendelssohn and Schubert, or where Fanny Kemble, the ceh brated actress, might sing a ballad. At Lenox itself now live Catherine Sedgwick with her numerous relatives. In fact, as Lonj fellow recorded in his journal, everything seemed to be Sed^ wick in this region. The very grasshoppers in the field chirpe “Sedgwick! Sedgwick!” The Sedgwick homes, as Longfellow am many another literary visitor discovered, were the very place fo tea and pleasant chat. Indeed, the Hawthornes went to the Berkshires, not only b( cause the region was beautiful, but because they had so man warm friends there. The Wards, to be sure, who had visite them at the Old Manse (the shining Anna of the golden curls' had left Lenox before the Hawthornes arrived, their commc dious house in 1850 being occupied by Mr. and Mrs. William Tap pan, other old acquaintances from the days of The Dial, whid Sophia’s sister, Elizabeth, had published for a time, and to whid Mrs. Tappan (then Caroline Sturgis) and Tappan himself hai both contributed. Ward and Tappan had both aided Hawthorn in his search for a house when he visited Lenox in October c 1849. With the Berkshire region Hawthorne had of course had pleasing acquaintance during his bachelor ramblings in 1835 Hence a number of things combined to draw him there again friends, the cheapness of living, the hope of improved health the beauty of the landscape, the solitude and the quiet which h coveted for writing, as well as a relief from the lately disturbim scenes of Salem. In this setting, more spectacularly beautiful than Concord and possessing a literary atmosphere agreeable enough, thoug less distinguished than that of Concord or Boston, the Hav thornes spent somewhat more than a year and a half. Here the renewed that acquaintance with Nature which had given them s much pleasure at the Old Manse; here their third child, Ros( [298] as bom in May, 1851; here they realized more fully than ever efore the happiness of that family life which Hawthorne so ighly prized; here they made new friends; here recent injuries ided into the past and lost their sting; and here Hawthorne, ith renewed hope, wrote more voluminously than he had ever Titten before. It was among these retired and quiet scenes of ,enox, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge would have cherished 1 the days of their prime, that Hawthorne learned, against his elief, that the critics of England and America had proclaimed im the most eminent writer of prose fiction in America. From Bald-Summit, somewhat to the south and west of Lenox hllage, one could take in at a glance a very large tract of a eautiful world. To the southward, in the center of the scene, ras Monument Mountain, though it was but one member of a irge family of hills. Beyond it bulked the Taconic range, and efore it lay Stockbridge Bowl, the lake which had so pleased .ongfellow on his drive from Pittsfield to Stockbridge, and which rom this height was very pretty, with all its little bays and inlets, aough it was not alone in its beauty, for two or three other lakes kewise opened their blue eyes to the sun in this broad landscape, everal white villages, each with its steeple, were scattered about 1 the distance, and all around were farmhouses with acres of oodland, pastures, mowing-fields, and tillage. Far to the west- ard were the blue Catskills, among whose misty hills Washing- )n Irving had imagined the strange adventures of Rip Van /inkle. In so grand a scene, a small red house near the head of le Bowl was necessarily but a dot among multitudinous details. That red house, with its green shutters, was the property of l e William Tappans, from whom the Hawthornes rented it for very small sum. It was only an old-fashioned farmhouse, low- i.ved, a story and a half high, a lower wing to one side, with a :.icken shed attached, a shed so rudely built that Hawthorne ireatened to affix a placard signifying that it was not his work, here were times when Hawthorne thought of his residence as e ugliest little old farmhouse he had ever seen, and in a fa- [299] cetious mood he dubbed it the Red Shanty, though sometime with mock-seriousness, he spoke of it as the Scarlet Letter. It stoo close to a little-traveled country road, from which it was sep; rated by an unpainted wooden fence, on the weathered and tun bledown gate of which Una and Julian (now aged six and foui used to swing as they gazed up and down the grassy distance Inside the fence was a small plot of lawn, with gravel walk an flower beds. What Sophia prized most in her front yard was balsam fir tree, of perfect pyramidal form, which she found fu of a thousand melodies. To the sides and rear were a vegetabl garden and an orchard of plums and pears and peaches an apples. There was a woodshed, too, and a bam with a haylo and hay, in the fragrance and shadows of which Hawthorne love to lie and read on a summer afternoon, and where he read a of the novels of Melville. Inside, the house seemed larger than its exterior indicate( though it was small enough. Its hall, its drawing room, its dinir room and its boudoir, Sophia had furnished simply and in goo taste. Upstairs were four bedrooms, all with slanting ceilings an each with its single window. One of these bedrooms served ; Hawthorne’s study. It was scarcely the study that Hawthorr dreamed of (a room with a thick, soft Turkey carpet upon tl floor, and hung round with full crimson curtains so as to hie all rectangles), nor was it so pleasant as his cheerful little stuc in the Old Manse. As in the study of the Old Manse, howeve there was the antique center table over which Sophia had om so proudly hung her astral lamp. The table had unfortunate lost one foot in its journey from Salem to Lenox, though it sti stood quite evenly. There was in this study, too, a long ottoma] which Sophia had re-covered in red. Most important, there were secretary and a writing chair, so placed as to permit Hawthorn as he wrote, to look out upon the scene which lay beyond h study window. It was that scene—visible, too, from the dining room and froi the boudoir—for which Hawthorne had mainly chosen this nor too comfortable little red house. That prospect, it seemed to hii was the most beautiful in the Berkshires. It was a view of me dow and forest, of lake and mountain-always new becau always changing with the shifting lights and shadows, ai [500] The Red House After an early photograph secured through the courtesy of the Berkshire Eagle, Pitts¬ field, Mass. promising a perpetual charm. He was soon to know every feature of the landscape, in every aspect of all the seasons of the year. Particularly endeared to him were a wood of tall primeval pines near by, the brook (Shadow Brook he named it), which wound through a glen between the house and the lake, the gleaming lake itself, and, above all. Monument Mountain, over which, in endless variety, played sunshine, or fleecy mists, or low¬ ering clouds. No longer was Nature, as developed in earth and sky, hidden from Hawthorne as it was in his years at the Salem Custom House. Once again, as at the Old Manse, he experienced that imaginative delight which spiritualized Nature and gave it an invigorating charm, and nothing in the Berkshire scene charmed him more than did Monument Mountain. On a pleasant summer morning, with not a cloud overhead, there, to the southward, was Monument Mountain with a fleece of sun-brightened mist covering all but its western summit, the mist hovering on the treetops, portions of it flitting upward into the sky. When these vapors passed away and disappeared, and as the day advanced into afternoon, the valley between the red touse and the mountain seemed a vast basin filled with golden sunshine. Or if the western hills looked black and desolate oeneath the clouds, and Monument Mountain, too, had a cloud >n its back, the sunshine might nevertheless gleam along its sides, ind make it a cheerful object; and, the mountain being in the :enter of the scene, might cheer up the whole picture, like a :heery heart. In the autumn, when the sunshine had a richness, Hawthorne bought, like nothing else in the world; when, on cool mornings, he smoke of farmhouse chimneys curled into the air; when mmense heaps of apples lay piled near cider mills, and all day ong the cider presses creaked as the horses trod on, and when the oliage had its autumnal hues. Monument Mountain looked like headless sphinx, wrapt in a Persian shawl. With the sunshine ailing on it through a mist, it had the aspect of burnished cop¬ ier. On a mid-October morning, a very heavy mist might fill up he whole length of the valley between the red house and the Qountain, so dense as to conceal everything except, at its near loundary, a few ruddy treetops—glorified, like the whole mist [301] cloud, by the early sunshine, which touched, likewise, the sum mit of the mountain itself. In winter when snow had fallen for two or three days anc the lower valley was all white. Monument Mountain stood ou in great prominence, its dark forest-covered hills, with hen and there a white patch indicating tillage or pasture land, mak ing a dark contrast to the white expanse of the frozen, snow covered lake at its base and the undulating white of the surround ing country. When the skies had cleared, the mountain, unde the sunshine of mid-day, and with many voluminous clouds hang ing over it, and a mist of wintry warmth in the air, was revealec in striking relief. Nevertheless, though all its bulging, rounc swells, and precipitous abruptness stood out, it had a kind o visionary aspect, and looked as much akin to the clouds as to th( solid earth and rock-substance. It was in spring, however, that Nature looked more beautifu than in any other season. Then the general impression was one o a new life; then all about was a fresh and youthful green, th( trees not being fully leaved, yet enough so to give an airy shadi to the woods, the sunshine filling the woods, too, with a greet light. Then Monument Mountain was green also, the lightness o the tint taking away something from its massiveness and ponder osity, so that it responded with livelier effect to the shine anc shade of the sky. Each tree then stood out in its own individual ity of hue. On a windy May day, moreover, the light shifted ove: the mountainside with magical alteration. Meanwhile, in th( meadows and pastures below the red house, softening and seem ingly humanizing the ruggedness of the mountain view, grew ai abundance of flowers—wild geraniums, violets, red columbines wild strawberries, Housatonias, and many others. What a variety was there, and what an apparent enjoyment in their new growtl had all these fair works of Nature! It was a fit setting for Words worthian lines to be written in early spring. Hardly less interesting than Monument Mountain, because hardly less varied in its scenic effects, was the lake, somewhat ovej a mile in length, which lay in the lap of the valley a furlong o so from the red house. In summertime, when the lake was as smooth as glass, anc when it gave motionless reflections of the surrounding wood [302] id hills, Hawthorne thought it at its best. Still, on a warm ly, as he lay on its green margin, partly in the shade and partly 1 the sun, it was pleasant to hear the wind sing among the trees id see it heave the wavelets against the shore. Lying so, with his i^es shut, while the breeze and sunshine were playing together, 2 could yet see, through his closed eyelids, the quick glimmer of le wavelets. Lying so, and smoking his cigar, and soothed by mshine and wind, by waves and fluttering trees, he knew a most jreeable inclination to sleep—and a vast contentment. Between the red house and the lake was a glen, less imme- iately conspicious than the lake and the mountain, but not ithout its interest, for through it wound Shadow Brook, no ss varied in its way than mountain or lake. In winter, when was considerably swollen, it rushed fleetly on its course be- veen overhanging banks of snow and ice and pendent icicles. 1 some places the crust of frozen snow formed a bridge quite i^er the brook, which nevertheless made itself known by its rawling sound beneath. In early spring, when it had not yet eansed itself from the disarray of winter, it was much embar- issed and choked up with brown leaves, twigs, and bits of ranches, though it rushed merrily and rapidly along, gurgling leerfully. Here and there in its course were small pools, of timer and smoother depth, in which little fish sported about. Isewhere it was all tumble and gurgle and mimic turbulence. In le summertime, its grassy banks, along its open part, offered the est of places for basking in the sun, a breath of wind occa- onally finding its way there and bringing refreshment with its jsterity. Where the glen, which was deep and narrow, was filled ith trees, it was, in summer, a dense shadow of obscurity. In the atumn, however, when the foliage of the trees was almost entirely golden yellow, the glen, instead of being full of shadow, was jsolutely full of sunshine, and its depths more brilliant than le open plains or the mountain tops. The trees themselves were golden sunshine, and, many of their golden leaves having fresh- ^ fallen, the glen was strewn with sunshine, amid which wound :id gurgled the bright, dark little brook. In his delight in Nature, however, great as that delight was, 'awthorne was well aware, as was his friend Emerson, that the I immering beauty of yellow October could not be clutched, and [505] that the too close seeking for it might end in an effeminacy Nevertheless, behind the visible forms of Nature, there was fc him, as for Emerson, a sustaining spiritual element to be pe; ceived only in rare and happy moments when only indirectly ; was being sought. It almost seemed to choose its own occasions t manifest itself. Furthermore, as among some ancient peoples thei was a reluctance to speak the name of God, so Hawthorne chos seldom to voice this most tenuous experience with Nature. H had suggested it in his journal, it is true, when, in his solitai walks along the sea, in his bachelor days in Salem, he had watche the gulls flying so high as to blend with the whiteness of the sky the real thus merging with the ideal; and when, voyaging alon in his boat up the North Branch of the Concord River, the reflei tions in the quiet water had hinted that ideal beauty which sati lies the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. And so, in his rambles in this Berkshire valley, it seemed t Hawthorne that the best way to get an impression and feeling c a landscape was to sit down and read, or become otherwise al sorbed in thought. Then, when his eyes happened to be attracte to the landscape, he seemed to catch Nature unawares. Thoug the effect might last but a single moment, and might pass away £ soon as he was conscious of it, it was nevertheless real for tha moment. It was as if he could overhear and understand what th trees were whispering to one another; as if he caught a glimps of a face unveiled, which veiled itself from every wilful glanc( The mystery was revealed—though, after a breath or two, it hi came just as much a mystery as before. As frequently as Hawthorne seemed preoccupied with Natun he never, like Thoreau, found Nature more interesting tha Man, and his interest in Man had its focus in his love for hi own family. No wonder, then, that the Hawthorne family, i: Hawthorne’s own view, was quite the happiest family to be foun anywhere. It was a happy family because it shared its affairs in mutual a fection. The family day began early in the morning, when tli children awoke. From a front bedroom came Una’s awakenin [304] all, “Bon-jour, mammal bon-jour, papa!” while from Julian’s oom came the stentorian and matter-of-fact statement, “I want a get up!” Then would papa hasten downstairs to build a fire Dr the children’s baths, following which came the rush of young ;et down the steps, the bathing, the rubbing, the dressing, and lie leaping, and running, and springing about the room. When 11 was done, papa went out to feed the hens, and, after breakfast, isappeared into his study, while mamma spent the morning giv- ig the children lessons in French, arithmetic, history, and geog- aphy. (At seven, Una, under her mother’s care, was reading her wn father’s stories for children.) At noon Hawthorne descended from his study, to the accom- animent of great rejoicing throughout his kingdom, for, after inner, the joint occupations of the day really began. Julian, rown enormous, was now a little brown giant, laughing and ood-natured, and Una, freckled and tanned, was wild as a colt, hough nevertheless good-tempered and obedient, a little lady ;^hen need arose. There were innumerable walks, mainly across he fields to the lake. The children gathered flowers—Housatonias, iolets, and the trailing arbutus, with its spicy and exquisite ragrance. Sophia and Una made laurel wreaths for themselves, nd Una crowned her father, too. Or Hawthorne lay in the sun- hine, flecked with the shadows of a tree, while the children ilucked long grass blades with which they covered his chin and ireast, so that he looked like Pan with a verdant and venerable 'eard. After supper, when Hawthorne walked to Lenox Vil- ige (not quite two miles away) to get the mail, Sophia nd the children went to meet him as he returned in the sun- =t. In the autumn they went nutting together, and when they ame to a tall walnut tree, Hawthorne would bid the children Dut their eyes. In a moment, when they opened them again, lere was their father swaying and soaring aloft among the top- lost branches, and presently showering down a host of nuts or the children to gather. After Rose came, in the second year 1 the Berkshires, a favorite summer gathering spot was the grove f tall pines, where baby slept in her carriage to the music of pine- ■ee murmurs and cricket-chirpings, while Una and Julian built lies of tiny sticks for the fairies’ winter fuel, and papa and iamma sat and mused in the breathless noon. [305] With Julian, while his mother and sisters were away, Haw thome spent weeks of closest intimacy and companionship. Earl'j every morning they took what Hawthorne called their milky wa^ —a quarter-mile walk to farmer Luther Butler to fetch the day’i supply of milk, occasions on which Julian was generally as frisky as the squirrels which scampered and chattered on the wooder fences along the way. Frequently they walked together to Lenoj to get the mail, Julian, along the roadside, picking wild flowers Hawthorne reflected, like a child of Paradise. Almost daily then walks took them to the lake, where they made little boats with tiny newspaper sails, or Julian set bits of moss afloat, imagining them peopled by men or fairies. An accompaniment of this close intimacy with the children; whether cause or effect, was that they clung to their father with unvarying affection, as Sophia observed with entire approval. Sht was amused to hear them discuss their father’s head, which Una said was full of thought, Julian agreeing that it was, indeed, thought which made papa’s head. Upon one occasion Sophia overheard them talking about papa’s smile, Una remarking, “But you know, Julian, that there is no smile like papa’s!” To which Julian replied, “Oh, no, not like papa’sV’ Both children were dis¬ consolate when their father went away without taking them, Sophia doing what she could to comfort them during his absence. As for Sophia, she was now giving all her attention to her family. Before the removal to Lenox, she had expressed the in¬ tention, when the change of location had been made, to paint at least three hours a day while her husband cared for the chil¬ dren. But nothing apparently came of this plan. Though her mother had admonished her to court the love of the humble in order to lighten the labor of her gifted husband, so that his en¬ deavors might be a blessing to the ages yet unborn, Sophia seems not to have acted so much upon a reasoned principle of duty as upon a spontaneous emotion. She simply loved her children and her husband wholeheartedly and gave herself to them with unstinted devotion. Her art was put aside until the children should be grown. As for Hawthorne, he was as happy as mortal can be, as¬ sured that he was never again likely to experience that lone¬ liness, which, shadow-like, had clung to him during the days [306] f his youth, before he knew Sophia. Though in this Berkshire leriod he was very busy with his writing, the greater part of the ay he nevertheless gave to his family. In his journal, it is true, e said less about Una than he had done at Salem, though she lone was sometimes his companion and though he thought of er tenderly. “Kiss Una for me,” he wrote to Sophia, when Una nd her mother were in West Newton. When Rose was bom, he reeted the event with characteristic masculine detachment, ob- erving quite realistically that she entered the world kicking aliantly and crying most obstreperously, and that her hair was more decided red than Una’s. Presently he remarked that she /as growing prettier, though she could not be called absolutely leautiful. On the other hand, he noted with affectionate approval ophia’s raptures over her new baby, and he contemplated ex- »ectantly that Rose would be in her gayest bloom when he would »e most decidedly an old man—if age and decrepitude were to be lis lot. It was of Julian that Hawthorne wrote at greatest length in lis Berkshire journal, in large part because he was keeping for bphia a family record while she and the girls were away, but Iso in part because, in their frequent walks together, Julian re- ninded him of his own boyhood. It was difficult, in these walks, o keep abreast of this little giant, who was as unweariable as he kingfisher which flitted from one decayed branch to another long the lake. His continual babble was sometimes a trial to his ather’s patience, thrusting itself forward constantly, and smashing very attempt at reflection into a thousand fragments. When he /as admonished to ask only sensible questions, his babble con- inued with a further remark, “Papa, what are sensible ques- ions?”—presumably with a view to asking some at once. Haw- lome wondered whether a father was ever before so bepelted fith a child’s tongue as he was. Nevertheless, he supposed that t the bottom of all this babblement was Julian’s desire for sym- athy and a wish to enrich his enjoyments by steeping them in the eart of some friend. He reflected, furthermore, that Julian was 1 no danger of living so solitary a life as much of his own had een. And when he compared Julian’s overflowing sprightliness ith his own reluctant footsteps, he was quite content that Julian lould be young instead of himself. In due season, he hoped, the [307] boy would develop wisdom, though he prayed that Heaven migh forbid it should come too soon. When Sophia, accompanied by Una and Rose, was in Wes Newton to care for her sick mother, Hawthorne wrote her liltinj letters to supplement the journal he was keeping for her to rea( upon her return home. He addressed her now as “Deares Phoebe,” a pet name which, together with some of Sophia’ traits, he had already introduced into The House of the Sevei Gables. With a mixture of poetic language and banter, he spok^ of himself as her most lovingest husband, who would be mos gladdest to see her, in the meanwhile asking her to kiss and span] the children for him. From the journal he was keeping she woul( know all that he and Julian had done and suffered, though didn’t remember having any enjoyment during her absence—i was all doing and suffering! When Sophia did not return so soon as expected, he wroti in his journal that his evenings were dreary, and that he wen to bed early, disconsolate and longing for Phoebe. If only shi were home, to shine upon him! One afternoon, he heard thi sound of the wheels of an approaching vehicle, and rejoiced tha Sophia had arrived. Alas, it was not she. Hence there was an other dull evening spent alone with a newspaper by dim lamp light. Two long days later, after supper, she and the girls arrivec —all well, thank God! On one of these dreary evenings, when he was most sensibf of Sophia’s absence, Hawthorne made a little prayer of suppli cation and of thanksgiving. He asked for blessings upon Phoebi and Una and Julian and Rosebud, and upon himself for thei sakes. No man, he acknowledged gratefully, had so good a wif( or better children. Would that he were worthy of her and o them. In writing to her sister Elizabeth, Sophia once confided tha only she herself could estimate the cost to her husband of havin a stranger in their court. He never visited, she wrote, or had an) thing to do with the public—he had only his domestic and hi [308] tistic life. Sophia’s remark, it is true, may have conveyed an ^eremphasis, interested, as she obviously was, in discouraging, r her husband’s sake, prolonged visits from members of her vn family. Nevertheless, her words may have suggested a basic uth—namely, that Hawthorne found his deepest satisfactions in e love of his art and in the love of his family, all other interests dng more or less secondary. If, however, he was but just not a ;rmit still, as Sophia said, he was no longer the solitary he id once been in Salem, when, according to his otvn account, irdly so many as twenty people in the town were aware of his dstence. A part of the story of his life in Berkshire is a story ’ deepening or expanding friendships and literary acquaintance. Eager as Hawthorne had been to get out of the abominable ty of Salem, he had not broken all ties with the past. He con- iiued to correspond with his sisters, Elizabeth and Louisa, writ- g of family events and asking aid in the collection of his old ories when he was preparing to publish The Snow-Image and ther Twice-Told Tales. He remembered with affection his old ilem friends—Benjamin Browne, David Roberts, Col. Miller, hlliam Pike, and Zachariah Burchmore, as well as his uncle, )hn Dike, to all of whom he sent copies of his Wonder-Book ry review in The Literary World. There was an exchange of letters in which each commented n the other’s writings, letters which Melville supplemented by ding over to Lenox in wagon or on horseback, Hawthorne having o such means of conveyance, Melville’s advent being heralded by the cries of the children, “Here comes Mr. Omoo!” their pleasun all the greater if Melville brought his Newfoundland dog. Oni aspect of Melville which interested the whole Hawthorne famil was his surprising dramatic talent, for, when he told some o his tremendous stories about the South Sea Islands, all the ob jects which he described became visible, the club with which hi was laying about in his tale of a fight among the savages assura ing a tangibility so real that, after Melville had left, the famib sought for it in the house. Some of these visits of Melville were especially memorable Once, when Sophia and the girls were gone, when Hawthorm and Julian on an August afternoon walked to Lenox post offio for the mail, and Hawthorne, on the return, had clambered ove the fence at Love Grove to sit and read his papers, he vaguely saw: horseman come along the road, a man who saluted him in Spanisl and who, when Hawthorne merely waved his hand, spoke again Then Hawthorne saw that it was Herman Melville, and the’ all went homeward together, Melville dismounting and tossing Julian on his horse, that little man riding the remaining mile ii high satisfaction. At the red cottage there was tea (which Mel ville feared to drink lest it keep him awake), and after supper when Julian had been put to bed, the two men had a long tall about time and eternity, about things of this world and the next of books and publishers, of all matters p>ossible and impossible- a talk that lasted pretty deep into the night. At last, however Melville arose and saddled his horse, which he had put into th( barn, and rode off for his home at Pittsfield, while Hawthom< hastened to make the most of what little sleeping-time remainec before morning. A week later came another day of delightful comradeship. P little before noon, up drove Melville in a barouche and pair accompanied by Evert Duyckinck and his brother George, Mel ville’s guests at “Arrowhead,” and forth came Hawthorne’s las bottle of champagne. Then they set out for a drive with no par ticular destination, Hawthorne taking Julian, too. Finding ; pleasant grove, they sat down to a picnic lunch of sandwiches anc gingerbread, accompanied by bottled refreshments which th visitors had brought, thus passing the noontide hours unde motionless maples and beeches with good talk about literatur [320] and other things. After lunch they set out westward, driving aim¬ lessly until, at a crossroad, where they saw an intelligent young girl at a fine old house, they asked where their road lecL It led, they were told, to Hancock and the Shaker establishment; and so, since Hawthorne had not been there, there they went, the Shakers promising as much diversion as one might find in the country on a warm summer afternoon. Hawthorne, of course, had had exp>erience with Shakers, having once, in New Hampyshire, drunk some heady cider with a jolly old Shaker, having i^as Duyckinck knew) had his say about Shakers in “The Canterbury Pilgrims” and in “The Shaker Bridal,” and, in the first das-s af his life at Concord, having taken a long walk to the Shaker Village at Harvard, when his friendship with Emerson was new. The Shaker quarters were examined under guidance of an )ld man in a gown and a gray, broad-brimmed hat, though every detail awakened Hawthorne’s disgust, convinced as he was that ■uch comforts as the sect knew were no higher kind than that mjoyed by their beasts of burden, and assured that the sooner he Shakers became extinct, the better. It was rather the ride lome that interested Hawthorne—a ride through unknown re¬ gions, over mistaken roads, up hill and down, by far the most pic- uresque ride that he had ever had in Berkshire. Just before sun- et, they had a wdde, wdde view, with the Catskills blue and far )n the horizon, and then the road ran along the verge of a gulf— leep, deep, deep, and filled with the foliage of trees that could lot reach halfway up to their carriage—such a road as he would ike to walk afoot, could he but find it again. Then, when they eached Lenox \’illage, it would have been quite dark had it not leen for the full moon, which set all the trees in bold relief, ulian, sitting in front with Melville, occasionally looked around t his father, smiling and reaching back to touch him, thus es- ibhshing through the dusk a sympathy in the adventures of the ay. Arrived at the gate of the old red house, and supper over prepared by Hawthorne’s Negress cook), there was conversation gain until ten o’clock, when the guests departed, and Hawthorne ?ad his newspapers until eleven. Before going to bed, he stepped utside to look at the night—a beautiful night, with full, rich, ■oudless moonlight. Regretfully he returned into the house. He . would much rather have been riding over the moonlit roads tc Pittsfield, six miles away. Julian, next morning, rehearsing the ad ventures of the previous day, summarized them all by saying thai he loved Mr. Melville as well as papa, as mamma, and as Una. Such were some of the circumstances which drew Hawthomt and Melville together in friendship. Of the interior record oi that friendship enough has come down to us to show us its gen eral outlines and, occasionally, its inmost recesses. When it was that Melville made his first acquaintance wit! Hawthorne’s writings may remain unknown, though he first publicly expressed himself in a long anonymous review (in Thi Literary World of August 17 and 24, 1850) of the Mosses from ar Old Manse, a copy of which book he had apparently acquired on July 18 of that year. Though in this review he writes as if he had read Twice-Told Tales and The Scarlet Letter, his remarks are too general to indicate a real familiarity. Besides, as late as February 12, 1851, he confessed to a friend that until recently he had read only a few of The Twice-Told TaZes—before, and seemingly until then, with no marked reactions. His review of Mosses, furthermore, suggests an intended mystification, not only because he pretends to be “a Virginian spending July in Vermont,” one who never saw Hawthorne, but also because he protests that he probably never shall see him, whereas he had already met Hawthorne when he wrote his review. Melville was apparently having some quiet fun, a fun increased by the curios¬ ity of the Hawthornes regarding the identity of the author of this glowing essay, a curiosity of which Melville must have been quite aware, since, when his review appeared, he was already on very friendly terms with the occupants of the little red house at Lenox. But however much or little Melville knew of Hawthorne’s writings before he read Mosses from an Old Manse, there is no doubt that, with the reading of that book, his admiration for man and author became almost unbounded. Hawthorne had never be¬ fore had such ecstatic approval, except, of course, from Sophia. Melville’s review began quietly with a statement of qualities in Hawthorne’s writings already recognized by other reviewers, though his words carried a poetic flavor and a personal warmth uncommon in such discourses. He spoke of the presence in this [522] 30ok of that mystical, ever-eluding spirit of all beauty which pos- lesses men of genius; he spoke of that contemplative humor, so ligh and so deep, and yet so richly relishable that it were hardly nappropriate in an angel, and of the hush of the noonday repose jf Hawthorne’s spell. In “The Old Apple-Dealer’’ he found the iubtlest spirit of sadness, such touches as argued a depth of tender- less, such a boundless sympathy with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love as no man might depict who had not himself cnown suffering at some time in some shape or other. And so, by legrees, Melville came to say that all over Hawthorne his melan- :holy rested like an Indian summer which bathed the whole :ountry in one softness. But having thus gently led his reader over accustomed paths of thought, past views known to the reader before, Melville turned ;o a quality which he fancied that he himself had discovered and tvhich fixed and fascinated him. In spite, he now said, of the [ndian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne, there vas another side—a dark half shrouded in black, ten times black. But as if hesitating for a moment on the brink of his foreboding ■evelation, Melville went on to assure his reader that this darkness n Hawthorne served but to give more effect to the ever-moving lawn that forever advanced through the darkness and circum- lavigated Hawthorne’s world. The hesitation, however, was only or a moment. The truth was, said Melville, that the world was nistaken in this Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was immeasurably leeper than the plummets of his critics, for blackness pervaded lim through and through, a blackness deriving its force from its ippeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original )in from the visitations of which no deeply thinking mind is ilways and wholly free. In “Young Goodman Brown,’’ a tale as leep as Dante, Melville especially saw an illustration of this black- less, a blackness which Shakespeare, too, had craftily insinuated n the dark characters of Hamlet and Timon, of Lear and lago, baracters wherein were things so terrifically true that it were all )ut madness for any good man, in his own person, to utter or even o hint of them, for in this world of lies, alas. Truth is forced to ly like a sacred white doe in the woodlands. Only by cunning glimpses does she reveal herself, covertly and by snatches, even n such masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth as Shake- [5^3] speare. In Hawthorne, however, one finds a fearless seeker foi Truth however terrific it may be. So fully did Hawthorne, in Melville’s eyes, embody his own speculative beliefs and literary aims, that it seemed a complete identity were possible. The more Melville contemplated Haw¬ thorne, the more Hawthorne expanded and deepened, drop ping germinous seeds into Melville’s soul. Beyond doubt Haw¬ thorne was a man of deep and noble nature, and in praising him, in expressing a feeling of sincere and appreciative love and admiration, Melville was sure that he was but serving and honor¬ ing himself. Eagerly Melville sought Hawthorne’s companionship after the initial acquaintance had been made. In midwinter, when Haw¬ thorne did not come on a visit as expected, Melville plowed through the snowdrifts to seek him out. He read more of Haw¬ thorne’s writing, too—read through the Twice-Told Tales, which he had but sampled before, and thought that they far exceeded the Mosses. They were wonderfully subtle—some of these tales— with deep meanings worthy of a Brahmin, and evincing a genius immensely loftier and more profound than shown by any other American. Still, there was something lacking—a good deal lacking —to the plump sphericity of the man. The trouble with Haw¬ thorne was that he didn’t patronize the butcher. What Hawthorne needed was roast beef—done rare. There were, then, flaws, and though speculatively Melville was convinced that no great author ever comes up to the idea of his reader, he yet yearned for a perfect union of thought and feeling. Perhaps, in that winter week spent with Hawthorne at the workbench in the bam at “Arrowhead,” something approach¬ ing such a union seemed more nearly possible in Melville’s view. At any rate, when, late in March, Melville had read The House of the Seven Gables, it seemed to him once again that he could merge himself in Hawthorne’s thought almost as if it were his own. In this book, what rich hangings embraided with scenes of tragedies! what indolent lounges to throw oneself upon! what a smell as of old wine in the pantry! Finally, in one corner, he found a dark little blackletter volume in golden clasps, entitled “Hawthorne: A Problem.” In this Hawthorne, he saw once more a tragic phase of humanity powerfully embodied, a man who [324 ] !ared no truth but declared himself a sovereign nature among the owers of heaven, hell, and earth, and who insisted upon treating ith all Powers upon an equal basis, surrendering no sovereignty 1 himself if those other Powers chose to withhold certain secrets, ad recognizing that perhaps after all there is no secret, the uni- erse itself being quite empty. In short, there was a grand truth bout this Nathaniel Hawthorne, for he said NO! in thunder, ad the Devil himself could not make him say yes, for all men ho say yes, lie. While reading The House of the Seven Gables, Melville was, E course, in the excitement of writing Moby-Dick, in the defiant ero of which he saw, and perhaps embodied, somewhat of what e seemed to see in the spirit of Hawthorne’s fiction. Captain itab, too, speculated upon the possibility that there was nothing eyond the mask, as Pieire was later to find the sarcophagus ap- allingly vacant. At the time, then, it seemed to Melville that hat Hawthorne had said in his second Romance was what Mel- ille was passionately trying to embody in his own tempestuous ory of the white whale. All the barriers between himself and [awthome had apparently dissolved and utterly faded away. And yet the juncture, alas, was not complete, or complete ily at intervals, with painful lapses to mar the perfect dream. 1 the height and near-frenzy of composition, when the toil of his ressing farm work sent him to bed with such bodily sensations •. those of a hired man working from sun to sun, when his writ- ig hand was full of blisters made by hoes and hammers, when it :emed that he was damned by dollars because it did not pay write what he was really moved to write. Truth being so un¬ anted, so that at last he should wear out and perish, all his boks being but botches—in such a time his despondency deep- ued because of the fearful thought that there were unbridge- ole chasms between himself and the one man who had seemed 1 see with his own eyes, and feel with his own heart. Much as h admired the story of “Ethan Brand,” which he had read in le last Dollar Magazine, much as he wished to agree with the teme of that story that the cultivation of the brain eats out the hart, and much as he himself insisted upon standing for the hart, it was nevertheless his prose opinion that in most cases ten with fine brains truly have hearts which extend down to [325] their hams. But more, and more disappointing. Hawthorne, appeared, was now becoming famous, a sign that he was heir patronized, and yielding to public taste. As for himself, Melvil preferred to be infamous. Fame being the most transparent ( all vanities. As for himself, furthermore, he chose to cast his 1 ( with Ecclesiastes, in which he found deeper and deeper and ui speakable meanings, though even there the truth had been mai aged a little with a view to popular conservatism. Some day, ho^ ever, he and Hawthorne might sit down in Paradise, in son shady corner by themselves, with a basket of champagne betwee them, and pleasantly discourse of all the things which on ean had distressed them, all the discordances of earth then being bi a reminiscence, they themselves at last in ideal accord. But if there were occasions when Melville felt that Hai thorne was failing him at the very time that he was himself i his deepest periods of despondency over his own writing, thei were other occasions when he enjoyed an exaltation which 1 was assured Hawthorne would understand and share. One thir which he almost desperately sought was the calm, the coolnes the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always i compose. He had tried to find such conditions in a third-stoi room in New York, there to bury himself and work and slave o his “Whale.” Disgusted, however, with the heat and dust of tl Babylonish brick-kiln of New York, he had returned to his fan at Pittsfield and had surprisingly found himself come out upc a less bristling time in which he could enjoy the calm prospe from the piazza of his old farmhouse. Seemingly disappearir now were those crotchety and over-doleful chimeras which hz beset him from out that boundless, trackless, but still glorioi wilderness which had surrounded him. Before very long he cou' look for the day when he would be free from the strain of writin Though his novel had not yet been completed, the nearness the end gave an exhilaration which he must convey to his frien who would surely appreciate the hell-fire in which the whole bo( had been broiled. Exultingly, and confident that he would ha' Hawthorne’s understanding and approval, he confided the seer motto of his book: “Ego non baptiso te in nomine. . . .” As so< as he was quite free, he was going to ride over to Lenox for [326] isit. Then, with a bottle of brandy, he hoped that they might ilk ontological heroics together to their hearts’ content. When Moby-Dick had at last been completed and published, D great was Melville’s esteem for Hawthorne, and so certain ras he that Hawthorne (if no other) would understand, that he edicated his book to his friend, in admiration, he said, of his enius. With its publication, Melville felt at peace and content, ontent that though he had written a wicked book, he was never- leless as spotless as the lamb, and content, too, because, he said, e expected neither comprehension nor appreciation of his little aper allegory, knowing well that he himself had not got the leaning of this great allegory—the world. When, therefore, Haw- lorne wrote him a plain, bluff letter that was yet joy-giving and xultation-breeding, Melville regarded Hawthorne’s appreciation s something more than he deserved—a glorious gratuity, the very town of India. It seemed to Melville that in Hawthorne’s praise he had, t last, evidence of the perfect understanding for which he inged. It is true that he still had his moments of doubt whether leir union of thought could ever be complete or more than eeting, the cause for the imperfection lying within himself as 'ell, perhaps, as in the nature of things. He himself could not uite recapture the spontaneous feelings with which he had hrst "ad Hawthorne’s letter—how pantheistic he had felt, how it had ’emed that Hawthorne’s heart beat in his ribs and his in Haw- lorne’s, and both in God’s! Nor, possibly, if Hawthorne spoke f the book again would he be addressing the same Melville who ad read that original letter with such exultation—so change- ole was he and everything, so difficult was it to cling to the good loment of full accord. Even in the expression of his pleasure i Hawthorne’s letter, his skepticism made him doubt his own Inity in writing so enthusiastically. And perhaps Hawthorne lid not really care for the book—merely praised its prevailing lought, despising the imperfect body and embracing the soul of x And yet, so it seemed to Melville, when he lifted the flagon •i his life to his lips, the lips were Hawthorne’s, and not his own. iie and Hawthorne were the pieces of the bread of Godhead -foken up at the Supper, and hence enjoyed this infinite fra- iirnity of feeling. If only life were properly constituted, he should [327] like to write a thousand—a million—a billion thoughts, all unde the form of a letter to Hawthorne. The divine magnet was oi Hawthorne, and his own responded. Which magnet was the bi^ gest? A foolish question, for they were One. Though it may remain uncertain when Melville first cam upon Hawthorne’s writing, it is clear enough when Hawthorn discovered Melville, for that discovery occurred with the ap pearance of Melville’s earliest book, Typee, which Hawthorn reviewed on March 26, 1846, for the Salem Advertiser, at a tim when, to fill the idle hours at the Custom House, he was reac ing and writing miscellaneous reviews. Typee, which he n viewed, rather strangely, without mentioning the author’s nam( though he knew it, Hawthorne found a very remarkable wor which he liked uncommonly well, a work lightly but vigorousl written, and giving a free and effective picture of barbarian lifi The author’s descriptions of the native girls he noted as volup tuously colored, though no more so than the exigencies of th subject appeared to require. The narrative as a whole he regarde as skilfully managed, the execution worthy of the novelty and it terest of the subject. In the author’s attitude toward his materia Hawthorne found a freedom of view which it would be too bars to call laxity of principle, though it rendered him tolerant c codes of morals little in accordance with those of our nativ land, but proper enough to a young and venturous sailor. What Hawthorne, from a literary point of view, thought c Melville’s fiction, is fairly clear, brief as is the extant record. H never regarded himself, to be sure, as an experienced literar critic, though his review of Longfellow’s Evangeline was a beai tiful piece of appreciation revealing a keen sensitivity to th merits of that poem. It may be regrettable that Melville ap parently discouraged his friend from reviewing Moby-Dick, as i is certainly regrettable that Hawthorne’s letters to Melville hav seemingly not come down to posterity. The outlines of Hav thorne’s critical reactions, however, do remain. Typee Hawthorne had admired for its vigor and for its e fective pictures of island life in the South Seas, as well as for th freedom of the author’s view. And he read Melville with a pn gressive appreciation, assured that no writer had ever before pi reality before his reader more unflinchingly than had Melvill [328] n Redburn and White-Jacket. Mardi he found a rich book, with lepths here and there compelling a man to swim for his life. He egretted only that in writing so good a book Melville had not )rooded over it longer so as to make it a great deal better. Moby- ')ick he regarded as a very remarkable book, giving him an idea ►f much greater power than the preceding ones. It seemed to lim that the review in the Literary World, which was friendly nough, did not do justice to its best points. Interestingly, it was iawthome who first called Melville’s attention to the detailed llegorical character of Moby-Dick, of which Melville lad had only a vague idea while he was writing his novel. In Melville, it is clear, Hawthorne saw a writer of in nt view and of great vigor and power, qualities which, as an xtist, he greatly admired. But that he went so far as to identify limself with Melville’s speculative views, or even to approve )f them, was true only in Melville’s fancy, so eager Avas Melville or understanding and sympathy. Such Byronism as HaAvthorne lad yielded to, he had put behind him with his college days and lis adolescence. He was no mad Captain Ahab, tom betAveen the onflicting determination to defy heaven, hell, and earth, and he belief that the universe Avas, after all, simply empty. He did lot say NO! in thunder, as Melville supposed, nor did he as- ume that all men lied who said yes. The tragic aspect of man, adeed, he recognized with clear eyes, believing, hoAvever, that lan can rise above his tragedy and actually be ennobled by it— aan’s ability to face his tragedy, perhaps, being his highest human uality, and raising him to the level of the angels. If there Avas a lystery in all this, it Avas a mystery which HaAvthome accepted ilmly as the Avill of Providence. Besides, he saAv that the tragic >pect of life is only one of life’s manifold parts. His ultimate iew Avas one of quiet affirmation. There Avas, of course, an element of sadness in the friendship E Melville and HaAvthorne, and this Avas so, doubtless, from le point of vieAV of both men. But there Avas in no sense a etrayal on the part of either man, the boundaries of friendship =ing sharply determined, finally, by the insularity and solitari- ;;ss of each. The limits of these boundaries HaAvthome Avas prob- oly the first to recognize (if Melville ever fully recognized i.em), both because of his nature and because of his experience. himself depend- As in the friendship of Emerson and Amos Bronson Alcott i was Emerson who was the more self-sufficient and Alcott th more dependent, so it was in the friendship of Hawthorne an( Melville; for Hawthorne, like Emerson, always had his cool am calm sanctuaries of retreat for communion with the mysteriou Power which sustained him. Besides, he may have been the mor fortunate in some of his outward circumstances, though thes circumstances did not always seem propitious. Hawthorne hac for one thing, the benefit of a formal education, in which divers philosophical speculations all had their day in court, and so eac! lost some of its novelty or poignancy. Long before he had me Melville (he was Melville’s senior by fifteen years), he had, mon over, already encountered Melville’s type of independent an free-ranging mind in the little Erenchman who, like himself, ha been a guest at Bridge’s mansion house in Maine, a man lik Melville, too, in being lonely, struggling against the world, an with bitter feelings in his breast. Furthermore, Hawthorne ha known the rounding and mellowing influence of such culture men as Longfellow and Sumner and Hillard, as well as the wil speculations of Channing. He had known intimately, too, Th( reau, who stood serenely, yet as aloof from his times as did Me ville; and Emerson, through whose mind had passed all thos problems so disturbing to Melville, yet had left the older ma collected and steady, like a soldier who had many times survive the rattle of artillery or the charge of cavalry. Hawthorne, b. yond a doubt, understood Melville’s thought perfectly wel though his own convictions had taken quite a different directioi It was not, however, in his nature to emphasize the difference, bt rather to listen with sympathy. But Hawthorne’s friendship for Melville had not only a intellectual aspect. When Hawthorne recorded in his journ little Julian’s remark that he loved Mr. Melville just as he lov( papa and mamma and Una, Hawthorne was recording a hous hold truth—that Melville Avas beloved by the whole Hawthon family. Then, and when he thought of his friend retrospective years later, Hawthorne recognized in Melville a very high ar noble nature. It had always seemed strange, however, as they s talking on the carpenter’s bench in Melville’s bam, or, at Ha’ thome’s red cottage, after many hours of discourse, they saw tl [350] doming grey appear, that Melville should persist in wandering 0 and fro over the deserts of speculative thought, neither be- ieving nor being comfortable in his unbelief. If he could but be religious man, so Hawthorne thought, Melville would surely be ne of the most religious and reverential, and better worthy im- lortality than most men. In spite of companionship and admiration and love, there idly remained, then, a wide hiatus. In a literary way, the friend- bip bore no fruit such as that borne by Hawthorne’s friendships dth Longfellow and Emerson. Melville, indeed, so it is said, lut Hawthorne’s portrait into Clarel, a poem which the world as not forgotten because it has never known it, though, in any vent, the portrait would hardly be recognizable as Hawthorne’s, rhirty years and more after their friendship had begun on that xpedition to Monument Mountain, and long after Hawthorne ly in his grave, Melville was still mistakenly convinced, as he ad been when he wrote of that little blackletter volume in olden clasps, entitled “Hawthorne: A Problem,” that there ad been in Hawthorne’s life some secret, never revealed, which "counted for the gloom which he thought he satv in Haw- lorne’s books. For Hawthorne the friendship was, fortunately, rich human experience, which deepened his sympathy and his ompassion. I When spring had come a second time during his residence : Lenox, Hawthorne had written to his friends Longfellow and •urtis that he was comfortable there, and that he was as happy : mortal could be. There were, however, hindrances to a com- jete happiness, and these obstacles seemed to increase as time ’ent on, leaving Hawthorne with the conviction that he could i)t stay, and awakening the hope that he might find a greater lippiness elsewhere. In the weeks immediately preceding the removal to Lenox, Aaile Sophia was with her parents and he was living in separate darters near by, Hawthorne had become weary and worn while Miting for a place to be, to think, and to write in, until he gave up entirely and was so indisposed as to distress Sophia. He took cold, and during the family’s first days in the red cottage, when the household was still in some disarray, took to his bed. The last year in Salem had been the most trying time in his life, as it had been in Sophia’s, a time when he had lost much of his vigor, his tread not now so elastic as it once had been. He protested that Salem was dragging at his ankles still. Nevertheless, Sophia was confident that the ministrations of nature would have their ef¬ fects in due time, so that she might see him soon as he had been in Concord. These hopes did, in fact, seem well warranted, foi the first winter passed so very pleasantly as to leave Hawthorne with the assurance that the best time for living in the countiy was the winter. But spring had hardly come when, though recognizing his happiness, he confessed a degree of restlessness. For one things as he wrote Longfellow, he missed the pleasure of treading pave ment, the smell of the sea breeze and of dock mud, and the companionship of former friends. Sometimes, though he had sought solitude, his soul became troubled with too much peace and rest. The winter had, of course, been a period of considerable mental strain, for during it Hawthorne had written The House of the Seven Gables. But though he was worn down with con stant work, and abominated the sight of his pen, he felt that he could not afford to be idle, for the arrival of Rose had addec a great responsibility. And so he set about to write anothei volume, the Wondet-Book, which he completed in a little over < month. There was, therefore, something paradoxical in his com plaint about an irksome surplus of rest. What he really sough was relaxation and variety, a need expressed over and over agaii in a hope for a vacation and a change of scene. In his letters t( his sisters, Elizabeth and Louisa, and to his friends Longfellow Bridge, Pike, and Fields appears a growing wish for the refresh ment ^vhich he anticipates from the sight of the sea and the solac of renewing old companionships—a wish to visit Boston am Salem and Portsmouth. There were other elements of discontentment. For one thim he was increasingly uncomfortable in the red cottage, which h to regard as certainly the most inconvenient and wretche [ 33 ^] came ittle hovel that he had ever put his head in. For a while the olution of this problem seemed the removal to Miss Kemble’s louse. He would regret the prospect, but nothing else. Then, iresently, to his practical-minded friends Bridge and Pike, he evealed his wish, in view of his seeming prosperity, to buy a louse. It must be a house located so as to give an easy access o the world; for, though it would do well enough for one to play Robinson Crusoe for a summer or so, a man making his settled lisposition for life had better be as near a railroad station as lossible. As a matter of taste, furthermore, he preferred the sea- :oast to the hill country of Berkshire. It was plain that he had lone with Lenox, whatever its charms once had been. There were yet other circumstances prompting discontent with vhat had once seemed to promise so much. For one thing, there lad been some misunderstanding with the Tappans concerning ights to the fruits of the orchard, and though this matter was ipparently settled amicably, it lingered as a disturbing memory, t was singular, too, as Sophia observed, how much more they yere in the center of society in Lenox than they had been in lalem, a circumstance augmented by the fact that a considerable lumber of literary persons seemed to be settling around them, o that they felt prompted to take flight before the original simple ountry surroundings had been quite altered. It was Hawthorne’s dissatisfaction with the climate, however, /hich primarily drove him to leave at last. It was not without eason that he missed city pavements, for in winter the road ■ver which he walked almost every day to and from the village /as often in the worst imaginable state of mud and mire—soft, lippery, and nasty to tread upon, while the grass beside it was carcely better, being so oozy and sometimes an absolute bog, the eneral effect of the day, moreover, being black, black, black! In ammer, too, he had experience with showers which drenched him n his walk homeward from the village in the evening, though ach an experience was as nothing compared with the heavy, rooding, oppressive heat of a sultry day, when Julian, accompany- ig him to the village, was so weary and hot that he pleaded to be jrried, and declared that he never wanted to go to the village gain. And yet, in spite of periods when the sun shone hot, there rere such long intervals of cold, in the second year at Lenox, that [ 535 ] it hardly seemed like a summer at all, and Farmer Luther Butler, though speaking of the weather as unusual, expressed his opinion that the corn would not do well this season. Hawthorne found himself continually catching cold, and shivering all day, with an utter disinclination to move. In short, he was convinced that the air and climate did not agree with him at all. Oh, for an east wind with a breath of salt sea in it! And so Hawthorne concluded that the Berkshire climate was horrible, horrible, and most horrible! He detested it, he detested it, he detested it! He hated the region with his whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat, for he decided that a miserable state of the atmosphere, at least in summertime, was incident to a country of hills, and might always be expected. At any rate, he felt compelled to say that where he had hoped for perfect health, he had for the first time in his life been made sensible that he could not with impunity encounter Nature in all her moods. This was a far-reaching confession, for it expressed not onl) a dissatisfaction with the local climate, but apparently a disap pointment with Nature herself. Perhaps it was a confession made only in a moment of despondency, written as it was on the first day after Sophia’s departure for a three-week sojourn at West Newton, when Hawthorne was lonely and had gone supperless to bed. It was no Coleridgean ode to dejection, no lost hope to win from outward forms a passion and a life whose fountains are within, though it was, after all, a disillusionment. There were yet to come from his heart and his pen many expressions of af¬ fection for Nature. He was still to be a lover loving, though with the sorrotvful realization of an imperfection in Nature, and with the knowledge that all was not to be as it had been before hh discovery of the seeming flaw. What Hawthorne did not know was that he was contending not only with an unpleasant climate, but with a deep-seated weak ness in his own health, a weakness (occasioned or intensified b) his Custom House experience) which in only a few years was tc lessen his creative powers and to deny him the longevity allottee to his immediate friends. Hopefully, in his ignorance of th( future, he looked elsewhere for more favorable surroundings After months of uncertainty it was at last decided to rent, in Wes [334] ewton, the house of the Horace Manns, who were to be in /^ashington, D. C., for some time, Congressman Mann wishing I have his family with him. There the Hawthornes planned to ay while they sought a house to buy. They had come to Lenox i May, when the children had wandered over the meadows with leir little straw baskets, gathering arbutus, anemones, violets, id Housatonia. (Oh, such happy hours!) When the family left enox in a farm wagon with their trunks and parcels, they left on le dreary day of November 21, 1851, in a storm of snow and eet. It was already dark when they were met by the Horace [anns at that grimy shed which in West Newton was called the ?pot. M The period at Lenox, in the way of authorship, had been a uitful one, for in it Hawthorne had produced the greatest body : writing that he had ever produced in an equal length of time, t Lenox he wrote his second Romance, The House of the Seven ables, which firmly established the high reputation begun by he Scarlet Letter. There, too, while at work on his Romance, ; wrote the preface to the third edition of Twice-Told Tales, o sooner had The House of the Seven Gables appeared than he it about, at the suggestion of Ticknor and Company, to as- mble the tales and sketches now appearing under the title of he Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales, for which he irote that “Dedicatory Letter’’ addressed to his old friend Ho- itio Bridge. Meanwhile, too, in the month of June, he wrote ( Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. Though, when it was com- [eted, he intended to enjoy the summer, to read foolish novels, sioke cigars, and think of nothing at all, July had not yet ended lien he decided to write yet another Romance, this one to be tsed on his experiences at Brook Farm. Within the week of tis decision, he was already at work on the preliminaries, though b interrupted his plans long enough, before he left Lenox, to \rite what, strictly speaking, was to be his last short story, ‘ eathertop.” He was surely entitled to look with satisfaction L)on his accomplishments during those eighteen months. All this writing, however, accomplished in such a relatively [335] short time, was not done without great effort or witliout nu merous risings and fallings of hope, without alternating hours oi enthusiasm and despondency. By coming to Lenox he had com¬ mitted himself to earning his living by witing, and so he vdshed to begin his next book as soon as possible, a hope being diat he might have it finished by November. There were, however, ob Stacies. For one thing, he had come to Lenox low in vigor anc afflicted with a bad cold that sent him to bed. Then, Sophia be ing vdthout a maid, he insisted, for a fortnight, upon helpinc her witli the housework. Furthermore, he had never been gooc for an)T:hing in the literary way until after the first autumna frost, which he fancied had somewhat such an effect upon him a it had upon the foliage. And so, as he sat in his study late it July, vdth the vdndow open, he vainly tried to ^vrite, his eye engaged in Avatching some wasp or bee as it entered his roorr out of tlie A\mrm atmosphere, soared about with large SAveeps buzzed against tlie glass as not satisfied A\dth the place, anc finally, in a joyous, uprising curA^e, came to the open part o the AvindoAv, and emerged into the cheerful gloAV of the outside- Avhile he himself could only seize the skirts of ideas and pin then doA\m for further investigation. By the first of October he saAV clearly that his book avouIc not be finished by November. He had not even decided on ; title, his story concerned Avith one of those old projecting-storiec houses familiar to his eye in Salem, this particular old shant haA’ing seA en gables. Should he call it “The House of the Sevei Gables,” “The Seven-Gahled House,” or simply “The Seve) Gables”? Perhaps the last Avas the best, because it Avould puzzl die Devil himself to tell Avhat it meant. By November he Aca AvTating diligently, but not so rapidly as he had hoped. Thi book, it seemed to him, required more care and thought thai did The Scarlet Letter. The latter, being all in one tone, he ha< only to get his pitch and he could go on interminably; but man pages of the book in hand ought to be finished A\ath the minute ness of a Dutch picture in order to give them their proper effec: Sometimes he greAv tired of Avhat he Avas Arriting, and then th Avhole thing struck him as an absurdity, from the beginning t the end. He tried to encourage himself A\ath the thought that, i Acaating a Romance, the A\aater is ahrays, or ought to be, caree [336] ig on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, the skill ly- ig in coming as close as possible v.-ithout actually tumbling cer. Encouraged by such reflections, he i^as com-inced that the bok ought to succeed better than The Scarlet Letter. The next loment, however, he was sure that it would not so succeed. He fayed that he might get through SNith the business speedily, and s he v.Tote fiercely—and found himself at a standstill. Then for CVS he would be in a Slough of Despond, bes%-ildered and unable t form any judgment of what he had done. The best thing he culd do was to throw dosvn his pen and keep quiet, seeking csersion by doing something else. At last, on January 12, 1851, he s^tote to Fields that his fouse of Seven Gables was, so to speak, finished. He svas only hmmering assay a little on the roof and doing a few odd jobs tat were left incomplete. iHe was working afternoons now, as srll as mornings, house-bound as the family was by drifts of sarkling snow.) The next evening, and for several evenings fol- hving, after the children had been put to bed, Ha^sthome read b manuscript to Sophia, an experience to her one of unsfjeakable jv, dazzled and be\vildered as she ssas by svhat he had svritten, ad charmed by the music of his voice. On January 26 the book »is finished, and immediately Sophia read the whole manuscript u herself. On the twenty-ses enth the manuscript ssas sent off to Fields in Bston, Hasvthome fearful lest it be lost in transit, for he had n copy of it except the wildest scribble of a first draft, from wich it could never be restored. Then, presently, proof sheets to arrive, Hawthorne svalking daily to the Lenox post oice, where he corrected them at once, the earlier to return tfem. He insisted that the proofs be sent to him for correction, ibugh reading them he regarded as a cursed bore. But he recog- ned that his handsvriting ^vas sillainouslv bad, and that when- e^r the printers mistook a word, it s%'as just the very jeivel of a t^rd, svorth all the rest of the dictionary. It tsus late in March >^en The House of the Seven Gables made its appearance. His book completed, Hasvthome tried to see it in perspective ad Avatched the public reaction ^sath interest. His osm imme- d.te feeling, like Sophia's, ^vas that he preferred it to The Scarlet Liter, though he admitted that an author’s Hew, upon first [557 . finishing a book, is worth little or nothing. One disadvantage o the new volume, he feared, was that the romantic improbabilitie became too glaring by being brought so close to the present time Still, as the days went on, he continued to prefer it to The Scar let Letter as having more merit, though he supposed that it wouk not make so much noise, the preliminary chapter being wha gave The Scarlet Letter its vogue. Sometimes he worried lest h( had refined upon the principal character too much for populai appreciation, and there continued the fear that the Romanc( should be found at odds with the humble and familiar scenep in which he had invested it. Nevertheless, he grew increasingly confident that portions of his new book were as good as anything he could hope to write. It was more characteristic of his mine and more proper and natural for him to write than was Tht Scarlet Letter. He was happy, therefore, when apprised of the sale of The House of the Seven Gables, that it seemed to have pleased a good many people more than his earlier book had done When all was said and done, he preferred it himself. He was interested in the criticism as well as the sale of hi' book, though he rather thought that he had reached that stagt when he did not care, very essentially, one way or the other, foi anybody’s opinion on any one production, especially since, or this last Romance, he had heard and seen such a diversity o judgment that he should be altogether bewildered if he attemptec to strike a balance. Nevertheless, he was not indifferent to th< very complimentary letters he received from poets and prosers not to mention adoring ones from young ladies, and he was a once startled and amused in receiving what was almost a dial lenge from a gentleman who complained that his gTandfather a Judge Pyncheon, had been introduced into the story! Of thi formal revieivs, Whipple’s in Graham’s seems to have pleased hin most, until Fields sent him, from the Southern Literary Mes senger, of June, 1851, the comprehensive essay written by Henry Theodore Tuckerman, an essay which, as Hawthorne vTon gratefully to Tuckerman himself, gave him the pleasantest sen sation he had ever experienced from any cause connected wit! literature. He was pleased not so much for the sake of the pi'ais( as because he felt that Tuckerman, better than anyone else, hac =en into his books and understood what he meant. He could ot thank Tuckerman enough for his beautiful article. In these months at Lenox Hawthorne himself had occasion 3 appraise what he had so far accomplished, his own prefaces, as ’^ell as Tuckerman’s summarizing article, prompting him to a etrospective view of his writings. How slowly he had made his 'ay in life, and how much was still to be done! All that he had :hieved, outwardly speaking, seemed of little worth. Reputation, e was sure, was but a bubble, and he thought that he would be ot one whit happier if his were world-w'ide and time-long, than hen nobody but his friend Bridge had had faith in him. For mg years he had written with an almost total want of sympathy ■om the reading public, though he wondered that his first tales ad gained such a vogue as they had. They had, after all, the pale nt of flow'ers that blossomed in too retired a shade, tales now, 1 retrospect, seeming to lack passion and life and power, and eing without profundity, though he might confidently claim lat they were not burdened by abstruseness of idea or obscurity E expression. Though they had been written in a clear, brown, vilight atmosphere, they were nevertheless obviously attempts to oen an intercourse with the world. If his first tales had failed to win an extensive popularity, ley had, however, provided him with much enjoyment, both :fore and since their publication. They had opened the way to ; ost agreeable associations and to the formation of imperishable ;iendships. From the publication of the Twice-Told Tales had allowed the acquaintance with George Bancroft and the appoint- lent to the positions in the Boston and the Salem Custom 'ouses. From that publication had followed, too, the friendship 'ith Longfellow and its literary consequences, the rewarding liendships with Emerson and Thoreau and Channing, as well others of varying importance. Most significant of all, it was trough the publication of his first volume of tales that he had let Sophia, from whom had emanated incalculable benefits cen¬ tring about the ineffable sanctuary of home. The early tales had, i seemed clear, led him out of the Dreamland of his youth into te pleasant pathway of his present realities, and so had given Im something far better than fame. Now, too, he assembled thoughts which had slowly, during [339] many years, emerged from the practice of his art, and which no’ assumed a perfection of expression matching his mature power From the very earliest days of his literary apprenticeship, when h had despondingly tried to tell Goodrich of his ambition to writ the romance of the early superstitions of our native land, he ha endeavored to express the character of his art. In “The Legenc of the Province House” and in “The Threefold Destiny” he ha more clearly stated his attempt to throw the spell of hoar ai tiquity over localities of the living world, and to mingle the wil and wonderful with the sober hues of nature. Now, in the pre ace to The House of the Seven Gables, he developed with ui mistakable clarity and force his distinction between the Nov( and the Romance, a topic which was to receive further elucid; tion in the prefaces to The Blithedale Romance and The Marbi Faun. For the Romance he would not claim a very minute fidelit to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience; rathe though the Romance must never swerve from the truth of th human heart, the writer of it should have a right to present thi truth to a great extent under circumstances of his own choosin;, and, if he should think fit, mellow the lights and deepen an enrich the shadows of the picture with a slight, delicate, an evanescent flavor of the Marvelous—a difficult task, he recognizee but one which he regarded as peculiarly his own. Such concepts, too, entered into the writing of his late volume for children, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. Whe he had written the Universal History in Goodrich’s Peter Park series, he had revolted against the factualism of Goodrich theories of literature for the young, a revolt included in his plai for “The Wonder Horn,” the book of fairy tales to be written i co-operation with Longfellow, and realized in part in Gram father’s Chair and Biographical Stories. Now all his long-hel plans to write for children culminated in the Wonder-Boo.' wherein he endeavored to remove the classic and marble coL ness of the Greek myths, to clothe them with the manners an' sentiments and morality of his own age, but yet to imbue the) with that romantic tone which it was now clearly his aim to gh all his writings. The Wonder-Book, incidentally, was one of tl most agreeable literary tasks he had ever undertaken. He ha put into it all his accumulated skill in tvriting, together with h [340] jng-held love for children, which had now been augmented by is affection for his own boy and girl, to whom all the stories had een told many times. Surely the old Greek myths have never een presented more beautifully in the literature for children. But it was with the writing of The House of the Seven Gables ith which Hawthorne was mainly engaged during the residence t Lenox. Into that Romance he poured his renewed energy and le deeper insight which reflection and the healing effects of time ad brought subsequent to the unhappy experience at the Salem ustom House. It was no wonder that, in retrospect, he regarded as more characteristic of his mind, more natural for him to rite, than The Scarlet Letter, which had been written in a lood of despondency contrary to the bent of his nature, and hich only in its deeper undertones was harmonious with his hilosophical affirmation. Now, firmer in courage, and morally ronger and more fit to cope with the world than ever before, 2 turned to an expression of that joy and assurance which had een so greatly augmented by his marriage with Sophia. Into 'he House of the Seven Gables went the story of his own happi- ess, more patently revealed, perhaps, than anywhere else in his ritings. If “The New Adam and Eve” had been an epithalamium )icing the first joys of marriage. The House of the Seven Gables as such a song once more, but lengthened and richly deepened V adversity met and overcome. In their days of courtship Haw- Horne had written Sophia that their love should leave them hap- ].er after every sorrow. And so it had been. In The House of the iruen Gables Hawthorne sang Sophia’s praises again, courted her gain, and again told of his profound happiness, much as he had one in his love letters, though now he wrote out of greater isdom and in the words of an artist at the height of his powers •one inimitably skilled in blending the real with the poet’s (earn. To be sure, there are in The House of the Seven Gables other latters than Hawthorne’s love story, though all these matters te merely ancillary. As in The Scarlet Letter, there are, for in- [341] stance, hints of Hawthorne’s own old short stories or sketches- characters, incidents, ideas, phrases—hints which convey the Haw thome manner much as the continuing use of certain colors an( brush strokes mark the paintings of a master artist, though not the manner, in Hawthorne’s case, has become bolder, richer, an( more forcefully emblematic of the wrriter’s expanding thought The melancholy wind which had whistled through the crannie of the Old Province House now shakes the aged framework of th Seven Gables with a clamor in awful contrast to the quiet o Judge Pyncheon as he sits in total darkness, his watch tickin pertinaciously all the while. The ancestral chair on which th judge keeps his silent vigil, where his great-great-great grand father had sat with blood on his ruff, had once upon a time serve( a milder purpose when Grandfather, with little Alice on his lap had sat in it to tell stories to the dream-children of Hawthorne’ bachelorhood. That very blood on Colonel Pyncheon’s ruff, toe had appeared momentarily long ago in “Howe’s Masquerade, though now it has become a darker and more ominous stain. So, too, with other matters. Alice Pyncheon, in the tale whicl Holgrave reads to Phoebe, is a renewed Alice Vane, out of “Ed ward Randolph’s Portrait,’’ where Hawthorne had placed som of his impressions of Sophia in the early days of their courtship In Holgrave’s story, also, the Matthew Maule who walks behini the corpse of the gentle Alice in her funeral procession gnashe his teeth in such frustration as Roger Chillingworth had knowi when Arthur Dimmsdale had escaped from his machinations Hepzibah Pyncheon, moreover, with her outworn loyalties t( the Past, had had her origins in Old Esther Dudley; and Clifford whom Hawthorne regarded as the main character of his Romance had had an earlier life in “The Artist of the Beautiful,’’ thougl he had already known a hazy pre-existence in “The Journal of ; Solitary Man,’’ far in the background of Hawthorne’s writing Perhaps most important of all, the secret of the profound happi ness which Holgrave and Phoebe find when the first, careless shallow gaiety of youth has departed, is a mystery which ha( been revealed more dimly long ago to Edgar and Edith in “Th Maypole of Merry Mount.’’ Indeed, a patient and discerning ea could hear a bewildering multiplicity of such partial echoes which are not merely echoes because, though they are reminis [342] aatches Pyncheon Street or the once elegant Gothic building of lawthome’s imagination. The claim of the Turner Street house ^ eems to rest mainly, if not solely, on its relation to the plot of The House of the Seven Gables. In its plot, as in its setting. The House of the Seven Gables /as natural for Hawthorne to write because the elements of the »lot were so inextricably intertwined with the lives of his an- estors. To Longfellow he had once written apologetically that, in /riting the Twice-Told Tales, he had seen so little of the world hat he had nothing but thin air to concoct them of. Now, it is rue, he had seen much more of the real world, though he chose, or the most part, to turn once more to the traditions of his own amily, known in part from his childhood, his knowledge in- reased by his conversations with Aunt Rachel Foirester, who had aade a genealogy of the Hathornes, by visits with his cousin, usy Ingersoll, who had a great fund of traditions about the amily, and by devoting his own leisure hours at the Salem Cus- om House to researches as a local antiquarian. Hence, when he at down to write his Romance, it was with a mind stocked to verflowing with a knowledge of his own family history. Basically, of course. The House of the Seven Gables is a story •f two warring families at last united by the love of a young ouple springing from the loins of the foes, much like the tale »f Romeo and Juliet, though in Hawthorne’s Romance the >arents’ strife ends happily. The Hathome real-life quarrel be- ;an, as has already been said, when Philip English was arraigned or witchcraft before Judges Hathome and Curwin, all the bitter- less fortunately terminating when a great-granddaughter of Eng- ish married a grandson of the persecuting Judge John Hathome. ts for the land claims to the east, claims made worthless by time, nd raising so many false hopes of yet greater family wealth, that uxiliary part of the plot, too, had long been a Hathome tradi- ton. The skullduggery regarding a will, which resulted in such lisfortune for the innocent Clifford, of course had its antecedents 1 the will of that Mary Hathome who had died in 1802, a will 'hich had so long lain neglected in a private drawer, and which ad so mysteriously disappeared in the night after its tardy dis- Dvery. Col. John Hathome had, to be sure, not demanded to ob- lin from a cousin the location of such records as would have [345] given him untold wealth in the lands to the eastward. But, ir 1811, he had beset the swooning Susy Ingersoll with the ferociu of a tiger in his effort to obtain possession of the old Tume: Street house—with no more success, by the way, than befell th( guileful Judge Pyncheon. Poor Clifford Pyncheon was not guile of murder, as circumstantial evidence and the silence of his cousii had made it seem, though Clifford Crowninshield, by marriag within the compass of the Hathorne family circle, was not s( innocent in the real-life murder of the wealthy Capt. Josepl White, a shocking scandal in Salem in 1830 and doubtless lingei ing in Hawthorne’s memory when he wrote The House of th Seven Gables twenty years afterward. But it is perhaps unneces sary to pursue such matters further, enough having already beei said to suggest out of what incidents Hawthorne transmuted th airy substance of his plot. Though the characters of the Romance obviously have n complete identity with any real people, it is clear enough tha they were created out of such earthly stuff as Hawthorne foun( at hand, he himself breathing into them the breath of thei fictional lives. It has long been an open secret, for instance, tha Charles W. Upham, undoubtedly the leader in drumming up th false charges which ousted Hawthorne from the Salem Custor House, sat for the portrait of Judge Pyncheon. In the heat of tha unhappy situation, Hawthorne had thought of killing and scalpin Upham in the public prints, but, convinced that Upham was th most satisfactory villain that ever was, consummate at every poini he wisely and fortunately saved him for purposes of fiction. Judg Pyncheon, however, is not merely the Salem political opportunist for the former shares, likewise, some of the characteristics of th belligerent and acquisitive Col. John Hathorne, who sought t wrest the Turner Street property from the distressed Susy Ingei soil much as the judge tried to beat down the wavering Hepzibaf Curiously, too, the judge seems to share some of the traits whic Hawthorne found in his former college mate Jonathan Cilley, th mature Cilley, in Hawthorne’s view, having the same artificial! created character as the judge, a crafty man concealing like murder-secret anything not good for him to have known, an possessing an insinuating smile and look which. Hawthorn thought, let out more of himself than could be detected in an [346] ►ther way, and which, since Gilley had made over his character, le had better do away with. There can be little doubt, however, hat in creating Judge Pyncheon, Hawthorne had Upham mainly n mind. With the character of old Hepzibah Pyncheon, Hawthorne lad long ago experimented briefly in the person of old Esther )udley, in the sketch bearing her name. Esther, like Hepzibah, ras a representative of the decayed past, both having treasured ip all that time had rendered worthless—the principles, feelings, aanners, modes of being and acting which another generation had [ung aside. Hepzibah, of course, is a much more profoundly con- eived character than Esther, for one reason because, since the mting of his early sketch, Hawthorne himself had not only grown nore mature, but he had also seen the development of the person ^ho doubtless suggested both old women to him—namely, his own QOther, who had more and more imprisoned herself in her mys- erious chamber, and who, like her two daughters, lived so much >ut of the world that she hardly knew its customs. If Madame iathorne had the solace of her children, she had nevertheless ncreasingly become, since the early death of her husband, not mlike old Hepzibah, with her single series of ideas, and but one iffection, and one bitter sense of wrong. The similarities are nu- nerous, Hepzibah’s identity, of course, residing in the multiplicity )f nuances emanating from Hawthorne’s fecund imagination. Into he character of Hepzibah, too, has probably entered somewhat )f the character of Susanna Hathome Ingersoll, Susy’s mother, hat old lady being, as Eben Hathorne had said, proud of being )roud. The origins of Uncle Venner, that wise, patched philosopher, re perhaps the most difficult to trace in the devious courses of lawthorne’s fancy. Perhaps, in creating Uncle Venner, Haw- horne went back in memory to his boyhood days at Bowdoin, /here “Uncle” Trench, dispenser of root beer and gingerbread, ■lain or sugared, on a sunshiny forenoon rested his wheelbarrow a the shade of Maine Hall to tempt the college youths with the roducts of his bakery or his home brewing. On their return from leir salt-water bath at the near-by bay, the boys used to stop at is humble dwelling in the pine and fir woods, not only to rest '•om their walk and to refresh themselves with gingerbread and [347] root beer, but to talk with the quiet, painstaking old man, whoi they liked for his own sake as well as for his sweets. Or, as is quit likely, in Uncle Venner Hawthorne may have blended his men ories of Uncle Trench with those of his old fellow-laborer at Broo Farm, George Bradford, who, though a man of education and n finement, cultivated vegetables which he conveyed to the publi market in a wheelbarrow, with no apparent eccentricity of cha acter—a most gentle man, impossible to describe without distortin his character, perhaps the rarest man in the world, whom Hav thorne had invited to live with him and Sophia at the Old Mansi in the first years of their marriage. If Hawthorne had paid h friend Emerson the highest of compliments when he had mad him, in the person of Ernest, the hero of “The Great Stone Face, he seems to have spoken with similar affection and respect of h friend George Bradford in the portrait of Uncle Venner, for Unc Venner had attained the summum bonum of all true philosopher a mellow, quiet, and simple spirit. The beginnings of the imaginary Clifford and Holgrave seei to have sprung from Hawthorne’s first recorded observations ( his cousin Eben Hathorne, who, in 1837, when Hawthorne wei to call on him for the purpose of inquiring about the family nam was an old bachelor, truly forlorn—lonely, and with sensitivene to feel his loneliness, and capacities, now withered, to have e joyed the sweets of life—his unhappy affair with the charmii Hannah Hodges, which Dr. Bentley had recorded in his diary, b ing far in the past, and his marriage to the Widow Peace still the future. These attributes of Eben, carefully recorded by Ha thorne in his notebooks, obviously suggest Clifford of the R mance. At the same time, however, that Hawthorne had noti Eben’s hobby in the pride of ancestry, he had also observed th Eben had given vent to the most arrant democracy, asserting th nobody ought to possess wealth longer than his own life, and tin it should return to the people—ideas very much akin to the of the fictional young Yankee, Holgaave, who, in one of 1 phases, loathed the odious and abominable Past, and hoped live to see the day when no man should build his home f posterity. Strangely, then, Eben Hathorne seems to have suggest two characters prominent in The House of the Seven Gabl characters very different in their finished form. [348] But, strange as all this may seem, the strangeness grows as tie characters of Clifford and Holgrave unfold in the progress f the Romance, for, different as these two men may seem—the ne young, energetic, and full of confidence in himself, and the ther aging and broken in health and hope—they are manifestly xpressions of two aspects of Hawthorne’s own character, both ransformed, of course, upon the principles of the author’s tile¬ ries of the Romance, with its evanscent flavor of the Marvelous, a the early “Journal of a Solitary Man,” wherein the autobio- raphical undertones seem manifest enough, Oberon, constituted ) partake largely of the joys of life, but never to be burdened ath its cares, with a nature of shrinking sensitiveness, finds it ard to die without his happiness, much as sensitive Clifford des out for his lost happiness in the dusk of the Pyncheon irden. More of such autobiographical elements, it is clear rough, appear in the Oberon of “The Devil in Manuscript,” and iappear enhanced in “The Artist of the Beautiful”—Oberon, 'wen Warland, and Clifford all representing the man of beauty, id all typifying the artistic sensitiveness in Hawthorne’s own ature. As for Holgrave, who, interestingly, seems to have no atecedents in Hawthorne’s earlier writings, he unmistakably jpresents the Hawthorne who, long restive under the restraints i: his solitude, sought reality in action, and who hoped that, hav- :;g devoted himself to physical labor, he might henceforth be en- itled to call the sons of toil his brethren, might thereafter find ; stronger sense of power to act as a man among men. Further- j'ore, in his zeal for man’s welfare, in his hope that men are not (X)med to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that in his (vn lifetime there were abroad harbingers of a golden era, in his ompanionship with men with long beards, and dressed in linen 1 ouses—reformers, philanthropists, community-men, and come- oters—in all these matters Holgrave plainly reflects the young lawthorne who frequented the Peabody bookstore in Boston, lid, moved by hope and the love of Sophia Peabody, joined the 1 formers and invested his savings in Brook Farm as evidence of ownright confidence in that project. : If it is astonishing to see the common origin of the characters ( Clifford and Holgrave, who develop so differently within the bunds of the Romance, it is no less astonishing to observe that [349] their identities, apparently so unlike, merge in their common love for Phoebe Pyncheon. And this merging occurs for the simple reason that the two men represent one Hawthorne drama¬ tizing his love for Sophia—the man of action and the man ol beauty each taking his turn—in a manner characteristic of each, but both in phrases echoing Hawthorne’s own love letters and diary—in singing the praises of the diminutive heroine, the vary¬ ing voices really being only variations of Hawthorne’s own speech, the sentiments representing, as in the love letters, his repeated efEorts to tell the boundless and inexpressible limits of his love, Clifford, indeed, was old, and worn with troubles that ought nevei to have occurred to him—a ruin, a failure. But he was a man, and he recognized Phoebe as a woman, taking unfailing note of ever) charm that pertained to her sex. If he recognized that some hopes were for him quite impossible, Phoebe nevertheless was what was required to bring him back into the breathing world. She was the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warml) home to his conception. Holding her hand, you felt something, and so long as you should feel its grasp, your place was good ir the whole sympathetic chain of nature—sentiments such as Haw thome had written to Sophia when he had told her that nothing was real to him unless she gave it that golden quality by her touch. It was Sophia who had interpreted the universe for him, so that he had found no need to ask Emerson, his Concord friend, foi the master word that should solve its riddle. Holgrave and Phoebe, of course, were young together, and so their relations had the coloring of youth. Homeless as Hoi grave had been, Phoebe made the House of the Seven Gables i home to him. And when, at last, they had declared their love they were conscious of nothing sad or old, for they transfigurec the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two firsi dwellers in it. Indeed, as early as when Phoebe had said goodbyf upon taking a temporary leave of the old house, Holgrave, car ried away by the moonlight, the nearness of Phoebe, and th( sentiment in his own heart, had felt that it was, after all, a gooc world to live in—how good, and beautiful! All these ideas hac their counterparts in Hawthorne’s own love story. Once, at Bos ton, he had written to Sophia that he was a homeless man, : wanderer in the desert of a great city. Then, when he and Sophi; lad finally joined their household gods at the Old Manse, he had :elebrated the event by writing “The New Adam and Eve,” vherein all the world was made new again. At the Old Manse, oo, one glorious day late in September, when a pervading joy eemed diffused all over the world, and when he and Sophia eemed so very rich in their blessings, he had looked out of his tudy window and thought, O perfect day! O beautiful world! 3 beneficent God! In the Romance it is Phoebe, after all, upon whom the at- ention is mainly focused. Holgrave, Clifford, Hepzibah, and even ittle Ned Higgins are all subject to her quiet spell. Nor was it he fault of the unctuous Judge Pyncheon when his kiss proved .bortive as that highly respectable kinsman tried to demonstrate o Phoebe his pretended family affection. If the sources of the haracters in The House of the Seven Gables are of interest, herefore, Phoebe’s genesis becomes a matter of greatest curiosity, nuch of which, surely, can be readily satisfied so far as such things ver can be settled. One may be moved to conjecture that some vanescent hints of Phoebe are to be dimly perceived in the char- cter of Ellen Langton of Hawthorne’s early and disclaimed 'anshawe, whatever real girl, if any, suggested Ellen. Much more ssuredly one may venture to say that in the creation of Phoebe here lingered in Hawthorne’s mind some long-remembered and herished memory of the charms of the Swampscott girl who in- pired “The Village Uncle” and became Susan in that sketch. 4 ot only is each a phantom of delight, a woman, and a spirit, □o; but Phoebe has been given the same brown ringlets and the alf-dozen freckles which made Susan’s face so enchanting; both iris possessing, too, such feminine attributes as shocked no anon of taste, each acting so carelessly, yet always for the best, s to make irrelevant the question of her rank among ladies. It j certainly not unpleasant to muse upon the many years, the long- ustained reminiscences, and the fond cherishings which finally manated in the creation of Hawthorne’s most lovable heroine, 1 whom Dr. Holmes found the sweetness of the sweet-fern and layberry of his own beloved New England. But unmistakably, and more than anyone else, Phoebe Pynch- on suggests Sophia. Phoebe was the very name which Hawthorne ad affectionately given Sophia in the early years of their mar- [55/] riage. Like Sophia, Phoebe had a diminutive person, a fact fondly repeated over and over in diary and in Romance. Like Sophia, Phoebe possessed the gift of practical arrangement, as Sophia il¬ lustrated in arranging so beautifully the lilies which Hawthorne gathered for her at the Old Manse, and as Phoebe demonstrated in arranging the Pyncheon roses on the first morning after her arrival at the House of the Seven Gables. More especially, Phoebe and Sophia alike had a most cheerful temperament. Whatever Phoebe did was done without conscious effort, and with frequent outbursts of song; and her prototype, Sophia, was, like Spring, full of hope and cheerfulness, singing out of her heart, and, like Spring, having the power to renew and recreate the weary spirit. In Hawthorne’s eyes, to be sure, Sophia was sunshine itself. If Phoebe purified the House of the Seven Gables of all former evil and sorrow by her sweet and happy thoughts, she had acquired that beneficent power from Sophia, who had transformed the musty and dismal Old Manse into one of the most pleasant and glad¬ some places in the world. In one of Hawthorne’s early sketches, “The Lily’s Quest,” it had seemed to the protagonists that no Temple of Happiness might be erected where human grief had left its stain; but at the Old Manse the renewing power of Sophia’s spirit had quite displaced such mournful sentiments, Sophia’s ministration bringing rest, peace, and happiness. When, moreover, Phoebe made a home for Clifford and Holgrave in the rusty old house of seven gables, it was because she had inherited her heart-warming domesticity from Sophia, who had done her husband one of her greatest services by providing him with a home, as he was well aware. When Hawthorne had returned with Emerson from that long walk to Harvard Village in the first year at the Old Manse, the former had remarked in his journal that it was the first time in his life that he had ever come home, for he had never before had a home. How very sweet it was to draw near his own home, after living so long homeless in the world! No wonder, then, that in The House of the Seven Gables he chose to celebrate the woman and the qualities bringing him the greatest happiness that he had ever knoAvn. Indeed, much of the spiritual drama represented as occurring in the House of the Seven Gables—that part of it depicting happiness displacing gloom —had had its origins in the Old Manse in Concord. And so it [332] was only fitting that another old house should provide the setting when the happiness that was autobiography was transferred to fiction. The personages of his tale, Hawthorne wrote in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, had been of his own making, or, at all events, of his own mixing. Though the process of the mixing might be pursued through many a labyrinth of the au¬ thor’s thought, and might well provide another kind of Road to Xanadu, it may be well, after all, not to try to examine with any / effort at finality the sinuous courses of Hawthorne’s imagination. Such matters may well be left to momentary glances, and then be permitted to dissolve in a pleasing sense of wonder. But the thought which provides the substance of the book—beyond the narrative and the characterization—may be examined forthrightly as something that Hawthorne wanted to say—not something that was in the contemporary air and interesting for dramatic pur¬ poses merely, but something vital to him as a man, something that life had taught him and therefore something worth sharing with others. Hawthorne was an idealist, and no realist endeavor¬ ing to keep himself strictly out of his writing, no literary scien¬ tist moved only by an impersonal curiosity, and no effete artist es¬ caping into a retreat where art exists only for itself. Into no other piece of writing, in fact, did he more unreservedly pour his own convictions. One would, however, be gullible to accept seriously the sup¬ posed moral with which Hawthorne in his preface facetiously says he has provided himself in order not to be deficient in such matters—the moral, namely, that the wrongdoing of one genera¬ tion lives into successive ones and becomes a pure and uncon¬ trollable mischief. Obviously the Romance illustrates nothing of the kind, as the most cursory reading of the story will reveal. Hawthorne was only enjoying an impish fun in thus ironically disarming the critics who had attacked The Scarlet Letter as hav¬ ing an undercurrent of filth, as indicative of an unsound state of public morals, and, finally, as representing the grossest and foulest falsification of truth in history and personal character ever en- :ountered in Romance or other narrative. None of the orthodox :ritics who had found fault with The Scarlet Letter could quar- rel with the pretended moral of The House of the Seven Gables— that is, that sin does not pay. If, however, these critics had read farther in the preface they might have observed Hawthorne’s small faith in impaling a story with its moral. The high truth with which he was concerned was not to be found only on the last page, but, rather, was intended to be wrought out skilfully along the way, adding an artistic glory, but no truer at the end than at the beginning. Of Hawthorne’s personal experiences preceding the Lenox period. Brook Farm, with its attendant reflections on reform; the expulsion from the Salem Custom House, with all its indig¬ nities and injustices; and his marriage to Sophia Peabody, with all its happy consequences, were among those of greatest magni¬ tude. Quite naturally, therefore, these events are reflected in the ideas which intermingle with and support the story and the char¬ acterization comprising The House of the Seven Gables. Though his reflections on reform were yet to reach their fruition in The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne had been medi¬ tating on the subject ever since he had decided that Brook Farm was not for him. In “The Hall of Fantasy,’’ in the colloquy between the storyteller and his friend, the question of reform had been rather evenly balanced in the scales of the argument, the advocates of a faith in the earthly perfection of mankind being quite impartially represented in contrast to Father Miller and his followers, who were anticipating the immediate dissolution of the world and the resolution of man’s affairs in the heavenly skies. The storyteller, though recognizing the reformers as quite prop erly residing in the Hall of Fantasy, nevertheless protests that he loves and honors such men. For himself, though he loves the earth so well that he will reluctantly submit to be transplanted even for higher cultivation in heaven, he will confide the whole matter to Providence, in the meantime so living here as not to leave him without a foothold somewhere else. In “The Christmas Banquet,’’ however, the modem philanthropist had not fared so well, but had been satirically represented as so deeply sensible of the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow creatures that he had no heart to do what little good that lay immediately within his power, contenting himself with being miserable for sympathy. At the Christmas banquet, too, had sat that woman Df unemployed energy who had driven herself to the verge of madness by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex. But be¬ yond these points, Hawthorne’s expression of his reflections on reform had not gone, though the beginnings of Hollingsworth md Zenobia of The Blithedale Romance seem clear. In The House of the Seven Gables, however, Hawthorne be- :omes unmistakably explicit, through the characterization of Holgrave, in his sentiments on reform. Holgrave has a mag¬ nanimous zeal for man’s welfare, and a recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man’s behalf, confident that the gray- bearded world is really only a stripling, capable of being im- aroved into all that it ought to be, and confident, too, that in his awn lifetime the moss-grown and rotten Past was to be tom down, ind everything to begin anew. But in such views, in the author’s udgment, Holgrave had hardly yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think. As to the better centuries yet to :ome, the daguerreotypist was surely right, though he erred in .upfaosing that his own age, more than any past or future one, was iestined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for i new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patch- vork. Holgrave erred, too, in fancying that it mattered whether le himself should contend for or against the great end in view. )uch sentiments honored him, and he had better never been )om than not to have cherished them. But when his early con- fictions had been modified by experience, he might yet have aith in man’s brightening destiny, only discerning, at last, that nan’s best directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while jod is the sole worker of realities. In such reflections had Hawthorne come to rest in his atti- ude toward reform, and here he was to remain. The Blithedale Romance being but a dramatization of these sentiments. How aulty had been Melville’s reading of The House of the Seven tables, how wrong Melville had been in assuming that Haw- horne, like Captain Ahab, defied the powers of heaven, hell, and arth, and supposed that, after all, the universe might be empty -these remarks of Hawthorne amply indicate. Much nearer, in uch meditations, was Hawthorne to Milton’s calm resignation. [355] God doth not need Either man’s works or his own gifts. Who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. Emerson, too, in “Experience”—that chapter in which he had set his heart on honesty—had arrived at conclusions much in accord with Hawthorne’s. The individual, Emerson had said, is always mistaken. He designs many things, draws other persons in as coadjutors, quarrels with some or all, blunders much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new and very unlike what he promised himself. Hence the ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism—that nothing is of us or out works—that all is of God. Significant as such thought is in the development of Haw¬ thorne’s personal philosophy, it receives but a brief treatment in The House of the Seven Gables. Much more central in that Romance is what is said directly of the problem of adversity and evil, the problem which Hawthorne himself had confronted—in the most devastating form he was ever to know—in his Salem Custom House experience. The problem in The House of the Seven Gables is one of a great wrong suffered, and it is through the lives of Clifford and Hepzibah that the question is drama¬ tized. Somberly it is confessed that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, is ever, in our mortal sphere, really set right¬ time, the continual vicissitude of circumstances, and the invari¬ able inopportunity of death, rendering it impossible, a very sad truth but for the higher hopes of immortality which it suggests. But there is no need to despair. The mature man, though he recognize that there must be evil in the world, will not there¬ fore feel as if the universe will tumble headlong into chaos. A wider scope of view than poor old Hepzibah possessed would see that even she had been enriched by poverty, developed by sor row, elevated by the strong and solitary affection of her life and thus endowed with a heroism which could never have char¬ acterized her in what are called happier circumstances. For Clifford, whose tenderness might have been completely eaten out or filed away had he enjoyed the means of cultivating hk taste for the beautiful to the utmost, there had been, too, a [336] edeeming drop of mercy at the bottom of his long and black alamity, which had at last brought him a recognition of the nerit of the affections. It was for Clifford to recognize, moreover, hat a remedy for the sufferer is to pass on, and leave what he )nce thought his irreparable ruin far behind him. If the dreams )f Clifford’s youth had suffered such a ruin, there yet remained or Clifford a quiet home in the old family residence with the aithful Hepzibah, long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and Peasant Sabbath days with Uncle Venner and the daguerreo- ypist in the garden house of the many-gabled mansion. What The House of the Seven Gables has mainly to express, lowever, is the thought which had most come home to Haw- home through his adversity at the Salem Custom House: namely, hat the affections are the great solvent of suffering, softening md subduing it, taking away its sting—nay, mysteriously making t the very basis of a more potent and deeper happiness. What Clifford needed, as Hawthorne was writing from a remembrance )f his own experience, was not only the calm of forgetfulness, but he love of a very few. When Clifford, newly arrived at the old *yncheon mansion, sat slumbering in his chair, with Hepzibah :azing momentarily at his altered, aged, faded, and ruined face, ler heart melting away in tears as she let down the curtain ver the sunny window, he had truly found his greatest blessing, le was at home, where there was nothing but love, as Hepzibah ad said. Holgrave, too, once the cool and detached observer of he Pyncheon fortunes, had seen in those fortunes such a record of uilt and retribution as made the world look strange, wild, evil, nd hostile—until Phoebe, the embodiment of the affections, lepped across the threshold and brought with her warmth, hope, nd joy. More than anything else, then. The House of the Seven Gables epicts the assuaging and recreative power of love. The story idiates, too, the tranquillity that follows turbulence overcome. E in “The Great Stone Face” and in “The Snow-Image” Haw- lome had attained a large degree of composure, there had evertheless apparently followed the grim wrestling with the ^orld dramatized in The Scarlet Letter. But The House of the even Gables ends with all the serenity of Shakespeare’s Tempest [ 557 ] after Prospero has disposed of his enemies, for, like Prospei Hawthorne had in his own way vanquished his adversaries—h found, in the solitude and calm of the Lenox hills, among frien and within his family, a renewed felicity, deeper and strong than ever, and could thus write a serene story of bygone w and present happiness. With Prospero he could now well say There sir, stop; Let us not burthen our remembrance with A heaviness that’s gone. [ 555 ] the Hawthornes had taken the house of the dorace Manns in West Newton, they came with no illusions of n ideal home. The rent was high—much more than they felt hat they could afford—though they consoled themselves with the lope that they might find a more suitable establishment of their twn in a matter of months. West Newton was dismal, a Boston uburb where smoky trains screeched and rumbled from mom- ng till night; and Horace Mann’s house, a small frame structure >ainted white, with green shutters, was heated with a furnace ^hich, to be kept going, was stiflingly hot. The winter of 1851- 852, moreover, was long and intensely cold, with snow piling p week after week, the grey clouds pelting the earth till the /eary householders were ready to cry. Hold, enough! Nor did ae coming of spring offer relief, for, on April 13, there arrived ne of the severest snowstorms of the year, and again on the ineteenth a tremendous northeast tempest bore down upon New ngland and imprisoned its inhabitants in the seclusion of their lowbound homes. Once, under similar conditions, while the ind had shaken the Old Manse and whistled through its crevices, lawthorne had written “Earth’s Holocaust.” Now, with no stately ^enue where, at night, the trees were crystal chandeliers, and ith no river meadow of ice over which, at dawn, the firmament as a vast rose, but surrounded by the ugliness of a dingy suburb dieved only by the omnipresent snow, Hawthorne again worked iligently. On the thirtieth of April he wrote the last page of The ’ithedale Romance, which he had begun to plan at Lenox. [359] 1 Then, on the first of May, he t\rrote the preface and modified the conclusion, thus lengthening the story by two pages of manu¬ script. But unlovely West Newton was from the first only to be a temporary place of residence. In mid-December Hawthorne wrote to Ellery Channing about the desirability of living once more in Concord, asking specifically about the Alcott place, the Alcotts having removed to Boston about two years previously. Ellery replied disparagingly. Concord in his fickle judgment now seem¬ ing a damnable place, absolutely the worst spot in the world. (Once, because Emerson lived there, it had seemed the very best place imaginable.) Eor one thing, only the other day the tempera¬ ture had been ten below zero, and he supposed that at the Alcott place the thermometer went as low as anywhere else in Concord. Two months later, Hawthorne, momentarily interrupting his tvTriting, went to dine with Longfellow, and the two men spent the afternoon tramping about Cambridge to look for a house there, both thus evidently seeking to strengthen old ties of friend¬ ship in the prospect of living near one another once again. But it was to Concord that the Hawthornes were after all to return, the Alcott place being purchased early in March, and the re¬ moval to Concord made the first week in June, 1852. Concord was not on the sea, as Ha^vthome had hoped his permanent residence might be; but it did offer the easy access to the tvorld which he coveted, at the same time that it provided the quiet of village life. Besides, Concord was associated with the first exploratory happiness of marriage, with the Old Manse, and with companionship in walks and talks with Emerson, and Tho- reau, and Channing—all of whom were still in Concord. Cam¬ bridge and Longfellow were only a few miles away, as were Bos¬ ton and the publishing house of Ticknor and Eields. It was the most natural thing in the ■^vorld that the Hawthornes should re¬ turn to Concord. The house in which they were to live had been occupied by tenants and was in a run-down condition—a horrible old [^60] house, Sophia thought, and to Hawthorne, first visiting it in snow¬ time, it had seemed fit only for a menagerie of cattle. It was re¬ markable, however, what a change had been made in a short while by carpenters, painters, and paperers, whose work had largely been directed by Sophia’s enthusiastic planning. Especially was Sophia pleased with her husband’s study, in the western wing of the house, with its rich velvet-like carpet of blue, in which were woven patterns of rose and rosebud and green leaf, the woodwork of the room grained to simulate oak, and quite in keeping, she thought, with the antiquity of the building. She exercised all her taste to decorate the study with vases and statuary and pic¬ tures, one whole division of a wall being occupied by her own painting of Endymion, on which she had worked, before the birth of Una, in her downstairs studio at the Old Manse, while her husband wrote overhead. Alcott had called the place “Hillside” because of the hill which rose directly beyond the house; but Hawthorne, remember¬ ing his own remark from the dedication letter prefixed to The Snow-Image, wherein he had thought of himself in his long ob¬ scurity as one who had sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, renamed his establishment “Wayside,” as being more morally suggestive and appropriate, the house stand¬ ing only a few feet from the old Boston road, along which the British had marched and retreated on the first day of the Revolu¬ tion. Nevertheless, he and Sophia thanked heaven for the hilltop which was a part of their property, a hilltop covered with locust trees (which came into luxuriant blossom in the month of June), as well as a few young elms and some white pines and infant oaks. From their hilltop there was a good view of extensive level surfaces and gentle, hilly outlines, covered wdth wood, in the remote concealment of which lay ’\V’'alden Pond and the now deserted cabin of Henry Thoreau. For Hawthorne there was in these broad meadows and gentle eminences a peculiar, quiet :harm that made them better than mountains, because they did aot stamp themselves into the brain, and thus grow wearisome ivith the same strong impression, repeated day after day. A few mmmer weeks among mountains now quite satisfied his tastes. He preferred a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, \36i] with outlines forever new, because continually fading out of the memory. Halfway up the hillside, on one of the terraces that Alcott had formed, there still stood a rustic summerhouse which Alcott had built of rough stems and branches of trees, on a system of his own. Though much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blew, it was still very pretty, as evanescent as a dream, and somehow enclosing a hint of spiritual beauty. The meadows and tree-covered hills below grew at once picturesque when viewed from its arched window. Though the trees on Hawthorne’s hilltop formed a thicket rather than a wood, they provided a good deal of shade. There, on a summer or autumn afternoon, in the warmest part of the day, Hawthorne spent delectable hours, stretched out at his lazy length, with a book in his hand or an umvritten book in his thoughts. Sometimes he was joined there by Sophia and Una and Julian, Hawthorne at full length on the carpet of pine needles, and all quiet in the great peace, while the tide of life flowed through them. It was, thought Sophia, such an enjoyment as no words could tell—simply to do nothing, but only to keep still, and be reverently happy and receptive of the great omnipresence. It was such a quiet receptiveness as she and Hawthorne had known in the days of their courtship, when Hawthorne had felt how futile and unnecessary were words. There were numerous walks again to enjoy the pleasures of Nature, Hawthorne and Una and Julian spending much time in exploring the woods and fields in the neighborhood, and, in winter, coasting down the small hills near “Wayside,” or rolling huge snowballs that melted only with the rains of spring. Once, on an October afternoon, the whole family (except Rosebud) mounted the hill behind the house till they came, beyond the Old Manse, to Peter’s Path, where, on a summer Sunday morn¬ ing, eight years before, Hawthorne and his dog Leo lay together under an oak, attending divine sendees in a temple not made with hands. Now, as they ascended the bare hill opposite the Old Manse, they looked up the noble avenue of trees where stood their first home, which they had not seen in seven years. No human being was visible in their beloved old house, or around it, and all was silence. Wachusett Hill was a pale blue outline [562] I The W'ayside From the drawing Iry Louisa May Alcott. Courtesy of Concord Free Pidrlic Library. on the horizon, and the Concord gleamed like glass here and there in the plain, reflecting the beauty on its banks. Hawthorne and Sophia stood and mused. It was all ground consecrated by unspeakable happiness. They returned home through Sleepy Hol¬ low, walking along the broad path that they used to say should be the chariot road to their castle which they would build on the hill to which it led. On other occasions, however, Hawthorne walked alone, as when, on an October night, he was dra^m forcibly out of doors by the rays of the moon, so clear and su¬ perbly bright. Though he might be reluctant to leave Sophia be¬ hind, he looked out and sighed, and went alone, as if under a ne¬ cessity to go, Sophia quite content to walk out in him while she fulfilled the obligations and pleasures of being mamma and nurse. The family, however, did not live apart, for Hawthorne was a celebrity of the first order now, and there were many visitors— men and women of literary accomplishments, as well as senti¬ mental admirers. Most welcome were their Concord neighbors and old acquaintances. Ephraim Bull, the originator of the Con¬ cord grape, whose property bordered the Hawthornes’ lot on the east, often came over to sit with Hawthorne in the summerhouse on the terrace to discuss human nature and the affairs of the world, as did another village Nestor, Edmund Hosmer, Emerson’s farmer friend, who discoursed of Daniel Webster and John Adams out of the memories of a long life. Thoreau came, too, and told Hawthorne that the “Wayside” had once been inhabited by a man who believed that he should never die—a tale that struck Ha^vthorne’s fancy, gave his old house a romantic color and moral significance, and lingered tantalizingly in his memory\ With Emerson and his family, now only a short walk distant, the old friendly relationships were speedily renewed. Mrs. Emerson came early, bringing an armful of roses, and the three Emerson children and Una and Julian were soon on the friendliest terms, the Emerson pony being a delight to all. On the first fourth of July in Concord, Hawthorne and Una and Julian and all the Emersons piled into the Emerson carriage to go to a picnic. In ;he second spring, one day when Hawthorne was out of town, Emerson came with his children and Ellery Channing, and asked Julian to accompany them to the pond and woods of Faiiy^ Land (near Walden), and Julian came home in ecstatic bliss caiTying [5^5] a basket of cowslips, anemones, and violets. The high talk of literary matters which had characterized the days at the Old Manse, when Emerson and Thoreau and Channing had been frequent visitors, had apparently largely ceased. Emerson and Hawthorne both had families now, and though there were oc¬ casions when the friends met as men of letters, as when Emerson gave a dinner at the Tremont House in Boston for the English poet Arthur Clough—a dinner at which were present Hawthorne and Longfellow, Lowell and Sumner, the sculptor Horatio Greenough, Sam Ward, Theodore Parker, and others—their re¬ lations were mainly the simple ones centering about house and home and children and the affairs of village life. The life resumed in Concord promised to be one of tran¬ quillity. Centered so much about home and children as it was, it seemed quite appropriate that Hawthorne’s mind should turn to another book for children—a continuation of his success with A Wonder-Book. But even as the household goods were being arranged in “The Wayside,’’ there began a course of events which were not only to postpone the book for children, but which were eventually to draw Hawthorne once more into the world and the turbulent affairs of politics. On June 5, 1852, the Democratic party, in convention at Baltimore, on the thirty-fifth ballot, nominated Eranklin Pierce as its candidate for the presidency. When this news reached Haw¬ thorne, it of course occurred to him that his old college friend might come to him to write the biography conventional for such occasions. Though he was willing to serve Pierce, it was a task not to his liking, not only because it was not to his taste, but because it needed long thought with him to produce anything good, and such a book, to meet the purposes of the political cam¬ paign, would have to be written speedily. Hence he wrote to Pierce immediately in an effort to deter Pierce from making the request, at the same time suggesting that Pierce turn to the editor of the Boston Times, who could acquit himself ten times better than he himself could, and to whom he would offer such aid as [364] lay in his power. What he did not tell Pierce, since the subject of consequences was not discussed between them, was that he feared, if he undertook the campaign biography, he would certainly be condemned publicly as one prostituting his friendship for pros¬ pect of public office. Pierce, meanwhile, as Hawthorne had anticipated, did re¬ quest the latter’s service as biographer as one especially desirable for the task because of Hawthorne’s fame as a writer. Reluctant though Hawthorne was. Pierce overbore his objections, and Haw¬ thorne consented—determined, however, to maintain his inde¬ pendence and his integrity. Since he sought nothing from Pierce, he need not be ashamed to tell the truth of an old friend dear to him almost from boyhood. Nor could he refuse Pierce his best efforts in his behalf at this—the great pinch of his life. The value of any campaign biography of Pierce which he could write, Hawthorne saw, would scarcely lie in its political persuasiveness, since he himself was too little of a politician as to call himself a member of any party. Rather, the value of what he could say resided in his knowledge of Pierce from a period of life when character could be read with undoubting accuracy. He could, therefore, judge Pierce’s motives, he was sure, better than those who had known the presidential candidate only during his later life. Though he and Pierce had met occasionally since their college days, and always on the old grounds of friendly confidence, their lives had nevertheless been separate, with no mutual events and few mutual interests; hence the tie of early friendship remained the same as when they had parted at Bow- doin. The biography, therefore, was essentially an expression of friendship. Fondly Hawthorne recalled that he and Pierce had belonged to the same literary society, that Pierce had been chair¬ man of the standing committee of which he himself had been a member, and that Pierce was an officer of the Bowdoin Cadets in which he had been a private. Hawthorne remembered, too, Pierce’s early indolence at college, an indolence threatening his college career, from which Pierce had rescued himself by de¬ termination and arduous toil, until he had graduated the third scholar in his class. When Hawthorne wrote of Pierce’s military service in the war with Mexico, he recalled that he had seen [5^5] Pierce on the eve of his departure, looking fit to be a soldier, and suggesting good fortune on the field and his fortunate return. What Hawthorne left unsaid in the biography was that Pierce’s departure for the war was colored in his own mind by his mem¬ ories of the time, only two years before, when Pierce and Bridge, one May day, had come up to the avenue of the Old Manse bring¬ ing words of hope and cheer, Hawthorne’s fortunes then being at a very low ebb. The biography is underlaid with many suggested but un¬ stated personal memories. As “The Great Stone Face’’ was a memento of friendship with Emerson, and as the “Dedicatory Letter’’ prefatory to The Snow-Image was a token of affection for Horatio Bridge, so was the biography an expression of tender regard for its subject. Hawthorne simply loved Pierce, whom he always recalled as the boy with whom, arm in arm, he had often strolled across the campus at Bowdoin. In writing the biography, Hawthorne not only stated his honest convictions; he did his friend an inestimable service by preserving the best in Pierce’s nature, by showing an aspect of that nature which the world might otherwise not have seen or remembered. Sophia, who did not see the little biography until after it was finished, read in it her husband’s adherence to truth in spirit and in letter, and thought it as serene as a dream by a river, such a testimony to the character of a presidential candidate as had never before been thrown into the arena of political warfare. Of course the biography could not be only an expression of friendship. Necessarily it was compelled to treat of the issues of the day, the great subject of variance between North and South unavoidably providing a difficult and delicate task for the biog¬ rapher. This problem Hawthorne determined to meet with per¬ fect frankness and candor—not pugnaciously or defensively, but on the broadest ground possible, in an effort to present Pierce as a man for the whole country. In so doing Hawthorne undoubt¬ edly stated some of his own convictions on reform, convictions which had, in a general way, already received expression in The House of the Seven Gables and more recently in The Blithedale Romance. As in the latter Romance no great faith is attached to the world-changing effects of any one reform, so in the biog¬ raphy it is frankly said that the subject of the memoir will scarcely [366] ave the confidence of those who conceive that the world stands till except so far as the anti-slavery movement goes forward. As a The House of the Seven Gables it had been said that Holgrave, a his maturity, still having faith in man’s brightening destiny, muld recognize his own helplessness, and learn that God is the ale worker of realities, while man’s best directed effort accom- ilishes a kind of dream, so in the biography it was said that lavery may be one of those evils which divine Providence does lot leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in ts own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, t causes to vanish. The biography, however, advocates a modest ffort at reform, assured that whatever contributes to the great ause of good, contributes to all its subdivisions and varieties, omething, Hawthorne was saying, in anticipation of Robert Tost, had to be left to God. Lincoln, a half-dozen years after the liography had been written, was of the opinion that slavery aight not peacefully become extinct in less than a hundred years, hough, like Hawthorne, he doubted not that, “in God’s own good ime,” an ultimate extinction would occur. The relative significance of man’s part and of God’s part in he progress of the world was a problem on which Hawthorne had bought long and earnestly. Years before the biography of Pierce, n “Edward Randolph’s Portrait,’’ with a mingling of seriousness md jocularity, he had commented on the Boston Puritans who trove against the oppressor with prayer and fasting, and who villingly submitted to whatever lot a wise Providence might end them—always, however, after their own best exertions to imend it. Much later, while consul at Liverpool, after many ef- orts to interest the federal government in improving the lot of eamen, he expressed his basic sentiment. He only knew that le himself had done no good. Vengeance and beneficence, he vas assured, are things that God claims for Himself. His instru- nents have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they lave, it is a pretty sure token that they are not His instruments, fhe abolishment of Hogging which he himself had sought, was, le was convinced, itself the cause of many subsequent ills. God’s vays, it seemed to him, are in nothing more mysterious than in [367] this matter of trying to do good. And so, as a mystery, the matti lodged restlessly in his mind, to await the disturbances of tl great Civil War. Early in July, 1852, Hawthorne was busily assembling i; formation for the biography so reluctantly undertaken, a ta; accomplished with the aid of Pierce himself and of some of h outstanding political supporters. On July 25 he set to work 1 begin writing in good earnest, determined not to show his fa( until the book was finished. Hardly had he begun to write, hot ever, when he was interrupted by the shocking news of the deal of Louisa, the favored sister with whom he had loved to “sava ize” in his pleasant boyhood days in the wilderness of Raymond Louisa had perished miserably in the wreck of the steambo; Henry Clay, which had burned on the Hudson on July 27 in scene of unspeakable terror. Nevertheless, benumbed as he w; by this loss, Hawthorne had the Pierce biography completed b fore the end of August—under the circumstances a heavy an exhausting labor. What he needed, Hawthorne saw, was rest and change < scene—such a renewal of spirit as he had known when, in tf days of his bachelorhood, he had visited Bridge at Augusta, ( when, in his ramblings at North Adams, he had meditated upo love and marriage and the uncertain future. After the completio of The Scarlet Letter, too, he had refreshed himself explorin nooks and corners of Boston, loafing in Parker’s grogshop, ei joying the hearty animality of livery-stable keepers, and obser ing the miscellaneous audience of a second-class theater. Aft( writing The House of the Seven Gables he had also craved change of scene—nothing, at that time, seeming so enticing as th sea, with its odor of salt water and dock mud. Now, once mon came the urge to be alone with the far-resounding roar of th ocean, to lose himself again in its overpowering majesty an awfulness. He tvas, beyond doubt, searching for the inspiratio to begin another book, though the form and substance therec were yet but as mist or dream. [755] Even as Hawthorne had begun the biography of Pierce, an casion arose which was to fulfil the desire for a vacation when e need arrived, for he was invited to attend the celebra- )n of the founding of Bowdoin. The invitation had been tended, not by the President Allen who had written Haw- orne’s mother that gently reproving letter about the card-play- g of her son, but by his successor. President Leonard Woods, lo knew of Hawthorne only as a distinguished alumnus. A more Tsonal invitation came from one of Hawthorne’s former teach- s. Professor Alpheus S. Packard, who had not foreseen his stu- :nt’s pre-eminence as a writer, but who still remembered the y, gentle youth who had sat near the end of the first bench his class. Professor Packard urged Hawthorne to contribute to e celebration an ode or a tale or a reminiscence, something in s characteristic manner, an honor which, however, Hawthorne d not accept, though he did visit his Alma Mater, making that sit a part of a vacation, the greater part of which he spent at e Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire. The return to Bowdoin, after an interval of twenty-seven ;ars, Hawthorne found a rather dreary affair, but not with- it its interesting and amusing aspects. He had left Concord L the rain, which had become so heavy that the train running p from Boston was delayed so many hours that he did not Tive in Brunswick until after the celebration speeches, which id occurred in the church where Parson Mead had once ful- linated against the evils of drunkenness, to the accompaniment t the shuffling of the feet of the unregenerate students. Hence, ickily, Hawthorne thought, or by the grace of divine Provi- ence, he was not put to the blush when his praises were sounded y orator and poet in the celebration exercises. But he was pres¬ et, it seems, at the dinner given in a large tent, so great was the ithering. There, at the head of the tent, over the heads of the leakers, was the college motto. Life without Literature Is Death, 'o the right was the motto of the Athenaen Literary Society, to hich Hawthorne had belonged—Knowledge Crowns Her Wor- lippers; to the left was the motto of the Peucinians—We Have vlways the Murmuring Pines. (How many memories were not ivived by these once familiar words!) Pierce, who was present, [5^P] as evei7body knew, as a presidential candidate, was a cente interest, and spoke to round after round of applause. What made Hawthorne’s college homecoming such a dr affair tvas that it made him realize the passage of years and accompanying sorrowful changes. His freshman roommate, fred Mason, had long been dead, as had his good friend J than Gilley. Frederick Mellen, with whom he had been cai at Wardsworth’s tavern, to the indtation of the faculty, Stephen Longfellow, who, like himself, had been indifferen college rules, were both dead. Indeed, more than a third of class of 1825 had died. Only eight of his class attended the union. Bridge was cruising somewhere in the Pacific, and H( Longfellow, vacationing at Newport, Rhode Island, did choose to come. Those who did come seemed to Hawthorne a of dismal old fellows, whose heads looked as if they had b out in a pretty copious shower of snow. It seemed to him tha the vanished quarter of a century they had undergone a mi able transformation, though he himself felt just about as yo as when he had graduated. His old classmates flattered him \ the assurance that time had touched him tenderly; but, alas, t were each a mirror in which he beheld the reflection of own age. To Sophia he tvrote that all his contemporaries i gi'own the funniest old men in the world. Was he, too, a fui old man? During the next two days he tvas with Pierce at Portl; and Portsmouth, and then, on September 3, he set sail for Isles of Shoals, where he might have the ocean all to himself, j where he might saturate himself tvdth sea breezes. There, at Lai ton’s Hotel, he spent the evenings under the long piazza promenade ^vith his host, sitting in the breeze, puffing a ci while Laighton smoked his pipe, not keeping up a continual fl of talk, but each speaking any wisdom that happened to come his mind. Sometimes he filled his leisure hours in the home Laighton’s son-in-latv and daughter, Levi and Celia Thaxi where all the company were mirthful and jolly, the youthful Thaxter (she tras seventeen) singing like a bird—glees and Nes melodies in Arhich her young companions joined. MTen, at 1 o clock, Hatrthorne emerged into the open air, out of that room song and pretty youthfulness of ^v’oman and gay young m( h'e was the sky, and the moon, and the old sea moaning all ood about the island. He took endless walks, sdsited an old jveyard, pored over old church records, listened to local ghost tries, and, as upon many a pres ious occasion, turned an expe- M.ced eye upon such oddities of character as came within his iw. He svas magnetized by a skipp>er of a ssTecked sloop, a man t rim and gloomy mien, with a rusty, jammed hat, a rough and yiv beard, and having a curious mode of chesving tobacco, ssith !5ch action of the jaws, getting out the juice as largely as pos- ifc, as men do svhen disturbed in mind—a man svho stood out urng the careless islanders around him, and left behind him a dll of strangeness in the place where he had been. Jut it was the sea and its rocky shores which mainly charmed 42rthome. It was vain to try to express the confusion of these rxy shores, so tossed together, and hang in all directions, as if ae of the massive materials of the world remained super- ioas, after the Creator had finished, and were carelessly thro^m xm, where a millionth part of them emerged out of the sea, or.ins: great hollows and harbors, into which the sea flotved, jofoaratively calm within, and foam and furv’ at the entrance, •nn the hotel, of an evening, he could hear the roaring of the jcaies at Hampton and Rye, nine miles off, the surf, meanwhile, weing against the rocky shores of the island, though there might •e tde wind. The morning, nevertheless, might break sunny Jiccalm, a haze sleeping along the shore, the surface of the sea tr6;.ed with smoothness and gentle ruffles of wind. .\t sunset a ising ship, setting off for Portsmouth, lay in the broad track i glden light thrown by the sun, far do\\ n toward the horizon, Aethe rippling water, her sails casting distinct shadows over the jriamess. Once, after night had set in sullen and gloomy, there iid^een threat of a stonn, such as he hoped to see, though a tjoting of rain brought only half a gale. Toward the east, arogh the opening of a shallotv valley, was the prospect of a ainhng sea, tvith a hundred tvhitecaps chasing one another ''etit. All around the horizon, landtvard as Av’ell as sea^vard, a nisthut in the view. Sometimes he had a dim sense of the conti- .-enbeyond, but no more distinct than the thought of the other •orl to the unenlightened. The sheep bleated in their desolate a^tre. The wind shook the house. .\ loon, seeking some quieter [ 57 ^] resting place than on the troubled t^-aves, swam in the cove n. the hotel, a restless object in the pother which the gale m; r\-ith the sea. It -was a wild spectacle, yet soothing and uplift; and nourishing to the soul. The vacation on the Isles of Shoals was doubtless meant < sen e both as a rest from the hurried and intense tNTiting of i Pierce biography and as a preparation for an imaginative pi'j of fiction. "WTiat was to be the nature of this book of fiction, h ever, it may be impossible to say. The netvspapers had i nounced that Hawthorne had begun a netv tvork the day a t: finishing The Blithedule Romance, though six weeks later f denied that his poor intellect was quite so ready and flexibltai that. Nevertheless, by July 14, 1852, he was tmting to \Villii Curtis of the delectable hours sj>ent on summer afternoons on i hillside, with a book in hand or an unt\-ritten one in his thoug s Perhaps, of course, the untmtten book may have been only j biography of Pierce which he had promised to write; on the ota hand, since he did not think of the biography as a literary j > duction, he may have referred to a continuation of the childr<’s tales begun in A Wonder-Book. In spite of his protests regti ing the inflexibility of his intellect, he had, by the middle of Jie, already proposed to himself such a continuation, a plan bro n off by his promise to write the Pierce biography. But before the middle of October, after the biographv as out of the way, and after he had had his fortnight of relaxai n on the Isles of Shoals, he had definitely made up his mincto commence a new romance. It was Bridge, apparently, to win he first revealed his intention, just as it w^as Bridge to whoime had first revealed his plans wflen he was contemplating 'k Blithedale Romance, an interesting commentary on his ccfi dence in Bridge’s sympathy in literary matters, a confidence e- gun in college days wTen Haw’thome had cast his lot with aut t- ship with Bridge’s encouragement. To Bridge he now wrote at the new romance w'hich he planned to begin in a day or c w^ould be, if possible, more genial than the last. 'What it a< specifically to treat he did not say. [37^] Since, unhappily, no clear record of the nature of this pn> picd romance is extant, it has been the subject of some sp>ecula- on. It has been proposed that Ha^sthome •^^'as intending to cvelop a plot offered to him by Mehille, who, in mid-August. 332, sent Hawthorne a story plot, ss-ith detailed notes for its de- slopment, a plot which had been given to Mehdlle. who thought imore appropriate for Hassthome’s talent than for his os%-n. The pisibUity of its use by Hassthome ss'as also urged upon him by ?elville during a sisit to Concord in November, though Haw- ome expressed uncertainty and urged MehiUe to s^tite the t e himself. A degree of plausibility of the theory that it ssus Mel- vle’s stoiy- which Hawthorne had in mind when he tsTOte to Edge is provided by the fact that the dates seem to substantiate us theory. But, contrarisdse, of equal or greater weight is Mel- vle’s testimony that his story was a tragic one to which Haw- ■i)me had not taken—perhaps because he tv’as thinking of a rore genial tale than The Blithedale Romance. But whatever the □cure of Melville’s proposed stors*, it seas probably not in Haw- tbme’s nature at this time to accept a stoiy* schich had not Aelojjed spontaneously out of his o^\ti thoughts. He had de- cned Conolly's offer of the tale which Longfellow developed in Eangeline, just as, somewhat later, he had declined Longfellow's p)p(»al that he tstite a histors' of the Acadians. It seems likely, ilrefore, that Melville’s prop>osal simply happened to be made wen Hawthorne was contemplating a plot of his o^^^l. However that may be, all thought that Hawdiome may have ai for the tmting of a new romance seems to have been laid ade with the election of Pierce to the presidency in November, is2, after which it became increasingly apparent that Hawthonie w; once more to have an appointive go\emment office. In the p^sence of the distractions accompanying these prospects, he regned the heavier task of composing a long ^cork for the slffiter one of resuming his plans for continuing A Wonder- Bok. These short stories for children he could develop with no ntd for concentrated attention, their composition being an easy an pleasant undertaking. In Tangleu'ood Tales, the title which htgave these stories, he retold six Greek myths in the manner beun in A Wonder BooA— purified of such elements as were ahorrent to the Christianized moral sense, and immersed in a [57.5] sunshine through whose agency the stem griefs of the origin; became mere shadows. An introduction, in part descriptive “The Wayside,” linked the new tales to the old by humorous ai playful references to the children at Tanglewood and to Eusta Bright, the fictitious storyteller of A Wonder-Book. The e gaging between-story episodes which had joined the stories of t earlier volume were, however, omitted in the new volume—pi haps as the result of the suggestions of Robert Carter, who f( that the framework was a detraction, and that nothing shou have appeared not harmonious with the Greek setting. Ha thome, of course, had from the beginning wished to imbue 1 versions of these old myths with the morality of Christianit and had had no hesitancy in presenting them in a romant guise. In yielding to Carter’s judgment, if that is what he di he may have diminished the effectiveness of his original pla The connecting links, instead of being excrescences in A Wo der-Book, have immortalized Tanglewood and have given tl book an indescribable charm, so that it remains the best of Hai thome’s books for children—the fulfilment of that youthful at bition which he had confided to Mary Peabody. If Tanglewoc Tales is a lesser book, it is nevertheless a good book, its merits ei hanced by the reflections of its unexcelled predecessor. [/H When Hawthorne had undertaken the writing of Pierce campaign biography, he had quieted his misgivings with th thought that he truly sought nothing from Pierce, and ther fore need not be ashamed to tell the truth about an old frienc He had tvritten the biography sincerely and with determinatio to stick to the truth. But the resolution not to accept a favor froi Pierce, should Pierce be elected to the presidency, was present) subjected to a number of circumstances altering Hawthorne original intention, until he came to wonder whether it would nc be rather folly than heroism to adhere to his resolution. For on thing. Pierce, perhaps as early as September, 1852, when he an Hawthorne had been together at Bowdoin and at the Isles ( Shoals, insisted that he look forward, if elected, to giving h [374] iend one of the prizes in his command. Then, after the publica- on of the biography, Hawthorne discovered that the book, in hich he had honestly expressed his sentiments (as well as ierce’s) on the slavery question, had cost him hundreds of iends in the North, so that perhaps, after all, he was justified in linking that Pierce owed him something, a sentiment with which ierce was apparently in accord. At any rate, under Pierce’s urg- ig, Hawthorne gradually yielded, the more readily because his ublisher-friend, William D. Ticknor, who had been made the jent of Pierce’s persuasiveness, urged not only that Pierce ought ) be allowed to acknowledge his indebtedness, but that Haw- lorne owed it to his family to provide as well as possible for leir future welfare, literature itself promising to offer only a leager subsistence. In the biography, Hawthorne had remarked that Pierce, kept oor by his public service, had resigned from the senatorship be- luse he had no doubt become sensible of the expediency of mak- ig some provision for the future. Now Hawthorne himself yielded ) such an expediency, at least for the time being, and once more )und himself within the iron framework of society. That utter bandonment of everything else, a noble self-devotion to the iuse of literature, which he had joined Longfellow in imagining ben they were youths, was still difficult of accomplishment for writer of storybooks with a wife and three children, world- imous though he might be. Perhaps, the world being what it as, the best harmony attainable between the Ideal and the Real as an uneasy alternation of the two, their respective oils and aters never quite mingling in a perfect homogeneity. Though Hawthorne was again entering the arena of politics, e now came with fewer illusions than he had entertained when e had begun his Custom House service in Salem. Now he was ■signed to the proscription on account of political opinion which id once embittered him, regarding it now as difficult to avoid, id perhaps, on the whole, not desirable to be avoided. What he ill protested was only the hypocrisy with which the Whigs had mied that their practice had contradicted their past professions, s for himself, he now readily accepted the probability that he Duld be turned out of any office that Pierce might give him ould Pierce himself fail to attain a second term. [375] Once resolved to accept an appointment from Pierce, Hav thorne actively determined to do the very best for himself tha lay in his power. A foreign mission he thought he could no afford to take. When the Boston Herald reported that some el fort had apparently been made to obtain for Hawthorne the Col lectorship of the Port of Boston (at a reputed salary of $6,400), i also reported that he would not accept the position on any termi since he probably preferred a foreign consulship, as was indee the case. More specifically, as Hawthorne wrote Bridge early ii October, he aspired to the consulship at Liverpool, one of th most lucrative posts at Pierce’s appointive command, with a con pensation said to be $20,000, and second in dignity only to th Embassy in London. To this end he consulted friends, spoke t politicians, and wrote jocular, mock-serious letters to Ticknoi letters in which he remarked that it would be a pity if the Get eral, who really meant well, would do anything wrong regardin that consulship! Furthermore, Hawthorne bent his efforts toward helpin others in their quest for political appointments, his aid bein coveted because of an assumption that he was a kind of princ in Pierce’s entourage. He did the best he could for such of friends as Pike, Burchmore, and Col. Miller, and for his nei young literary friend, R. H. Stoddard, who had come to “Th Wayside” to visit him. Even Emerson, who voted Whig and ha no sympathy for Pierce, solicited (and received) Hawthorne’s hel in behalf of a man from Cincinnati whom Emerson regarded as a fine scholar with poetic taste. In nobody else’s interest di^ Hawthorne work with more determination, however, than fo Melville, who aspired to a consulship at Honolulu, and who, lik his family and his father-in-law, had the greatest confidence ii Hawthorne’s interest and influence. That Hawthorne’s effort t help his friend was ineffectual was a matter of some embaiTas! ment perhaps to both men, though Hawthorne failed only from real lack of power, and not from a want of endeavor. On March 23, 1853, President Pierce sent to the Senate th nomination of Nathaniel Hawthorne as consul to Liverpool and three days later the nomination was confirmed. Charle Sumner, from the Senate Chamber, immediately wrote tvords c congratulations, assuring his friend that nothing could pleas [376] him more than Hawthorne’s appointment. The Whig press, how¬ ever, was less generous than the Whig Senator from Massachusetts. With the appearance of the Pierce biography, it had begun its caustic remarks, assuming that the biography had been ^vritten not only to further Pierce’s interests, but to add to Hawthorne’s pecuniary resources, either through sales of the book or through prospective office—for mercenary reasons, in short. Later it charged Hawthorne with a bigoted partisanship, ridiculed his fitness for the position, charged that the appointment was made on the basis of friendship for Pierce and without any special reference to Hawthorne’s literary talents, but concluded sarcas¬ tically that Hawthorne would be likely to make as good use of the job pickings as any other member of the Democratic party. What, in the way of abuse, the return to an association with political affairs was to cost him, Hawthorne had accurately fore¬ seen, though now he was prepared for the worst. He knew much more of the world now than when, as measurer at the Boston Custom House, he had idealistically wished to take his place among the sons of toil. His appointment as consul to Liverpool confirmed, Haw¬ thorne, having completed Tanglewood Tales while awaiting an appointment, journeyed to Washington with his friend Ticknor, the latter assuming the task of making travel arrangements, such matters being irksome to Hawthorne and unmanageable in his hands. On April 14, a dark and rainy day, the two men set out for New York, where Hawthorne called on Allan Melville in Her¬ man’s behalf, and saw his old friend O’Sullivan, whose hopes were tgain in the ascendant, now that the Democrats were once more n power. On the nineteenth they were in Philadelphia, spent ive hours in Baltimore, and arrived in Washington on the twenty- irst, Hawthorne having enjoyed the journey and the new places ilong the way, this being his first trip so far south. It was springtime in Washington when Hawthorne and Tick- lor arrived there, and the air was bland and filled with the jeauty and fragrance of blossoming trees. Though it was nine )’clock in the evening when the train pulled into the station, hey chose to see something of the city at once, and so walked round the White House, which far exceeded Hawthorne’s ex- )ectations. It was midnight and after before they had their fill [ 377 ] of the sights and were on their way to bed. The next momins Hawthorne saw Pierce for the first time in Pierce’s official capac ity, though during the ensuing week or two they saw each othe frequently. Indeed, as Ticknor wrote to his wife. Hawthorn was quite a lion in Washington. He not only saw the Presiden on official matters, but was invited for tea at the White House visited Mt. Vernon with the ladies of the President’s family, an when he would leave Washington, was urged by the President t( stay a few days longer. He and Ticknor saw many of politica importance in Washington, Hawthorne really amazed by th lionizing which he received, though learning more of politica intrigue and management, as Ticknor observed, than the latte had ever dreamed of. Hawthorne thought it very queer how mud he had done for himself and others while he was in Washingtor In addition to the Liverpool consulship, he had secured for hiir self the one at Manchester also, which might add some $3,00 to his annual income. But while Hawthorne was thus so outwardly engaged in th affairs of the world, his private thoughts were back in Concori with those for whom he had undertaken to re-enter the struggl among men. He was homesick for Sophia; and the children, toe seemed very good and beautiful. It was ages since he had lei home. To Sophia he wrote brief notes recounting his activitiei though mainly he wrote of how lonely he was without her, hoi weary he was with longing for her, how imp>ossible to tell hoi much he wished to be in her arms again. She must tell the chi dren, too, how much he loved them all. Sophia, meanwhile, a her husband doubtless envisioned, was busy with her domesti life. In moments of leisure she looked out upon the peach ani apple trees, now all in bloom, or sat down in their pine gTOVc trying to bear her husband’s absence, for without him her lif seemed a desolation. For Hawthorne the appointment to the consulship at Live pool meant much. That Pierce had given him this post, whic promised to be so lucrative, revealed the warmth of the Pres dent’s affection, since, though he might have made great politicj [575] ipital out of it, Pierce chose rather to give it to his boyhood ■iend, a man without political influence. In this appointment, JO, Hawthorne thought he saw an end to the poverty which had ogged him all his life. He saw in it, moreover, the opportunity j visit Europe, with all its alluring prospects. Longfellow had een there, as had Sumner, and Emerson, and Ellery Channing, nd Alcott. Hawthorne himself had had several invitations from English celebrities to come to England, and so this office promised j make all things straight. Besides, The Blithedale Romance ad been received so well in England that he stood there, accord- ig to the critics, as the foremost American writer of prose fic- ion. It was a most attractive expectation; indeed, to see Europe ad been a dream which he had cherished for many years, how- ver hopeless the real outlook had been. When he had first told .ongfellow of his appointment to the Boston Custom House, in 839, he had written of a letter from Bridge, a letter dated at Lome. Fancifully, as he wrote Longfellow, he hoped that some essel in Boston Harbor would mutiny and run away with his rarshipful self to the Mediterranean. At any rate, he had a pre- mtiment that he should be there some day. And now his dream ^as coming true. Hawthorne’s friends remarked how pleased he was with this uming up of the wheel of Fortune. Fields observed how happy e seemed at the thought of flitting, though Fields himself won- lered if Hawthorne could possibly be as contented across the /ater as he was in Concord. Longfellow, who gave a farewell inner for his old friend on June 14, noted how very lively Haw- home was, how high his spirits, how cheered by the prospect efore him. Emerson, who attended the dinner, as did Lowell, ilough, Eliot Norton, and Longfellow’s brother, Samuel, thought a very agreeable occasion. Longfellow, next day, still found the lemory of it sweetening the delight he had had in a farewell so aspicious. There were, however, some solemn moments for Hawthorne efore his departure. One day he burned great heaps of old ;tters and other papers in preparation for going to England, mong the letters were hundreds of Sophia’s—from the early lys of their courtship, when they had exchanged notes almost lily, to the present. The world, he was sure, had no more such; [379] and now they were all ashes. What a trustful guardian of secret matters was fire! What should we do without Fire and Death? The departure for Liverpool from Boston occurred on July 6 , on the paddle-wheel steamship Niagara, Captain Leitch. Sophia’s father. Dr. Peabody, and James T. Fields had come to see off the party consisting of the Hawthornes and their three children, two ser\'ants, and the faithful Ticknor. As the ship steamed out of the harbor, there were Avaves of farewell, cannons thundered a salute in honor of the distinguished United States consul and author, and then presently there was no land—only the glorious day and the blue surrounding sea. O heron was no longer the solitary dreamer. Life had verily called him forth, and now here he was—advancing beneath the archtray of futurity onto the hightvay of human affairs, as in lonely youth he had imaginatively wished might be his lot. ^Vhen, in the last months at Lenox, Hawthorne’s thoughts had turned inward to conjure up a new romance, a story which would give him a foothold between fiction and reality, he sensed again the difficulty that he had long felt in treating American subject matter. In America there was no such Faery Land as the old ^vorld seemed to provide, an area where the author’s work need not be put side by side with nature, but where a certain license was permitted with regard to everyday probability. He had, moreover, already dramatized two of the most significant episodes in his own life—the expulsion from the Salem Custom House in the allegory of The Scarlet Letter, and, more directly his courtship in The House of the Seven Gables. The most ro¬ mantic episode of his life yet remaining untold, save in incidental allusions in his tales and sketches, was the period spent at Brool Farm. To that socialist community, a little removed from tin highway of ordinary travel, he therefore turned as offering an op portunity for the creatures of his brain to play their phantasma gorical antics without exposing them to too close a comparisor with the actual events of real lives. Brook Farm might well pro vide the side scenes and backgrounds and exterior adormnen [380] )f a work of fiction in which fact and daydream should mingle o create the proper effects of Romance. Into such a background, oo, it would not be amiss to weave, in airy disguises, the wisdom ind strength which had arisen out of his own disenchantment vith the ideals of the transcendental Utopia. And so, during those wintry months at West Newton, con- med by cold and snow, and with few' interruptions, Hawthorne rarked intensely in the WTiting of The Blithedale Romance, iving over again the events and hopes and shattered dreams of Irook Farm, searching for the renewed life among the phoenix shes, and shaping all these elements afresh in the crucible of his pagination. Behind him, to guide his writing hand, were a lousand accomplishments of thought and pen. W'hen, therefore, e described the pleasant firelight of the kitchen hearth at Blithe- ale, w'ith its knot of dreamers drawn up before it, that firelight as the epitome of the fires which had burned in “Fire W'orship,” id before the embers of which he had sat while dreaming into s impalpable substance the story of The Scarlet Letter. When riscilla, coming out of the snow'storm, and suggesting some un- irthly creature doomed to w'ander about in such storms, entered le old farmhouse, with snow' and icicles in her hair, she brought ith her all the strangeness of the mysterious maiden of The low-Image, though the words used to describe Priscilla were ew. Coverdale, suffering from a bad cold caught on the way to topia, experienced such feverish thoughts as had already had leir prototype in “The Haunted Mind,” where the author had \d his practice in representing such matters. Wdien Coverdale, lo, poet as he was, shrank back from the uncompromising ma- irialism of W’^estervelt, he did so the more naturally and convinc- igly because Ow'en W'^arland, the artist of the beautiful, re- jilsed by worldly old Peter Hovenden, had provided their creator \th the skill w'hich comes with experience. In like manner did Haw'thorne, in composing The Blithedale iDmance, recast numerous otlier old matters into new and em- lllished forms. The old apple dealer—patient, quiet, hopeless— Mom he had studied years ago in the railway station in Salem, ad whose character he had sketched w'hile living at the Old fanse, now merged with that elderly tatterdemalion whom he Id seen in Parker’s grogshop in Boston—merged and came to a subdued life in the person of Old Moodie. Coverdale, who earh sensed the approach of the catastrophe arising from Zenobia’; pride and passion and Hollingsworth’s surrender to an overrul ing purpose, saw with experienced eyes because he saw with th( same eyes which had permitted the painter of “The Propheti( Pictures’’ to sense the approach of Destiny as it came to over take Walter and Elinor Ludlow, its unhappy victims. And Hoi lingsworth, who lost the warmth of his heart, his humanity, whei he became the bond-slave of his philanthropic theory, could b( all the more clearly realized by the author who, in “The GentL Boy,’’ had long ago seen in the religious fanaticism of the Quake mother a sundering of all human ties of affection. Though Hoi grave of The House of the Seven Gables was yet to acquire hi doubts as to the immediate improvability of the world, his creato had already anticipated such doubts for him, and in The Blithe dale Romance made these skepticisms a major theme. Not only is the past of Hawthorne’s writing experience re fleeted in The Blithedale Romance. The exterior adornment o that story is replete with details chosen from the author’s meriior of Brook Farm. The farm itself, its fields and woods and meadows Eliot’s pulpit, and the Charles River are all introduced, thougl the waters of the Charles River mingle, in Zenobia’s drownini scene, with those of the Concord in a quite ungeographical man ner. The snowstorm which greeted Hawthorne’s arrival a Brook Farm reappears in the Romance, as does the cheer fire in the kitchen of the farmhouse. If the first May-Day a the farm, when Hawthorne had found but one anemone, a poor pale, shivering little flower, had only reminded him of the differ ence between the ideal and the real, he nevertheless rememberer that day when, in the story, Zenobia and Priscilla, in the balm of: May-Day of their own choosing, go a-maying, and find anemone in abundance, as well as other flowers to fill their basket. Th( large pine tree, into which Hawthorne had mounted nearly t( its very tip, screened from the sun and the earth below by thi spreading leaves and purple clusters of a grape vine that ascender to its very summit, became Coverdale’s hermitage in the stor) the hermitage from which Coverdale overheard fragments of con versation as Zenobia and Westervelt passed below, their tragi [382] wds mingling indistinguishably with the sound of leaves flut- ning in the wind. As for the characters in The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne rotested-t^at they were entirely fictitious, as surely in the larger mse they were. No such people ever walked the earth, and it fould be patently false to identify them fully with any of Haw- lorne’s acquaintances. But that their substance consisted only f the gossamer of Hawthorne’s imagination, the record denies, n these characters reality and fiction mingle as in the conjurer’s rt fact and sleight of hand blend indistinguishably. Old Moodie s Hawthorne conceived him did have some of the characteristics f the tattered old man with a patch over one eye whom Haw- lorne had seen in Parker’s grogshop in Boston; but the Moodie fho had been Fauntleroy was never the grogshop ragamuffin, [tough Fauntleroy had had his origin in reality, too, with what- ver fanciful changes in his transformation from the pages of a alem newspaper to the pages of the Romance. Priscilla, who, ike Sophia when Hawthorne first knew her, looked her loveliest a white, and who was only a leaf floating on the dark current of vents, was not the highly intelligent Sophia; nor was she quite he poor little seamstress from Boston whom Hawthorne had let at Brook Farm, though doubtless that young person magically lecame Priscilla when he decked her out in the fancywork which nade her a gentle and lovely woman. In his notebook Hawthorne lad recorded that William Allen, who was in charge of the 'arm, had threatened, when the seamstress had upset a load of lay, to rivet two horseshoes around her neck; whereas Allen’s ounterpart in the story, Silas Foster, for the same reason, threat- ned to rivet about Priscilla’s neck three horseshoes, and chain ler to a post—the third horseshoe and the post, amusingly, being naterial additions of Hawthorne’s otherwise Ariel fancy. But hen, in the introduction to the Mosses from an Old Manse, lawthorne had also imagined a ghostly flatiron! Of the possible origins of the tragic heroine of The Blithe- 'ale Romance, much has been said, sometimes in harsh criticism f Hawthorne, such criticism arising from associating an assump- ion that Zenobia is Margaret Fuller with Hawthorne’s consider- bly later severe remarks on the artificiality of the character of hat learned and vocal advocate of women’s rights—an obvious anachronism. It is true that Hawthorne attributed to Zenobi; some of the qualities of an actress—Zenobia, like an actress, fling in g aroun d her an illusion which made it difficult to know he truest attitude. It is also true that, when Hawthorne wrote, Mai garet Fuller had recently drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island New York. But these are quite irrelevant coincidences. The suicid( drowning of Zenobia of course came out of Hawthorne’s owi experience at the Old Manse when he and Ellery Channing hac aided in retrieving the body of the p>oor girl who had drownec herself in the Concord River, and who had provided Hawthomi with such a midnight spectacle of perfect horror as he had neve: before seen or imagined. No wonder that, in searching for matte: for his Romance, he employed, not only the romantic episode o his own life at Brook Farm, but this terror-inspiring real-lifi event, recast into some of the most powerful writing in his book Zenobia, beyond doubt, owed something to Margaret Fuller, foi the latter was the one outstanding woman in Hawthorne’s ac quaintance who brooded over the rights of woman and spok( often on that subject. Sophia, at the Old Manse, it will be re membered, had reflected that if Margaret were truly marriec (Margaret was of course not yet married at all) she would noi be puzzled about the rights of woman. But already at the Old Manse, when Hawthorne was writing the Mosses, Margaret Fuller and whoever were the prototypes of Priscilla and Hollingsworth, had assumed their initial fictional forms by being guests at “The Christmas Banquet.” Zenobia, moreover, derived some of her characteristics from Hester Prynne —a Hester of independent thought removed from a Puritan so¬ ciety to a nineteenth-century milieu just becoming aware of woman’s rights. Certainly Zenobia’s admirable figure, the beauty of her features, her bloom, the influence which breathed from her sex and vigor, were an old Hawthornean ideal, an ideal as old—and as young—as Beatrice in “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Per¬ haps Zenobia’s social aims and a tending toward a loquaciousness in such aims remain an indebtedness to Margaret Fuller. Her tragedy was surely her own, resulting inevitably, as it did, from her passion and pride when these qualities clashed with Hollings worth’s stubborn adherence to a fallacious concept of refoirn, [3S4] Hollingsworth, in his essence, in his error of pouring the warm ide of his benevolence exclusively through one channel, had ived in Hawthorne’s thoughts as long ago as the writing of “The ientle Boy,” though he had also had an early incarnation in ^dam Colburn in “The Shaker Bridal,” Adam having lost his ympathy with human frailties and affections in his single-minded ievotion to the temporal and spiritual ties of sect, and thus rushing the heart of Martha Pierson, much as Hollingsworth [rove Zenobia to suicide. It was only natural. Brook Farm being oncemed with social reform, that this tragic weakness be attrib- ited to a reformer-protagonist in The Blithedale Romance. f, as is quite likely, some acquaintance of Hawthorne specifically uggested Hollingsworth, it was probably Theodore Parker, the loston minister, who, in Sophia’s judgment, and perhaps hrst in lawthorne’s, was one-sided, a monomaniac—whose effort to dam ip the mighty stream of truth so as to make it flow through his ►articular channel could result only in catastrophe and ruin. As or the impracticable plan with which Hollingsworth was ob- essed, the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their ligher instincts, that had doubtless had its beginnings years ago ►fhen Sophia, in the ecstasy of her youthful idealism, had had a ieep interest in prisons and prisoners, believing that even the yeatest criminals could be trusted if approached with proper ympathy, assured that real confidence and love could win even he hardest heart. That had been when Hawthorne himself had onfided to Mary Peabody his secret aim to reform society hrough the medium of an enlightened literature for children, loth he and Sophia had quite different views now. Nothing in The Blithedale Romance, indeed, indicated more poignantly than his abortive reform of Hollingsworth the extent of Hawthorne’s lisillusionment with some of the aspirations of his young man- lood. And who was Miles Coverdale, that frosty bachelor, that weary nan of the world who lacked a purpose, and who reluctantly aw the three white hairs in his brown mustache and the deepen- ng track of a crow’s-foot in each temple? The pleasant bachelor- •arlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, which Cover- lale had left when he came to Blithedale, tvas doubtless the one /hich Hawthorne had occupied while employed at the Boston [5^5] Custom House. Indeed, while reliving the Brook Farm episod in his memory as he wrote, Hawthorne, in leaving his bachelo apartment, transformed himself into Coverdale, effecting a dii guise as successful—and as transparent—as any ever assumed b Sherlock Holmes when he left his Baker Street apartment r London on another adventure. Hawthorne, of course, in real lif had no mustache at all at this time; nor was he a weary man c the world, a disappointed lover; nor did he lack a purpose—hi purpose being to write and to marry Sophia Peabody as speedil as possible, purpose enough to keep any young man from bein weary. But these details were only a part of the disguise, the mas' behind which he hid his identity—more or less. The mask itself, too, had been used before, though now i was altered—touched up here and there—to serve a new end and as not to seem familiar. Once, only recently, it had been use( when its owner had impersonated Holgrave, that cool and patien observer of other people’s affairs whose seemingly chilly indil ference at last yielded to the warmth of love. Long ago the mas] had served to represent that artist and polished citizen of th world who, possessing the power of seeing into the inmost sou of his subjects, had painted the Prophetic Pictures. Far in th past, moreover, it had been employed for Oberon, who likewise lacked a serious aim, and who, like the artist, like Holgrave, an( like Coverdale, in his inward life tended to step aside from th common path to observe and, in observing, to penetrate the live of others. If Coverdale appears somewhat unamiable, if his preseno in the story seemingly casts over the Romance an air of gent! cynicism, that is only an element of the disguise, an element o the atmospheric medium, and not inappropriate in a tale of dis illusionment. To represent himself as a disappointed lover suf fering from the ennui of life, yet enjoying the image of his suffer ing, like an introspective King Richard, was only a part of th( game and the fun of authorship; for, in Coverdale, Hawthorn( is quietly satirizing himself, as in Mr. Lindsey, the father of th( imaginative children of “The Snow-Image,” he had laughec at himself as a dealer in hardware who was sturdily accustomec to take the common-sense view of all matters, though in “Th Snow-Image” the self-satire was simple and obvious, whereas ii [ 5 ^ 5 ] ’'he Blithedale Romance it is subtle and shadowy. But, once aore, the truth comes home in the realization that only in an ccasional obscure sign does the path of Hawthorne’s imagina- ion reveal itself. Where his fancy was bred, how begot, how lourished, remains, on the whole, perhaps as inexplicable a sub- ect as when Shakespeare mused upon the mysteries of head and leart. Hawthorne himself preferred to have The Blithedale Ro- nance read as if it had nothing to do with Brook Farm, as, he )rotested, essentially it had not. When he spoke thus, however, le spoke to beguile his reader, for naturally he wished to em- )hasize an end-product of his Romance, the atmosphere of strange nchantment which he had aimed to throw over his story. Beneath he fancy of his sketch quite apparently lie his final reactions to he ideals of the transcendental brethren of whom he had been a aember. When, in the Romance, he writes of the purposes of his .not of dreamers, the aims as he states them are patently those o rapturously chanted by Elizabeth Peabody in the pages of the ~)ial in the early days of Brook Farm, though now, in Haw- horne’s words they are expressed with gentle amusement, and vith a quiet irony, the subtlety and pointedness of which only gradually creep into the reader’s mind. Before the story is at an :nd, what a delusion has been the institutional effort to abandon )ride and to supply its place with familiar love! However, though he Romance is not irrelevant to the ideals of Brook Farm, it loes go beyond them to express Hawthorne’s convictions on various matters pertinent to the day or abiding timelessly in the iffairs of man, thus adding to the interest of story and character- zation the substance and force of reflective thought. In bringing his story within his own period, Hawthorne was ipprehensively aware of the limitations he was placing upon him- elf. The subject matter of The Scarlet Letter had been far inough away in years not only to permit readily that willing uspension of disbelief necessary to romantic as well as to poetic aith; it had been remote enough, also, to provide Hawthorne Lnd his readers, too, with a perspective necessary to a calm and evel perception of timeless truths. When, however, in The Blithe- iale Romance, he wrote of his own day, he could but choose, in )mamenting and giving body to his fable, such elements of con- [357] temporary thought as then seemed of interest or import. If soni of these ideas, in the intervening century and more, have loi somewhat of their original luster, they may nevertheless serv to illustrate the agitations or enthusiasms of the nineteenth cer tury, as well as some of the problems of deep concern to Hav thome personally. One such matter, then still enveloped in novelty and unce: tainty—still, in the thought of the day, hovering unsteadily tx tween the scientific and the mystical or spiritual, was hypnotisn at the time more commonly known as animal magnetism or me merism. The veiled lady who was the subject of Zenobia’s wil legend, told with such dramatic effect that poor Priscilla at th climax quite fainted away, was not wholly a figment of Hav thome’s imagination, however well she served him in casting a aura of mystery over the past of Priscilla. The Veiled Lady ha had her counterpart in real life in that Mysterious Lady whos apparently superhuman powers had been astonishing or deligh ing the good people of Boston and Salem in 1843, and whose pei formances had provided excellent copy for the newspapers c the day. With such magnetic miracles Hawthorne personally wante nothing to do, for it seemed to him that these phenomena wer calculated to bewilder rather than to instruct, their worst featur seemingly a violation of the sacredness of the individual, an ir trusion into the holy of holies. Emerson, whose friends Margare Fuller and Caroline Sturgis had endeavored to entice him into th current rage, protested that he was a slow scholar at magnetisir and always read the newspaper whilst the subject was discussed He preferred to leave Margaret and Caroline alone in thei flights in the sky, wishing them, meanwhile, pleasant airs and ; safe alighting. It was a subject as repugnant to him as it was ti Hawthorne, though he was probably more skeptical of it thai his friend, apparently regarding it at best as a pseudo-science like the also currently exciting phrenology. The subject of mag netism came close to Hawthorne because Sophia, before thei marriage, in the agony of her numerous headaches, had beei drawn toward hypnotism as a possible cure, though the feminin curiosity of her friends had doubtless added to the fascinatior But woven deeper into the texture of The Blithedale Rc I3S8] lance than the theme of hypnotism, which Hawthorne associated ith his minor heroine, is the topic of women’s rights, associated dth Zenobia, the major heroine, whose implication in such lew Thought resulted, in its clash with her feminine instincts, in le destruction of that magnificent woman. Though this clash 'as followed by no physical catastrophe when Hawthorne saw its rototype in Margaret Fuller, to Margaret he doubtless owed le germinal idea of his tragedy. From Sophia’s conviction that largaret would no longer be puzzled about the rights of women : she were truly married, Hawthorne unmistakably derived Cov- rdale’s amusement and puzzlement in the fact that women, owever intellectually superior, seldom disquiet themselves about le rights or wrongs of their sex unless their own individual af- ^ctions chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. The character f eccentricity and defiance which had distinguished the more ublic portion of Zenobia’s life, Coverdale observed, ensued from er personal misfortune in love. But Coverdale’s sympathies—and Hawthorne’s—are distinctly n the side of Zenobia in her dilemma. It was the perception of [le tvrongs which Zenobia was suffering that largely softened tie originally somewhat cynical and prying Coverdale and rompted him to dedicate himself by sympathy to minister to enobia’s afflictions, so far as mortal could. Superficially paradox- :al as it may seem in a book skeptical of social reforms, it is [uite patentl y tr ue that in The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne las expressed a protest against the nineteenth-century status of mman. It was, in his judgment, not only nonsense, but a miser- ble wrong that the success or failure of woman’s existence should )e made to depend wholly upon the affections, and on one species ■f affection, while man had such a multitude of other chances, lawthorne’s indignation was the greater because he retained the everential attitude tow'ard woman which he had expressed as arly as Fanshawe. When he had Coverdale express the belief that rod has endowed woman with a religious sentiment free from lat gross, intellectual alloy with which masculine theologians re prone to mingle it, he was voicing his own genuine senti- lents, very much akin to those in Emerson’s essay “Woman.” n the days of his courtship, when Hawthorne had called on ophia, and when she had stood with the width of the room be- [389] tween them, she had looked so spiritual, so like a vision, that h human heart had wished to be assured that she was truly clothe in earthly vesture. After twenty years of marriage and the atti tions unescapable among the details of domestic life, he still d ferred to Sophia’s religious views and ethical convictions. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that Hawthorne protest against the status of woman in his day implied his desh for a law, much less for an amendment to the constitution wit all its physical compulsions. His protest, rather, was against tf masculine egotism which tended to make woman a gentle par site and thus to limit her sphere of thought and action. He w; asking, not for a law, but for an inner reform in the charact< of man. Moreover, his thought and the dramatization of it in tf fate of the unhappy Zenobia may be so clothed in such an atmo phere of nineteenth-century sentiment as to be not wholly aj preciable by a tough-minded age which has its acceptance of tf nineteenth amendment blended with a stolid recognition of i disillusionment in the purity of American politics and life whic was supposed to follow the adoption of that amendment. To hel recapture the nuances of feeling aroused by Zenobia’s predic ment in the heart of the Victorian reader, one can do no bette perhaps, than to recall Julia’s lament in Lord Byron’s Don Jum a passage oft quoted by women in its day, wept over, and copie in innumerable commonplace books: Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, ’Tis woman’s whole existence; man may range The court, camp, church, the vessel, and the mart; Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart. And few there are whom these cannot estrange; Men have all these resources, we but one. To love again, and be again undone. This is only to say that other times have had other which have stirred the old, unchanging human emotions. Tb social barriers may not now exist which kept Mr. Darcy so Ion aloof from Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice; but ba riers of one kind or another continued to obtrude, and it woul be but an unimaginative reader who would be unable to identii [390] imself with the problem of Jane Austen’s heroine—or with enobia’s. Besides, the world of woman is not yet the world of lan; the complaints of Euripides’ Medea still have a familiar didity. But the status of woman and the lesser subject of hypnotism :e only auxiliary to the dominant theme in The Blithedale .omance. The topic which most engrossed Hawthorne as he rote—which provided the incentive for writing the book, was le topic of reform, the, topic _which was everywhere in the air, id with which he himself, in his own transcendental phase at rook Farm, had had such an experience as was to influence his linking forlEFrest of his life. Brook Farm was not only, as he imself said, the most romantic episode in his career; it was a lost disturbing experience, resulting in that basic re-evaluation E his ideals out of which he shaped both the catastrophe and le resolution of the problem of his Romance. His whole treatment of Brook Farm in The Blithedale Ro- lance, Hawthorne begged to be understood in his “Author’s reface,” was only incidental to the main purpose of his story; e did not wish to illustrate a theory, favorable or othenvise, in aspect to the socialism of the community. Perhaps so. Still, his not of dreamers, much like the Brook Farmers, ivished to show lankin d the e xample of a life governed by other than the false ad cruel principles on which human society had all along been ased. More specifically, like the Brook Farmers also, they pro- osed to offer up the earnest toil of their bodies as a prayer, no ;ss than as an effort for the advancement of our race. \Vhen loverdale at Blithedale, like Hawthorne himself at Brook Farm, iscovered that intellectual activity is incompatible with any large mount of bodily exercise, that the yeoman and the scholar can ever be welded into one substance, the criticism may not be of Kialism, though fact and fiction become at least momentarily idistinguishable. Somewhere within the compass of the story, owever, Wahrheit und Dichtung may part company, so that rook Farm and its specific aims may have been left far behind hen, near the end of the Romance, Zenobia bitterly remarks lat of all varieties of mock-life, she and her companions had irely blundered into-the very emptiest mockery in their effort ) establish the one true system. Hollingsworth's philanthropic [391] scheme, the reform and mental culture of criminals, was of cours no part of the plan of Brook Farm. It is, therefore, only in a broad sense that The Blithedale R( mance embodies Hawthorne’s reactions to the reform movemen of his day, and, more basically, to that philosophy of refori which eighteenth-century Deism and the contemporary doctrir of progress had introduced into the world. Like The Scarh Let ter, The Blithedale Roma nce is a kind of allegory, an artisti dramatization of a great disillusionment and of the lyop e th ; re mains a mong the ruins. The death of the magnificent Zenobi is not only a tragic incident in a piece of fiction; it is a symbc of the end of an evanescent dream. That the world itself do( not disintegrate with the disintegration of Blithedale is a symbo too: namely, of a new wisdom engendered out of an old trutl In a figurative way, in short, Hawthorne has told in The Blith dale Romance, as in The Scarlet Letter, and as in The House c the Seven Gables, a part of the story of his interior life. And what is the essence of Hawthorne’s reflections on philai thropy or reform? For the professional reformer he had a live! skepticism. In real life, he regarded Theodore Parker as a kin of monomaniac. Within the imaginative realm of The Blithedal Romance, Hollingsworth, who could not conceive that one migf wish well to the world, and struggle for its good, on some othe plan than precisely that which he had laid down, became a mot ster when he had compelled his benevolence to pour its wan tide exclusively through one channel. How complete was th ruin of his character he demonstrated when he sacrificed hi love for Zenobia and Zenobia herself to that delusive scheme c reform which his madness had made seem so grand. In that sacr fice, in the name of benevolence, he had lost an inestimabl precious possession—his humanity, the rich juices of his heari In his futile effort to save society, he had ruined a great God-givei possession, as had the Quaker mother when she deserted her chib in “The Gentle Boy.’’ The skepticism and the irony of The Blithedale Romance however, go much deeper than in the representation of th withering of Hollingsworth’s heart as he follows his single-trac course. The Utopians of Blithedale had confidently set out t establish a new system of society which by its structure woul [392] •eate a blessed state of brotherhood and sisterhood. They had oped to divorce themselves from pride and supply its place with imiliar love—love, that is, of mankind. What they did not reckon ith sufficiently was their own natures—the egotism of Hollings- orth and the passion of Zenobia. In the end, the dead Zenobia aunting his memory and his conscience, Hollingsworth perforce anfesses that his grand edifice for the collective reformation of riminals has never been begun, for the simple reason that the formation of himself has proved to be an all-engaging if not an verwhelming task. Zenobia, of course, with a clearer vision than lollingsworth, had the earlier comprehended the entanglement E her emotions, had become sick to death of playing at philan- iropy and progress, and by her suicide had demonstrated her lability to harmonize love and social theory when the two were t odds. As regards human progress, says Coverdale near the end of le story, let him believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose. lUt a moment later he confesses that he has exaggerated, as in- eed he has, Hawthorne’s true attitude toward reform being a ualified one. What Hawthorne’s basic position was when he Tote The Blithedale Romance, he had already said in the fic- on of The House of the Seven Gables, remarks presently to be apported in the straightforward factual prose of The Life of ranklin Pierce. God, he believed, is the sole worker of realities. Ian must content himself with very modest hopes that human ontrivances can remedy evil, though, at the same time, he must e aware that his wrong actions can retard progress. The better snturies which are surely to come are, finally, in the hands of ivine Providence. The Blithedale Romance is only a part of that body of reflec- on which Hawthorne experienced in his disillusionment with le ideals which had taken him to Brook Farm. The Romance mply expresses his major conviction that it is a piece of folly- ay, a mockery—to suppose that Utopia will follow from any heme or system of society so long as the individuals in it re- ain the victims of their own uncontrolled passions. Thoreau, few years before, in his essay “Paradise (to be) Regained,’’ had ^pressed an analogous idea when he had ridiculed the assump- on that, by a control of nature through invention and science. man might regain Paradise and live a life of continual happines Such an assumption Thoreau thought quite fallacious, for it i nored the moral reform which must precede the regain of Par dise, a reform dependent upon the power of rectitude and tn behavior. Between them, Thoreau and Hawthorne had obvious pointed the two great delusions of modem times, their observ tions even more valid today than when they wrote. In its initial impact, because of the seeming cynicism ( Coverdale in a large part of the story (before his heart had bee touched by Zenobia’s plight) and because of its atmosphere i disenchantment. The Blithedale Romance may have a somewh: withering effect, an effect whic h hin dered the popularity of tl book in a day white-hot in its fever of reform, and yet a deterrei to favor in a still youthful America which assumes that all thini are possible to man. But a closer observation and a deeper thougl should mitigate the severity of these first impressions. When all said and done, it remains that the story is told by a disappointe lover who bewails his bachelorhood quite as much as he do his vanished hopes in a Utopia, his lament of lost love offerf whimsically, with a sentiment reminiscent of the firelight Reveri of a Bachelor blended with a gentle laughter at such sentimenta ity. What an amusing touch is given when Miles Coverdale offe to join a brave rush upon the leveled bayonets—provided he migl choose a mild, sunny morning, after breakfast, for the conflic But it is not only such dimini shing notes upon which tl story concludes. Scattered here and there throughout the R mance, and gat hering in a crescei^ in the last chapter but on are the old affirmations which had supported the author in earli( times, and to which he returns now that his ephemeral hopt expressed in his joining the venture of Brook Farm, have bet blighted through experience with reality. It is in the restoratic of these old affirmations that the momentarily disillusioned Ha' thorne found a new wisdom and a new strength. What if tl hope of a quick earthly reform were lost? There yet abided tl old assurances. Though all the physical beauty that was Zenob perished, the human spirit yet remained inestimable. The flittii moment when Zenobia sank into the dark pool, her breath goi and her soul at her lips, was as long as the lifetime of the wor in its capacity of God’s infinite forgiveness. In spite of all tl /il that Hollingsworth had done, in spite of the wild energy and le passionate shriek with which Zenobia had condemned her Ting lover, Coverdale could yet find it in his heart to forgive [ollingsworth when that chastened reformer became truly peni- ;nt. Coverdale, too, was the more readily forgiving because his wn heart had been softened through his sympathy for Zenobia. Forgiveness—human and divine—and the hope of immortality ler a soothing solace for the loss of an earthly paradise. Besides, man cannot effect a speedy and a grand reform, he may still ;nder life sweet, bland and gently beneficent—may still influence .her hearts and other lives to the same blessed ends. The best artion of a good man’s life may yet be found in his little, name- ss, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. To have heard slls knoll to church, to have sat at a good man’s feast, to have iped a tear from one’s eyelids, to have known what it is to pity or » be pitied, is not only to encourage gentleness, as Shakespeare has irlando say; it is to have found that precious herb, heart’s-ease. fter all, why should the spectator who had witnessed earth’s olocaust despair over the disintegration of Blithedale? Now, as len, he could find sustenance in his old assurance: Be of good jurage, nor yet exult too much. It was a position of impregnable ifety and calm, quite above the clamor and the false promises E the world. [3P5] first American ancestor, Hawthorne reflected had left England in 1630. Now he, an American Hawthorne returned in 1853. He felt, sometimes, as if he himself had beei absent those two hundred and twenty three years, leaving En^ land emerging from the feudal system, and finding it, on his re turn, on the verge of republicanism. To view the matter thu seemed to him to bring these two far-separated points of tim very closely together. He recalled that this first American ancestoi William Hathome, had willed some land to Gervase Elwes, soi of Sir Gervase Elwes, Baronet, of Stoke, Suffolk, provided tha the former, who had Hathome blood in him, would come ove and enjoy it. A knowledge of this Gervase Elwes, Hawthorn himself had long possessed, for he had made Gervase a characte in “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle,” wherein had fancifully been wovei a tale of a smallpox plague brought to America by Hawthorne’ own ancestors. His return to England therefore filled and stirre( Hawthorne’s imagination. He tried, though unsuccessfully, t trace his lineage in the old homeland, rejoiced when he learne( that there was a Hathome Hall in Cheshire, and lived with th pensive expectancy, never to be realized, of finding the famil name on a mossy tombstone in some ancient graveyard. Nebr lously and gradually, but with growing intensity, his fancie shaped themselves in the fragments of a story which he though of as his English romance. In it, instead of an Englishman coinin to America to take possession of an inheritance, as in the case c Gervase Elwes, an American would return to his forefather ome in England with the possibility of acquiring an ancestral state. These were fancies which led Hawthorne on and on, sus- iining his imaginative life until such time as circumstances and dsure might permit their embodiment in written words. That iiey were to prove a will-o’-the-wisp which was to entice him for ears and to lead him, at last, into a quagmire of sunken hopes, e was yet sadly to learn. Just now he was busily engaged in becoming acquainted hth his new surroundings, the novelty of which was sufficiently ngrossing to fill all the days. He was constantly alert to impres- 'ons of the people about him in his effort to form his judgment f England and Englishmen collectively. The English country- ide, where Nature always seemed subdued and tamed by Man, /y-grown and crumbling castles, cathedrals of astonishing beauty, tie cities of Liverpool, Edinburgh, and London, with their di- ersity of sights and sounds—all these things he observed with vely interest and with an awareness of an atmosphere of an- iquity which alternately charmed him and left him longing for tie newness of his own forward-looking native land. It was a ind of luxury to visit scenes associated with authors whose Titings he had known since boyhood and who had fed his own lind and heart. Society found him out. He was lionized by people f wealth and rank, an experience at once agreeable and dis- uieting. He made numerous literary acquaintances, and a few itimate friends. Old friends from America came to see him in is new surroundings, which enabled him to see these old friends, i well as himself, in new perspective. He was of course much xupied with his consular duties, which grew constantly more ksome, and were tolerable only because they promised a coveted ;onomic independence. Happily, though the family lived a kind ; vagabond existence, moving about from place to place so fre- iently as they did, there remained for Hawthorne that unit of mily life which he himself most highly prized. All these mat- rs he recorded in a journal copious as it never before had been, he four years in England went by pleasantly enough, widening s intellectual horizons and enriching his humanity. If, during ese years, the artist did not profit quite as he hoped, the man as nevertheless the fuller and wiser thereby, at once—para- [iP7] doxically—more at ease in the material world and recognizinj more clearly than before the limitations of that world as thi home of Man. In his outward circumstances, and in the people into whos presence those circumstances casually threw him, Hawthorn found much to disappoint and actually to repel him. Liverpoo] as he first saw it, was smoky, dirty, pestilential. Never was ther anything so nasty as Liverpool, where thousands of footstep stirred up the wetness and earth into such a mud-slush as coul( not be conceived of in America. Nor, as he extended his obsei vations, did he find other English cities any better. In Edinburg! he encountered a general filth and evil odors of gutters an( people, things suggesting sorrowful ideas of what the inner house must be like when the outside looked and smelled so badly. Ii a system of living so unfavorable to cleanliness, how people’s rut bish was got rid of must be known only to themselves. Thi ugly smell was such as he had never perceived before crossin] the Atlantic, the odor of an old system of life. In all old building there was always the inevitable musty smell of antiquity, and, ii the ancient churches, the odor of dead men’s decay, garnered u] and shut in from generation to generation. On a holiday, as he mingled with the crowd, the greates peculiarity of those about him seemed to be that nobody hac any best clothes, and therefore had put on no holiday attire—; grimy people, heavy, obtuse, with thick beer in their blood Coarse, rough-complexioned women and girls were interminglec —the girls with no trimness in their clothing, large and blowsy Nobody seemed to have been washed that day. The girls an( women whom he saw on the streets were often abhorrent. Whei he encountered a group of schoolgirls of the lower classes, he ob served that they all had a plebeian look—stubbed, sturdy figures round, coarse faces, snub noses—the most evident specimens o the brown bread of human nature. As for the women, they seeme( to Hawthorne capable of being atrociously ugly. After middl age, they might be thought of as composed of sirloins, or a ;venty-four-gun ships in time of peace. He pitied the respectable derly gentlemen whom he saw walking about with such atroc- ies hanging on their arms—women so puffed out, so huge, so ithout limit. Surely such ugliness need not be. It was the pen- !ty of a life of gross feeding—of much ale-guzzling and beef-eat- ig. Indeed, it was in second-class refreshment rooms that John ull and his wife might be seen most characteristically—when ley were in full gulp and guzzle, swallowing vast quantities of )ld boiled beef, thoroughly moistened with porter or bitter ale. here one might find an explanation of the seeming all-prevailing jarseness and grossness. But of course this heaviness was not so prevalent as it at first :emed. There were, for instance, the very poor, some so haggard, ) apparently without hope or faith as to have lost from their ices all signs of normal humanity. On a chill and misty De- ?mber day, Hawthorne was shocked to see little girls and women ill barelegged and barefooted on the wet sidewalks. The streets, loreover, swarmed with beggars by day and by night—the like E which he had not seen in America, and presenting such scenes i made his heart warm toward his own happier country, though ; the same time he was moved to sympathy for beggars and the oor. At Manchester, on an Easter Sunday, he witnessed the mass edding of six couples who had chosen this day for their mar- age because on Easter they had to pay no marriage fee. They ere all of the lower orders, most of them poverty-stricken— le men in their ordinary loafer’s or laborer’s attire, the women ith their poor, shabby shawls drawn closely about them; faded ntimely, wrinkled with penury and care; nothing fresh, virgin- ke, or hopeful about them; joining themselves to their mates ith the idea of making their own misery less intolerable by add- ig another’s to it. To Hawthorne it seemed the saddest thing e had seen since leaving home. At his own residence in Rock erry, he was visited by dozens of people out of work and with o resource other than charity. Their deportment was quiet and Itogether unexceptionable—no rudeness, no gruffness, nothing E menace. They really seemed to take their distress as their own lisfortune and God’s will, and to impute it to nobody as a fault, uch meekness Hawthorne found very touching, though it made im question the more whether they had all their rights. [S99] The condition of the very poor, and even of the tradesmei convinced Hawthorne that England was on the brink of a revoh tion. Surely there were forces abroad that were trampling ovf the aristocratic institutions of England, institutions which wet crumbling in the process. With the outbreak of the Crimea War, Hawthorne thought he saw a vast impulse towards demo( racy. Thereafter, he was confident, the nobility would never a sume or be permitted to rule the nation in peace, or command ] in war. Moreover, he was sure that in England was lacking public spirit which America did not lack, and for want of whic England would have to resign her foremost position among th nations, even if there were not enough other circumstances t compel her to do so. When, in the course of the war, British officers sought t recruit soldiers within the borders of the United States, am when England falsely charged the United States with building ii New York harbor a warship for Russia, and when war betweei England and his native land seemed imminent, Hawthorne bt came more and more impatient with England. If war shouL come, he was certain that the fate of England was in our hands It was time that audacious England be crushed—blind, ridiculou old lump of beef, sodden in strong beer, that she was. Soone or later the time would come, furthermore, when Old John Bui would look to the United States for salvation. There were time when Hawthorne thoroughly hated England, though he lovec some Englishmen, and, in fact, liked them generally as indi viduals. He almost always felt, however, a cold, thin medium be tween them and himself in their most intimate approaches. It wa: plain to him, too, from the first days of his arrival in England that a great many Englishmen disliked Americans, whatever the^ might protest to the contrary. If a typical Englishman were indi vidually acquainted with all our 25,000,000 Americans and likec every one of them, and believed that each was a Christian, honest upright, and kind, he would nevertheless doubt, despise, and hate them in the aggregate. Yet such impatience did not reflect Hawthorne’s whole view On a fine summer morning, he doubted whether any part of the world could look so beautiful as England—the bright universa’ verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages (noi ittages of gentility, but dwellings of the laboring poor); such ce villas along the roadsides, so tastefully contrived for comfort id beauty. Certainly, England could present a more attractive ce than America could, even in its humbler modes of life, to y nothing of the beautiful lives which might be led, one would ink, by the higher classes, whose gateways, with broad, smooth aveled drives leading through them one saw every mile or two ong the road, winding into some proud seclusion. All this was Lssing away, and society must assume new relations; but there IS no harm in believing that there had been something very >od in English life—good for all classes while the world was in a ite out of which these forms naturally grew. Of course Hawthorne’s view of England shifted from time time. Though he saw that changes were on the way—must come r England’s good—yet there were occasions when he preferred igland just as she most characteristically was. When he met lexander Ireland, Emerson’s friend who had directed Emerson )w to find Carlyle, and when Ireland talked of reform, speaking :ry earnestly of the Maine liquor law in America—while he was mfortably quaffing sherry, champagne, hock, port, and claret—it ruck Hawthorne that he himself preferred English conserva- /es to such liberals as Ireland represented. The liberals, with 1 their zeal for novelty, seemed to originate nothing. Especially one happened to have been a Brook Farmer, one felt a little dis- isted with their poor little views of progress. Perhaps the best ing a man bom in England could do would be to eat his beef id mutton, and drink his port and porter, and take things they were, and think thoughts that were beefish, muttonish, )rtish, and porterish, and so frankly exemplify the material ther than the intellectual. In this manner, at any rate, he would his own way be natural, good, and wholesome—a being fit for e present time and circumstances, and entitled to let the future one. In another mood, yet exemplifying his liking for England ist as it was, Hawthorne wrote to his friend Longfellow that I England everything was delightfully sluggish. America might ^ a land good for young people, but not for those past their rime. It was pleasant in England to find people hanging on to [401] old ideas, and hardly beginning to dream of matters already ol with Americans. Personally, he had had enough of progress. H preferred to stand stock-still, or, rather, to go back twenty yea] or so, which was what he had seemed to do in coming to Englanc A man of individuality and refinement could certainly live k more comfortably in England than at home—provided that h had the means to live at all. At last, when the four years of h consulship drew to a close, Hawthorne supposed that, if he wei rich enough, he should never leave England for a permaner residence elsewhere. Later, after a year on the Continent, h knew that there were no countries so near to his heart as Englan and his native land. In these years, he had, of course, leame to know more of England than was encompassed by its arroganc( its crumbling aristocracy, its gross inhabitants, its poverty, and it filth. When he was preparing to leave England, Hawthorne rt corded in his journal that he had spent four years in a gray gloom How misty was England! In his first winter he had regardec the climate as abominable. And yet, it came to suit him prett well, until it seemed to him that the English winter was not after all, so terrible as ours. A peculiarity of England, Hawthorne noted, was that then Nature was never far removed from Man. There the art of mar was seen conspiring with Nature, as if they had consulted to gether how to make a peaceful scene, and had taken ages of quie thought and tender care to accomplish it. On the rudest surface oi English earth, there were to be seen the effects of centuries ol civilization, so that naked Nature was never perceived. In Eng land the major function of Nature was apparently to adorn the home of man, and nowhere was this adornment more character istic than in the gardens of the bishops’ residences adjacent tc England’s cathedrals. There one passed through a churchyarc where the dead men that slept there hallowed and sweetened tht Paradise of the lawn that lay beyond the gateway—a lawn pre senting a vista which really seemed hardly to belong to this world so bright and soft was the sunshine, so fresh the gTass, so lovely the [402] ees, so trained and refined and mellowed down was the whole ature of the spot, and so shut in and guarded from all intrusion, [awthorne confessed that he had never beheld anything so cozy, > indicative of domestic comfort for whole centuries together ( such delectable old houses—houses fit to live in and die in, and here it would be pleasant to lead a young wife beneath the itique portal, and dwell with her until husband and wife were merable. But when Man thus subdued and polished Nature, something, [awthorne thought, had been lost. Much as he delighted in the mtrast of the finish of English scenery to the roughness and rug- sdness of his native scenes, he thought that he would be glad ) return to the latter after a while. It was pleasant enough, for time, to look upon a Nature converted into a portion of the iomment of a great garden. But then every point of beauty in ngland was so well-known, and described so much, that one lust perforce look through other people’s eyes, and feel as if he ere seeing a picture rather than a reality. Young men, he should link, might sometimes yearn for a fresher draught. He wondered 'hy people of taste should prettify Nature as much as they did— laking a scene picturesque whether or no. He could not rid him- df of the thought that there was something false—a kind of hum- ug—in all this. He missed the wildness of Nature which he had nown in his boyhood days at Raymond, and the virtues of which ; had been the genius of Thoreau to sing. Much, therefore, as Hawthorne enjoyed domesticated Nature s he saw it in England—so humanized, so suggestive of peace and ?pose—something deeply necessary was wanting in it. Moreover, lose delectable old houses, to the comfort of which Nature had een so refined and mellowed down, were not without a mortal aw. Hawthorne doubted that anybody was entitled to a home in lis world in so full a sense as these old homes offered, so shut in nd guarded from intrusion, so made for convenience and phys- ;al comfort. They assumed too confidently that earth is the roper abiding place for man, whereas Hawthorne, like Socrates 1 the Phaedrus, felt a growing impatience as regards this earthly fe, where man may only be imprisoned in his body, like an yster in his shell. [403] In his second year in England, after an ample familiari with his official duties permitted the leisure to explore beyoi Liverpool and its environs, Hawthorne made his first acquair ance with an aspect of the Old World the absence of which 1 had lamented when he had written his Romances. In Ameri there was no legendary mist brought along by tradition out of time long gone by. It had, of course, for years been his theo that romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wallflowers all ne( ruin to make them grow. Now he could enjoy to the full th which he had known only in his imagination—the ruins of i ancient past as exemplified in crumbling old castles and palac and abbeys. It was Conway Castle which Hawthorne thought must be tl most perfect specimen of a ruinous old castle in the whole worl The entire circuit of the wall was still standing in a delightfi state of decay, at the base of which were hovels, with dir children playing about them, and pigs rambling along, ar squalid women visible in the doorway, though all these thini melted into the picturesqueness of the scene and did not hari it. He found it altogether impossible to describe Conway Castl Nothing, he thought, could have been so perfect in its own styl and for its own purposes, when it was first built; and now notl ing else could be so perfect as a picture of ivy-grown, peaceh ruin. The banqueting-hall, all open to the sky, and with thic curtains of ivy tapestrying the walls, and grass and weeds grot ing on the arches that overpassed it, was indescribably beautifu There was, in fact, no such thing as a roof in any part; tower hall, and kitchen were all open to the sky. From a grassy pk beneath one of the towers, it seemed to Hawthorne that nothin in the world could be so beautiful and picturesque as Conwa Castle, and that never could there be so fit a time to see it as on sunny, quiet, lovely afternoon. But no castle, in Hawthorne’s view, could make so interestin and impressive a ruin as an old abbey, because the latter had bee built for beauty, and on a plan in which deep thought and feelin were involved; and having once been a grand and beautiful worl it continued grand and beautiful through all the successive stag< its decay. In these abbeys the age which built them had left ignificent specimens of the only kind of poetry which it knew w to produce, a poetry for which the world was the better day. Their best points as ruins were neglect, wildness, crum- ing walls, the climbing and conquering ivy; masses of stone ng where they fell; and trees of old date, growing where the liars of the aisles used to stand. They were at their very best ily when decay was triumphant over their former beauties. In the extensive ruins of Furness Abbey, Hawthorne saw the Dst pleasing representative of all such ruins, especially in what IS formerly the church, where the floor was all overgrown with ass, and strewn with fragments and capitals of pillars. The liars along the nave had been alternately a round, a solid, and clustered one. Now the remains of some of them were even th the ground. Once the arches of the nave had been noble id immense, four of them together having supported a tower lich had long since disappeared—arches loftier than he had ever nceived to have been made by man. He doubted that any ches, however stately, could show to such advantage as these in is old ruin—most of them broken, and only one of them, as ; remembered, still completing its sweep. It seemed to Haw- ome that in this state they suggested a greater majesty and ;auty than any finished human work could show; the crumbling aces of the half-obliterated design producing somewhat of the feet of the first idea of anything admirable, when it first dawns x»n the mind of an artist or a poet—an idea which, do what he ay, he is sure to fall short of in his attempt to embody it. When Hawthorne had visited Furness Abbey in July, 1855, e day had been most beautiful, warm, and sunny, the ruins erefore having had all the pictorial advantage of bright light id deep shadows. Birds flew in and out among the recesses, and lirped and warbled, and made themselves at home there. The y, to be sure, had been more majestic than the tallest of the inous arches, arches through which a giant might have stepped, id not needed to bow his head, unless in reverence to the sanc- .y of the place; and yet these arches made the stronger impres- m of sublimity, because they translated the sweep of the sky to man’s finite comprehension. A moonlight solitary visit might d charm to such a scene; but it seemed to Hawthorne that one [405] great charm and beauty of antiquity for him was that he view( it out of the midst of quite another mode of life, and the mo; perfectly he could do this, the better. He had never done it betti than at Furness Abbey, which to him was in itself a very sombi scene, standing, as it did, in the midst of a melancholy valle Pleasant as Hawthorne found such experiences, and long ; they were to linger as associated with his theory of Romance, the: came a day late in his sojourn in England when this wear ar tear upon old buildings, these effects of storm and fitful weath( and the vicissitudes of time, temporarily almost ceased to char his mind. It was the churches of England which disappointf him least—which most nearly filled out his ideal in the old worl In some of these cathedrals his heart ached, as he gazed abou for lack of power and breadth enough to take in all the beaui and grandeur. He strove in vain to feel adequately, to make hir self sensible of how rich and venerable was what he saw. He coul only trust that such a realization must come in its own time, lil the other happinesses of life. It seemed quite useless, too, to ti to describe these cathedrals, mere words being wholly inadequai in suggesting the glory and gloom of these grand and venerab' edifices. He despised himself when he sat down to describe then All that it seemed worth while to reproduce with his pen wei the impressions, the states of mind, produced by these noble spe tacles. Hawthorne found the test of his taste in architecture whe he compared St. Paul’s with Westminster Abbey. Until he sa St. Paul’s, he did not think that anything but Gothic architectui could interest him. St. Paul’s was certainly very beautiful, vei rich. The statues, niches, the embroidery of sculpture trace around it, produced, it seemed to him, a delightful effect. In i interior, what a total and admirable contrast to that of a Gothi church—the latter so dim and mysterious, with its various aisle its dark walls and pavement, and its painted glass windows, b' dimming even what daylight might otherwise get into its etern; evening. But St. Paul’s was full of light, a light that was quii [406] oper to it. There were no painted windows, no dim recesses, t a wide and airy space beneath the dome—no obscurity, but e lofty and beautifully rounded arch succeeding to another, far as the eye could reach. St. Paul’s was a grand and stately edifice, forever fresh and w. But beautiful and grand as it was, when Hawthorne corn- red it with Westminster, he felt in the former a sense of cold- ss and nakedness. It was more external, and not so made out of 2 dim, awful, mysterious, grotesque, intricate nature of man. iwthome felt that there was a cold propriety about St. Paul’s lich would weary him in due time. Hence, in Westminster, as walked round the aisles, and paced the nave, visiting the some- lat dim Poet’s Comer, a spot which he seemed always to have own, where a window shed down its light on marble busts and Diets, yellow with time, he came to the conclusion that West- inster Abbey, both in itself and for the variety and interest of its Dnuments, was a thousand times preferable to St. Paul’s. For n, there was as much difference between a snowbank and a imney corner in their relation to the human heart. Such sentiments, however, only expressed the extremes of awthome’s views; they did not reveal the extent of the pleasure found in St. Paul’s. In intermediary moods, St. Paul’s appeared him unspeakably grand and noble, and the more so from the rong and bustle continually going on around its base, without the least disturbing the sublime repose of its great dome or its massive height and breadth. In its way, there could not be ything so good in the world as just this effect of St. Paul’s in e very heart and densest tumult of the city. It was delightful escape from the sunny, sultry turmoil of Fleet Street and Lud- te to find one’s self at once in this remote, solemn seclusion, rrble-cool, in the midst of the feverish city. From the base of e pillars, the upper depths of the dome seemed almost hung th clouds, so that the dome hovered overhead like a cloudy /. The muffled roar of the city, as Hawthorne heard it there, s very soothing, and kept him listening to it, somewhat as the w of a river might keep him looking at its waters. It was a ind and quiet sound; and ever and anon, a distant door mmed somewhere in the cathedral, and reverberated long and avily, like a roar of thunder or the boom of cannon. But every noise loud enough to be heard in this vast edifice melted, at las into the great quietude. If his mind could manage to stagger under the experience i one day, Hawthorne wished that it might be possible for him pass directly from St. Paul’s into York Minster. How very d; ferent they were in effect! York Cathedral seemed like a hou not made with hands, but rather to have come down from abov bringing an awful majesty and sweetness with it. It seemed light and aspiring, with all its vast columns and pointed arch( that he would hardly wonder if it should ascend back to heav( again by its mere spirituality. The pillars and arches of the cho were so very beautiful as to give the impression of being e quisitely polished, though such was not the fact; but their beau threw a gleam around them. When he visited such cathedrals as those at York or Lie field, Hawthorne felt that the Gothic cathedral was surely tl most wonderful work which mortal man had yet achieved- vast, so intricate, and so profoundly simple, with such strange d lightful recesses in its grand figure, so difficult to compreher within one idea, and yet so consonant that it ultimately drew tl beholder and his universe into its harmony. And yet Hawthon felt that he could appropriate only a minute portion of the floe of beauty pouring down upon him. It was something gained, hoi ever, to have that painful sense of his own limitation, and th half-smothered yearning to soar beyond them. Such cathedra showed him how earthly he was, but yet whispered deeply > immortality. It added a rich charm to such sacred edifices, Hawthorne t fleeted, this time-honored custom of burial in churches, whe after a few years, the mortal remains had turned to dust beneai the pavement. It was singular, too, how the memorial of the late buried person seemed precisely as much at home here as his m dieval ancestors. Henceforth he belonged to the cathedral lil one of its original pillars. In this impression of his fancy the seemed for Hawthorne to be the shadow of a spiritual fact. Tl dying melt into the great multitude of the Departed as quiet as a drop of water into the ocean, and, perhaps, are conscio of no unfamiliarity with their new circumstances, but imm [408] itely become aware of an insufferable strangeness in the world lich they have quitted. Death has not taken them away, but s brought them home. [/H In the sights and sounds of the cities, Hawthorne often seemed come closest to the heart of the actual, modem England. In verpool, in his first winter there, a snowfall reminded him of ; New England home. On the river the vessels at anchor showed j snow along their yards and on every ledge where it could . A blue sky and sunshine were overhead, and apparently a :ar atmosphere close at hand; but in the distance a mistiness came perceptible, obscuring the banks of the river, and making : vessels look dim and uncertain. It was not, however, in such sight that Liverpool was to be seen in its most characteristic /elations. It was when he was walking along the darker and igier streets, inhabited by the poorer classes, that Hawthorne iS assured that he was truly seeing Liverpool. The scenes he en- untered there were picturesque in their way: at every two or ree steps a ginshop; everywhere people filthy in clothes and rson, ragged, pale, often afflicted with disease; women nursing bies at dirty bosoms; men haggard, drunken, careworn, hope- s but with a kind of patience, as if all this were the rule of sir life; groups standing or sitting together, around the door- ps, or in the descent of a cellar; often a quarrel going on in e group for which the next group cared little or nothing. Haw- )rne never walked through such streets without feeling as re should catch some illness; but yet he had a strong interest in :h walks, for then, in all this bustle, he had a sense of having : hold of something real, which he did not find in the better sets of the city. It was not unlike the experience he had had as a Dok Earmer, when he had observed the peculiarities of earthy ikeedom at Brighton Fair. In Edinburgh, too, Hawthorne found the usual squalid mobs English cities, streets swarming with dirty life, as some mouldy i half-decayed substance might swarm with insects—vistas down ;ys where sin, sorrow, poverty, drunkenness, and all manner of [409] somber and sordid earthly circumstances had imbued the stone brick, and wood of the habitations for hundreds of years. An such a multitude of children! But when he walked, at evening, it to the valley which separated the old Edinburgh from the nev the setting sun gilded the old town with its parting rays, makin it, it seemed to him, absolutely the most picturesque of all scene The mass of tall, ancient houses heaped densely together looke like a Gothic dream; for there seemed to be towers and all sor of stately architecture, and spires ascending out of the mass; an above the whole was Edinburgh Castle, with a diadem of gol on its topmost turret. When the last gleam faded from the wii dows of the old town, it left the crowd of buildings dim and ii distinguishable—of course to reappear on the morrow in squalo lifting their meanness skyward, the home of layer upon lay( of unfortunate humanity. And how many scenes and sorts of life were not compr hended within London! There more than in any other Englis city could Hawthorne satisfy his passion for thronged streets, ar the utmost bustle of human life. Exploring its vastness was lil swimming in a boundless ocean. In his last months in Englan the consulship behind him, he walked the streets of London great deal, always taking a certain pleasure, in those dull wint days, in being in the midst of human life—as closely encompass( by it as it was possible to be anywhere in this world. It was humj life; it was the material world; it was a grim and heavy realit He had never elsewhere had the same sense of being surround* by materialisms and hemmed in with the grossness of this earth existence. It was really an ungladdened life to wander throng these huge, thronged ways, over a pavement foul with mu ground into it by millions of footsteps; jostling against peop who did not seem to be individuals, but all one mass, so hom geneous was the streetwalking aspect of them; the pervading ro of vehicles—wearisome cabs and omnibuses; everywhere the din; brick edifices heaving themselves up, and shutting out all but strip of sullen cloud that served London for a sky in short, a ge eral impression of grime and sordidness; and, in the winter s( son, always a fog scattered along the vista of streets, sometin so dense as almost to spiritualize the materialism, and make t [410] ene resemble the other world of worldly people, gross even in lostliness. Yet, even in the jaws of the monster city, there was the ancient aietude of Gray’s Inn. Nothing else in London, it seemed to awthorne, was so strange, so like the effect of a spell, as to pass ider an archway and find one’s self transported from the jumble, oh, tumult, uproar, as of an age of weekdays condensed into le present hour, into what seemed an eternal Sabbath. He had lown a similar but milder experience when, in the lonely lys of his young manhood, he had stolen from the sultry sun- line of his little Salem world and, in a walk along the seashore, id plunged into the cool bath of solitude. What had interested Hawthorne most in London, however, ere the relics of the city which reminded him of the writers of ueen Anne’s age—whatever Pope, the Spectator, Defoe, and hers down as late as Johnson and Goldsmith, had mentioned, had been a defect of St. Paul’s that he had found there no lemorial of any literary celebrity except Dr. Johnson. Much, •o, as he wandered among old English graveyards, he loved sst to find the graves of men connected with literature—perhaps scause he was one of the literary kindred, though more probably scause he felt himself akin, and on terms of intimacy, with those horn he had known in books. At any rate, he found one of his reatest pleasures, during his English sojourn, in visiting sites as- •ciated with authors. In visiting such sites, there were, to be jre, certain disillusionments in coming so near the man who had therto been known only in his books. Occasionally, too, the sen- mental journey ended in a reappraisal, with deleterious effects, 3 on once favored writings. It required time and perspective to ljust the new impressions to the old ideals. Even as he approached Stratford, on the very first of his erary journeys, Hawthorne had a feeling of disappointment. In ite of the forget-me-nots among the flags along the banks of the von, he found that stream narrow and sluggish, and by no pans pellucid. In fact, he knew no American river so tame. As for Stratford itself, it had a good many shabby old houses, am the streets being quite level, the total effect was quite unpictu esque, the one peculiarity of the city being the great number ( old people, tottering about and leaning on sticks. In Shakespeare’s house, Hawthorne had to confess, he felt r emotion whatever—no quickening of the imagination. The birt] place was almost a worse house than anybody could dream it i be. He entered a room whitewashed and clean, but woeful shabby and dingy, coarsely built, and such as it was not very ea; to idealize. The kitchen might be made cheerful by a great fii in so huge a fireplace; but so small a room could suggest only depressing idea of the humble, mean, somber character of tl life that could have been led in such a dwelling—with no coi veniences, all higgledy-piggledy, no retirement, the whole famil old and young, brought into too close contact to be comfortab together. What a hardy plant was Shakespeare’s genius, ho fated its development, since it was not blighted in such an atmo phere! The church where Shakespeare lay buried was, howeve venerable and beautiful, with a great green shadow of trees aboi it, and the Gothic architecture and vast arched windows obscure] seen among the boughs. But the bust of Shakespeare, affixed to tl wall of the chancel, compelled Hawthorne to root up all his ol ideas of Shakespeare’s aspect, and adopt an entirely different om for this face, though it clutched one’s sense of reality, suggeste no lofty-browed, noble man. Henceforth, Hawthorne reluctant] admitted, he would see, in his mind’s eye, Shakespeare as a rec faced individual, with a moderately capacious brow, an intelliger eye, a nose curved very slightly outward, a long, queer upper li] with a mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks very muc developed in the lower part of the face. On the whole, Shak speare must have had a singular rather than a prepossessing fao Nine-tenths of the time his neighbors must have seen in the fac of the burgher of Stratford only a dull mask. Out of his visit to Stratford Hawthorne believed that I had formed a more sensible and vivid idea of Shakespeare as flesh-and-blood individual than he had previously, though 1 was not quite certain that this power of realization was altogeth( desirable, for the Shakespeare he met there had no laurel o) [412] ither, he was the Shakespeare of tradition—the youthful deer- aler, the comrade of players, the too familiar friend of Dav- ant’s mother, the mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon com- nion of John a’ Combe, and the victim of convivial habits, □m such a view, there must follow moral bewilderment and in- lectual loss in what was the best of Shakespeare. It obscured ; one-tenth of the time when the poet’s face was transfigured. When Hawthorne had visited Lichfield, he had been drawn ther not only to see the beautiful cathedral, with its dim nooks holiness, but more especially because Lichfield was the birth- ice of Dr. Johnson, whom he had come to know, at a very early riod, through the good offices of Boswell. Dr. Johnson, indeed, :med as familar to Hawthorne’s recollection, and almost as fid in personal aspect to his mind’s eye, as the kindly figure Hawthorne’s own grandfather. Perhaps this was so because, as a itary child, left to his own tastes in reading, he had compre- nded the great English moralist rather by his childish sensi- ities and affections than by his intellect. Hawthorne was aware, ), that many of the latent sympathies that enabled him to joy the Old Country so well had been derived from, and kept ve by, his admiration for the sturdy old talker and humorist. He recognized now, however, that Dr. Johnson had been but heavy-footed traveler, who meddled only with the surface of J, and many of whose qualities he had appreciated more Droughly in his boyhood than now. Nevertheless, he was still Dvingly touched, when he visited Uttoexeter, and saw the irketplace where the mature Johnson had stood bareheaded in ; rain in penance for a boyhood unkindness to his father. To iwthorne it seemed as sad and lovely a story as when he had id it as a boy, or as when, in his own Biographical Stories, he d long ago tried to tell it for his childish readers. Indeed, to see i very spot where Johnson had stood was one of the few senti- mtal pilgrimages which Hawthorne ever undertook. None, rhaps, gave him a more deeply seated personal pleasure. There were, however, other literary pilgrimages, with varying ects. Together with Sophia, Hawthorne visited the lake dis- ict, familiar to them in imagination through their readings in i Quincey and Coleridge and Wordsworth and Southey. At dore they established themselves at a country inn, from which [413] they had a view of beautiful Derwentwater lake, with Skidda mountain at the head of it. It was but a few minutes walk to tf cascade described in Southey’s verses, though Hawthorne thougl the fall worthy of better poetry. From Portinscale they walke over a bridge and through a green lane to the church whei Southey was buried. Hawthorne liked the recumbent statue ( Southey, the face so lifelike and full of expression—a thin, higl featured, poetic face, tvith a finely proportioned head and abui dant hair—the poet represented in the full maturity of his mai hood, when he was strongest and richest. But despite Hawthorne indebtedness to Southey’s Curse of Kehama, when that poei had provided a body of reflections on that momentous joumt to North Adams, when love and marriage were uppermost in h mind, Hatvthorne could not, as he stood beside that marble fora bring Southey into close relation with himself. Doubtless thei had been few better or more blameless men than Southey; bt now it seemed that Southey lacked color, passion, warmth. Tt monument over his grave tvas a disappointment also, for thei tvas nothing airy or graceful about it. Indeed, it seemed to Hat thorne that there could not be many men so solid and matter-o fact as to deserve a tomb like that. Nor was the graveyard whei Southey’s body lay so rural and picturesque as that where Word tvorth was buried, although Skiddaw rose behind it, and Grei stream murmured at no great distance away. Wordsworth’s grat was better, too, with only a simple headstone, and the grass grot ing over his mortality. The pilgrimage to sites associated with Wordsworth had bee most satisfactory, though Sophia had thought it irreverent in he husband to say of Rydal Water that he could carry it away in porringer. Nevertheless, they had enjoyed the view of the lak from the high rock seat from which they had looked down at th hills and water, a seat where Wordsworth himself had doubtle; sat hundreds of times. \Vordsworth’s house seemed the very plat for a poet’s residence—so delightfully situated, so secluded, s hedged about with shrubbery and adorned with flowers, so beai tiful with the personal care of him who had lived in it and love it. From the grounds about the house there tvas a fine view, wit glimpses of mountains through opening vistas. It was good t think of "Wordsworth in quiet, past days, walking in his hon [414] ladow of trees, training flowers, trimming shrubs, and perhaps taping some verses. In the little church at Grasmere, it seemed I Hawthorne that he could best call up Wordsworth’s image i the pew where the poet had sat—a white-headed, tall, spare lan, plain in aspect. It was agreeable to see, in the graveyard, lat a hawthorn tree extended its farthest branches to Words- orth’s grave, at the head of which was the very simplest slab E slate, with “William Wordsworth’’ and nothing else upon it. he grass had been quite worn away from the head of the grave, ; if people had stood upon it. There was scarcely a fault to be )und with the grave—within view of the hills, and within sound E the river murmuring near by. It was pleasant to think and now that Wordsworth did not care for a stately monument. Almost all was in harmony with Hawthorne’s own tastes. With /ordsworth, of course, Hawthorne had long had the deepest kin- lip; for, ever since the writing of “The Maypole of Merry- lount,’’ through The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Ro¬ mance, he, like Wordsworth, had found solace in the soothing loughts that spring out of human suffering. In such thoughts oth men had perhaps had their most characteristic expression. Among some gloriously long days in May, on one of their umerous tours, Hawthorne and Sophia drove from Nottingham, ong roads where there were tall and continuous hedges, and a uiet English greenness and rurality, to Newstead Abbey, By- )n’s home. From the entrance gate they walked over grounds ooded with evergreens and much overgrown with ferns, from hich hares scampered in and out of their hiding places. A long alk, and then, through the trees, they caught a glimpse of battle- lents, a gleam of water, and presently appeared the Abbey’s merable front. After the visit, it seemed useless to Hawthorne to describe fewstead Abbey; he forgot very much that he saw, and this was range, perhaps; though, of course it had been long since, in col- ;ge, that he had gone through his Byronic phase, and though lelville’s Byronism, at Pittsfield, had left Hawthorne compre¬ ending but personally unmoved. Hence, when he was led to yron’s own bedchamber, the only thought that occurred to him )ontaneously was that it would have seemed difficult, before- ind, to fit up a room in such a picturesque old edifice so that it should be utterly devoid of picturesqueness; yet that had beei effected in this apartment. In another bed chamber, however, h saw with some interest, among volumes of poetry and light liters ture, the present owner’s copies of The House of the Seven Gable and The Scarlet Letter. The skull which Byron had transforme( into a drinking-goblet was a freak, Hawthorne thought, outdon by his own cousin Eben Hathome, who had once solemnly assure( him that he had had a spittoon made out of the skull of his enemy What perhaps interested Hawthorne most was the tree on whicl Byron had carved his own name and that of his sister, Augusta Though one stem of this tree still lived and flourished, that oi which Byron carved the two names was quite dead, as if there hac been something fatal in the inscription that had made it foreve: famous. In looking back over the history of the Byrons, Haw thorne concluded, quite unsentimentally, that they had been ; miserable race. It had been with some unsatisfactory feelings, too, that Haw thome had visited Abbotsford and other Scottish sites associatec with Scott. Abbotsford at once disappointed him. It was but j villa, after all; no castle, nor even a large manor house. It was noi even a real house, intended for the home of human beings. It wa; but a museum which showed that Scott was not really a wise man nor an earnest one, nor one who grasped the truth of life; he die but play. Still, when Hawthorne visited the very room in whicl Scott had died, he observed that he himself and other visitors spoke with a sort of hush in their voices, as if Scott were still dying there. The guide had invited Hawthorne to sit in the chaii in which Scott had sat while writing his romances, the invitation being accompanied by the suggestion that perhaps Hawthorne would catch some inspiration there. What a bitter word that would have been, Hawthorne reflected, if the guide had known to whom he spoke! Nevertheless, Hawthorne had sat down. When he had bade farewell to Abbotsford, Hawthorne could not but confess a sentiment of remorse for having visited the dwell¬ ing place of Scott with so cold a heart and in so critical a mood. Once he had admired and loved the mighty minstrel, who had done so much for his happiness when he was young. But he now looked at Scott from a different point of view. He was no longer a college boy writing Fanshawe, with its various echoes of the [416] nglish romancer. Besides, he was sensible again, as he had een when he had visited Stratford-on-Avon, of the human im- erfections of his former hero, as if he had actually seen him live. Penitent for harboring such thoughts, he protested to him- :lf that he still cherished Scott in a warm spot, and that he nticipated the pleasure of reading all Scott’s novels over again hen he got back to “The Wayside.’’ Nevertheless, when Hawthorne and Sophia had taken an xcursion to Loch Lomond, the scene of the adventures of Rob .oy, and to Loch Katrine, the setting of The Lady of the Lake, lere were again the old disappointments. Loch Lomond was ideed very beautiful, especially when, early in the day, the mists overed over the lake and lingered about the mountain heads ke morning dreams flitting and retiring, and letting the sun- line in, and snatching it away again. But the scenery of the lores of Loch Katrine, Hawthorne found not altogether so rich nd lovely as he had pre-imagined. Of Ellen’s Isle, it was per- aps not too much to fancy that there might be a rustic habita- on among its rugged shrubbery; evidently, however, Scott had sed as much freedom with his natural scenery as he did with his istoric incidents. He could have made nothing of either one ad he been more scrupulous in his arrangement and adornment f them. As for the actual Loch Katrine and its environs, Haw- lome thought that there were many scenes as good in America, eeding only the poet. He was, at the same time, reluctant to ;ave the spot, and cherished the hope of seeing it again. In his excursion to the haunts of Bums, Hawthorne perhaps ermitted a freer play of his sentiments than upon the occasion f any other literary pilgrimage. At Moss Giel, he and Sophia rove in their carriage through the very field, so their driver told lem, in which Burns had turned up the mouse’s nest. A little irther on, the ground was whitened with an immense number of aisies—the soil seemingly consecrated to daisies by Bums’s song, lawthorne sprang out of the carriage to gather a handful of the owers for Sophia to press for memory. At roofless Kirk Alloway, le scene of Tam O’Shanter’s misadventure, they tentatively lentified one mullioned window, tall and narrow, as perhaps that tie seen, blazing with devilish light, by Tam as he approached ong the road from Ayr. Through a small square window, on [4^7] the side nearest the road, Tam, they supposed, might have peen as he sat on horseback. Hawthorne clambered up to it and pulh out of the embrasure a small stone, as a relic. In the Bums country, too, Hawthorne and Sophia saw tl bridge where Burns supposedly met the Lass of Ballochmylc, bridge high in air over a deep gorge, so that the young lady m; have appeared to Burns like a creature between earth and sk It was a place to fall in love—the river flowing over its pebb bed, sometimes gleaming into sunshine, and sometimes hiddc in deep verdure, and here and there eddying at the foot of hi^ and precipitous cliffs. But beautiful as was this scene, it was n( so lovely as the bonnie Boon when one looked over the parap of its bridge to see it flowing wildly and sweetly between its det and wooded banks. The ancient bridge itself, ivy-grown, with high arch, was very picturesque in a quiet and gentle way. Lor after the event, the memory of the Boon, with its wooded bank and the boughs dipping into the water, affected Hawthorne lil the song of birds, or the melody of Burns’s own verses. Bespite such sentimental pleasures, there remained for Hat thorne in these experiences the old disappointments. He ha enjoyed the innumerable daisies, whose progenitor Bums ha turned into an amaranthine flower. The adjacent home of Bum however, he had viewed with quite different emotions. It stoo behind a tall hedge of hawthorn, a whitewashed stone cottag with a thatched roof, on which grew grass and weeds. Close b were two other buildings of the same general appearance, eac just as fit for human habitation as the others, though a looked more suitable for donkey stables or pigsties. The who) place was pervaded by a frowzy smell, and also a dunghill smel Hawthorne could not well understand how the atmosphere c such a dwelling could be any better morally than it was physicalb No virgin, surely, could keep a holy awe about her while stowe higgledy-piggledy with coarse-natured rustics into such narrov ness and filth. Such a habitation could be calculated only to mak beasts of men and women. Hawthorne was glad to get out of th house, and out of the farmyard too. The visit to Bumfries had resulted in similar disillusionment “Burns Street,” at the outskirts of the town, was a vile lam bordered by cottages or mean houses, built of stone and joinin [418] ne to another through the whole length of the street—not a blade f grass between the paving stones, and reeking with a genuine cotch stink, dirty, and infested with dirty children. Though urns’s house was perhaps a little more decent-looking, it proved 1 Hawthorne’s judgment, very unsatisfactory—altogether a very oor and unsuitable place for a pastoral and rural poet to live or ie in. Seeing Burns’s poor, mean dwelling and surroundings, lawthome did not much wonder that the people of Burns’s day lould have failed to recognize what was immortal in a disreput- ble, drunken, shabbily clothed and shabbily housed man, con- jrting with associates of ill reputation, and, as his only ostensible ccupation, gauging whiskey, which he too often tasted. The onder was that honor came to him so soon—that the miracle of is genius became so soon apparent. Among all these disappointments in his literary pilgrimages, lere was, as Hawthorne perceived clearly enough in his reflec- ve moments, a kind of common denominator. A sensible man ad better not let himself be betrayed into attempts to realize the lings he has dreamed about, things which, in many mirrorings 1 his imagination, have ascended from common reality to a igher life. When such dreams cease to be purely ideal, they have )st the truest of their truth, the loftiest and profoundest part of leir power over his sympathies. Facts, as one really finds them, Tatever poetry they may involve, are covered with a stony ex- rescence of prose resembling the crust on a beautiful seashell, 'hich never shows its most delicate and divinest colors until one as dissolved the grosser actualities by steeping them in a powerful lenstruum of thought. Seeking to actualize the original again, ne but renews the crust. Hence there were times when Haw- lorne abhorred making pilgramages to the shrines of departed reat men. During such pilgrimages, as well as in his reflections upon the Id cathedrals of England, its ancient castles, and its time-mel- iwed houses apparently built for an earthly immortality, Haw- lorne thought he saw an emblem of what England itself really [419] was—a present stir with a good deal of antiquity in it, new thin based and supported on old things, and often limited and it peded by them. What disturbed him was the thought that th antiquity was so massive that there seemed no means of gettir rid of it without tearing society to pieces. Hawthorne had ample occasion now to reflect upon those aj parent discordances which had occupied his mind in those ear years when he had written the “Legends of the Province House, in which he had felt the spell of hoar antiquity at the same tin that he had seen the folly of treasuring up, like old Esther Dudle what time had rendered useless. He still was of the opinion tb romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens, and wallflowers, need rui to make them grow, though he felt with equal assurance what h had long ago felt in sharing Longfellow’s enthusiasm in “A Psalt of Life’’—the high desirability of letting the dead Past bury ii dead, and of acting in the living Present. It was in his visits to the British Museum that the oppressiv< ness of the past especially weighed upon Hawthorne. There i seemed to him that the present was too burdened with the pasi We have not time in our earthly existence, he reflected, to af preciate what is warm in life, and immediately around us; yet w heap up these old shells, out of which human life has Ion emerged. We do not recognize for rubbish what is really rubbish As he wandered about the halls of the museum, he came to wisl that the whole Past might be swept away, and each generatioi compelled to bury and destroy whatever it had produced, befor being permitted to leave the stage. When we quit a house, W( are expected to make it clean for the next occupant; why ough we not to leave a clean world for the next generation? Simila; sentiments, of course, Hawthorne had heard his cousin Eber Hathorne express twenty years ago, and Hawthorne himself hac toyed with them imaginatively in “The New Adam and Eve,” anc more especially through the character of Holgrave in The Houst of the Seven Gables. In the very present life of England, however, as well as in the objects of the British Museum, the Past seemed to obtrude itself Picturesque as were these old English villages, gathered rounc their churches, with their dwellings of stone and thatch, it was a little wearisome to think of people living from century to cen [420] ;ry in the same spot, going in and out of the same doors, cul- t'ating the same fields, meeting the same faces, and marrying le another over and over again; and going to the same church, id lying down in the same churchyard—to appear again, and ) through the same monotonous round in the next generation, '^hen Hawthorne had smelled that ugly smell in the poor streets Liverpool, he had thought of it as the odor of an old system life. Fortunately, the fresh scent of the pine forests was still o recent with us for such an odor to be known in America. In merica there yet remained some novelty, and livelier hopes for e Future. It was, however, with the present stir of life in England, rather lan with the past, that Hawthorne was mainly concerned. He as not long established in his duties in Liverpool before society und him out. He was lionized by people of wealth, fashion, and nk. He was introduced into a wide circle of men and women iterested in literature, drama, and music. He formed a few new itimate friendships, and renewed some old ones, with altered ;rspective. His residence in England, indeed, brought him into ich an expanse of the world as the boy at the country college mid hardly have imagined. Hawthorne had not entered this social world altogether will- igly; he had, in part, chosen Rock Ferry, some distance from iverpool, as a residence, because that location gave him a good ccuse for refusing social invitations, and, as he said, kept him out ; a good deal of nonsense. He was not comfortable at aesthetic as, with the accompanying music and miscellaneous talk. He irsed all dinner parties as malicious inventions for destroying iman comfort, and he loathed the white cravat which the con¬ ations required as a part of the full dress of a gentleman. He uch preferred his old black satin stock. When, as Sophia said, i was finally broken in, and when, before a dinner, he glanced i the glass at his white cravat, he declared that he looked like a ispectable butler! It amused Sophia to see her husband in the mtches of a lady of fashion—the lady in crimson velvet, with [421] pearls and diamonds, her neck and arms bare and very beautifi It was, for Hawthorne, certainly a vastly different experience fro witinessing, at Bridge’s mansion house, years ago, the pretty, blac eyed Nancy standing bare-armed over a washtub! The lionizing to which he was subjected was to Hawthon something between a satisfaction and a botheration. He gre weary of seeing so many people, especially ladies, who were supe fluous in their oblations, quite stifling him, indeed, with the i cense that they burned under his nose. Good Heavens! What w a man to do in such cases? Though his admirers might be ve: good and kind persons, in the presence of their laudations he fe besmeared with sweetness—all bestuck, in short, as after handlir molasses candy. But if Hawthorne was embarrassed in such scene Sophia was elated, and rejoiced at the covert glances of admiratic cast at her husband. He was wondrous handsome, handsomer tha anybody else at these soirees. The lofty, sumptuous apartments ( the wealthy and the aristocratic, she thought, became him vei much. She had always regarded him as born for a palace, and no he showed that he was. Among people interested in literature and the arts, Hawthon was somewhat more comfortable than he tvas among people ( polite society. If he made only a limited acquaintance among tho! whom the world has now called great, that was so in very lart part because his shyness forbade him to seek out the famous. H was too modest, likewise, to assume that his own achievemen warranted thrusting himself upon the attention even of such as h should doubtless have been pleased to meet. Such people ( accomplishment as he did meet, themselves made the overture or were introduced by others who had already cultivated his ai quaintance. Doubtless he would have liked to meet Tennyso and Dickens, neither of whom he actually met. There seems t be no record of a wish to see Thackeray or Carlyle. Nevertheles he saw, on the whole, for his own satisfaction, quite enough c contemporary celebrities—those whose art was just then in vogU( Among the first to call upon him were the distinguished Un tarian minister, James Martineau, and Mrs. Gaskell, of Cranfor fame. The poet Allingham came to bring a volume of his poen and to talk about Carlyle and Tennyson. B. W. Proctor (“Ban Cornwall’’) called, and Hawthorne liked him very well, bi [^ 22 ] >ught him no great poet. Monckton Milnes (later Baron ►ughton), patron of literary men, seemed to Hawthorne to re- able Longfellow, in personal appearance and in genial man- Miss Harriet Martineau, whose Retrospect of Western avel had made something of a stir in America, Hawthorne ind a lively and sensible talker. He was intrigued by her ear- mpet, which seemed a sensible part of her, like the antennae of ae insects; and disappointed by her atheism, which denied her ellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting forever. Perhaps took no greater pleasure, among literary acquaintances, than in meeting with Leigh Hunt, who seemed nearly the embodi- nt of Hawthorne’s own concept of the artist of the beautiful, wthome had been accompanied, on that visit, by Sophia and la, and had been greatly moved when, at parting. Hunt had rmly grasped and shaken both his hands, and had kissed Una’s id by way of farewell. Such literary acquaintances increased as the years of the con- ship rolled on. As a guest in London at the Milton Club and : Reform Club, Hawthorne saw numerous contemporary Celeb¬ es. He saw M. F. Tupper of Proverbial Philosophy; S. C. Hall, ;rary reviewer and editor of the Art Journal; Dr. Charles ickay and Herbert Ingram, editor and owner, respectively of ; Illustrated London News; playwrights Tom Taylor and jles Jerrold; a number of writers for the London Times, as well others of note. At various literary affairs—suppers, dinners, ;akfasts—he met, at one time or another, the novelist Charles ade; Faed, a young and distinguished artist; Miss Isabella Glyn, ress, who was just then playing the feminine lead in Shake- are’s Antony and Cleopatra; and the illustrious Jenny Lind, a breakfast given by Monckton Milnes, he sat at table with caulay, and thought his face fit for a scholar, a man of the rid, a cultivated intelligence. Robert Browning, also a guest, reduced himself to Hawthorne and remarked that he admired e Blithedale Romance as the best of Hawthorne’s writings, wthome wondered why, but did not ask, and was not enlight- d. Mrs. Browning talked of spiritualism, of Margaret Fuller, am the Brownings had known in Italy, and of William Story, lerican sculptor, with whom they had been intimate in Italy, Hawthorne liked the Brownings very much immediately. [423] De Quincey wished to meet Hawthorne but apparently nev did. At an art exhibit at Manchester Hawthorne saw but did n venture to speak to Tennyson, whose native shyness was almc equal to Hawthorne’s own. Hawthorne regarded Tennyson the most picturesque figure, without affectation, that he had ev seen—his face very dark, and worn, and expressing great sen tiveness. He liked Tennyson well, and rejoiced in him more th; in all the other wonders of the exhibition. Still, he was rather gl; than otherwise that he had not actually been introduced to t Poet Laureate. Only a few days before the departure from Er land, the Hawthornes received a call from the poet Covent Patmore, whose Angel in the House Hawthorne and Sophia h both greatly enjoyed. Like Tennyson, Patmore was simple ai agreeable in manners, and shy. When the conversation dragge it was Hawthorne, strangely, who had set it afloat again; but fo years as consul and American literary celebrity in England h given him a skill in conversation such as he had not had befoi At some of the literary parties which he attended, Hawthor of course was the lion whom the other guests had come to see, he was aware. Privately, it seemed ungracious in himself, thei fore, not to be gratified with the interest expressed in him; b the truth was that he was sometimes bored because he did n know what to do or say, nor were those who sought to know hi always prepared to talk, thus throwing upon him the task of cc verting a conversible substance out of thin air, perhaps for t twentieth time in one evening. He often felt that he did not Sc or hear said, one rememberable word all evening. But how cou anything characteristic be said or done among a group of peof sitting at table in full dress? Moreover, he sometimes felt li some strange insect imprisoned under a tumbler, with a dqzi eyes watching whatever he did. In the end, however, after the petty embarrassments and a noyances were forgotten, he admitted that he had enjoyed hii self gloriously. His London experiences, in which he had met t most people, seemed to him, retrospectively, rich in incident ai character. It was queer that what had done him a wonderful dt of good, he should, if he had had his choice, have left alrnc wholly undone. Later, doubtless, these social experiences cc tributed to that climactic fame that was his when The Mari [ 4 ^ 4 ] un was published in England in i860. There is no evidence, wever, that contact with English writers stimulated or enriched > artistic productions. As an artist, he remained, perforce, alone. Pleasant as were these literary acquaintanceships, they were jrely external. Happily, however, while the artist was only perficially engaged, the man was forming a few friendships of e kind he cherished, and which provided some of the richest his English experiences. It was young Henry Bright, as Hawthorne later confided to mgfellow, whom he liked more than any man in England. It d been Longfellow who had introduced Bright to Haw- ome at Concord in September, 1852, when Bright and a com- nion had come to America on a literary pilgrimage. Bright, en in his twenties, was the son of a wealthy English shipowner, jroung man of literary bent who humorously spoke of himself, some doggerel verse, as “a suckling, scribbling merchant.” He is Hawthorne’s first friendly visitor at the consulate, where his esence, as Hawthorne remarked later in Our Old Home, was e consul’s one solace. He used to come and sit or stand by Haw- orne’s fireplace, talking vivaciously and eloquently about litera- re and life, the two men exchanging frank and amiable views of ch other’s native country, so that Hawthorne understood ight’s countrymen all the better for him, and was almost pre- red to love the intensest Englishman of them all for his sake. Hawthorne and Bright went on numerous excursions together, liked the streets of London, dined in pleasant companionship, d saw strange, out-of-the-way nooks, and leisurely watched the triages in the park. Sometimes, when Hawthorne was engaged his office. Bright entertained Sophia. Once, in London, Bright Dk Sophia and Julian to Kensington Gardens, where the trees •re lustrous in the clearest warm sunshine and soft, sweet air. r off, the pinnacles of the Parliament Houses and Westminster )bey towers rose into the clear sky. A pretty yacht, with white ng, moved slowly along the Serpentine, and lambs grazed on my lawns, while Sophia and Bright sat on a felled tree and ked, and Julian ran about the Gardens. Sophia thought of ight as the most amiable and hospitable of mortals. It was ight, too, who showed Melville the sights of Liverpool, when moo” came to visit Hawthorne, and the latter was busy with [425] his duties. It was Bright to whom Hawthorne entrusted his En^ lish journals when he left for Italy—with the injunction, hal humorously given, that the seals be broken not a day sooner tha; 1900! Hawthorne could scarcely have offered better evidence c trust and affection. Bright thought it one of the best things in his life to hav made a friend of Hawthorne, whom he regarded as a singularl happy man—happy in his domestic relations, in his own wondei ful imaginative faculty, and in the fame which he had achievec Much as Hawthorne liked young Bright, it was Francis Ber noch, London wholesale drygoods merchant and patron of poei and artists, to whom Hawthorne owed most in England. Ber noch’s warm benignity of nature was never weary of doing Hav thorne good. This English friend led Hawthorne to many scene of life which the latter never could have found himself, knei precisely the kind of help a stranger needed, and gave it freeb It was mainly Bennoch who had provided those London exp< riences which Hawthorne, in retrospect, had recognized as havin done him a wonderful deal of good. Bennoch was a kindly, jolb frank, offhand fellow—a man of active benevolence and vivi sympathies, who warmed his guests like a household fire by the ir fluence of his broad, ruddy face and glowing eyes—eyes of sue warmth as Hawthorne had not seen before. Hawthorne love Bennoch as much as if he had been a friend of long standing When misfortune and bankruptcy came to Bennoch, Hawthorn could but hope that his friend’s sturdiness and buoyancy woul raise him above his disaster (as, indeed, they were to do). Henc( as the two men said farewell shortly before Hawthorne’s depai ture for Italy, Hawthorne noted thankfully that Bennoch was i: good spirits, his face almost shining with its old luster, still r< taining the cheeriest glow that Hawthorne had ever seen in an human countenance. It was remarkable, it seemed to Hawthorne, as he made thes new friends and acquaintances, that he should now see more di tinctly than ever before all past affairs, all home-conclusions, a people whom he had known in America and met again in Enj land. All such were compelled to undergo a new trial. It was m that these people suffered by comparison with English manhooc [426] t, being free from old surroundings and the inevitable preju- ;es of home, he decided upon them, it seemed, absolutely. When, therefore, he had a visit from George Bradford, whom had, in the first effervescent happiness of married life, invited live with him and Sophia at the Old Manse, he could but see adford as a wonderfully small pattern of a man. Bradford was e of Emerson’s most valued and trusted friends—a scholar, with le cultivation and independence of thought. But it appeared at he lacked a strong will, so that his conduct, when not deter- ined by principle, was miserably weak and wavering. Perhaps he had married, thereby coming into more earnest contact with e joys, griefs, and business of the world—if his fortunes and pes, as a girl’s schoolmaster, had not been so paltry, he would It have been kept so small. He could, in truth, hardly be reck¬ ed as a man. When O’Sullivan came to Liverpool, on his way to Portugal United States minister, he, too, underwent Hawthorne’s re- aluation. Hawthorne had now known O’Sullivan for almost enty years—since the time when the Democratic Review had iblished “The Toll-Gatherer’s Day’’ and other tales and etches. O’Sullivan had proved himself a friend and advocate, pecially in the distressing days of the expulsion from the Salem istom House, when he had declared Hawthorne’s discharge a Ltional issue. For O’Sullivan, Hawthorne continued to have a nuine affection, as he had for Bradford; but he did not see in 'Sullivan, who never stirred him to any depth beneath his sur- :e, his ideal friend. Hawthorne wished his ideal friend to be a ?mer and grimmer man than O’Sullivan. Sterner and grimmer, surely, was Melville, who, when he me to visit Hawthorne in Nevember, 1856, had already ex- essed the bitterest ambiguities and pessimism in Pierre, and 10 now, having left wife and family behind, was on his solitary y to Constantinople, with hardly any baggage save a night- rt and a toothbrush. At Southport, where the Hawthornes re then living, the two men took a long walk by the sea, in an ea wild and desolate, and there, sitting down behind a sand hill shelter themselves from a high, cool wind, they smoked their lars and talked. On a fitful and uncertain day, too, between ishine and showers, they went to Chester together, Chester be- [4^7] ing the only place within easy reach of Liverpool which possesse any old English interest. It seemed to Hawthorne that Melville was much overshai owed since he had seen him last. Melville confessed that he di not anticipate much pleasure in his rambles, for the spirit of venture had gone out of him. As they had sat among the sar hills of Southport, Melville revealed that he had pretty muc given up the hope of immortality—this revelation coming fro: him when, as of yore, he had begun to reason of Providence ar futurity, and of everything lying beyond human ken. Hawthon still thought of Melville as he had thought at Pittsfield—th Melville had a very high and noble nature; but it was also qui apparent to him that, at thirty-seven, Melville was still a spiritu wanderer, in mind as in body roving over the face of the eart hopeless of finding peace or rest. It appears that the friends nev saw each other again. The Berkshire idyl faded sadly into reir niscence. In the midst of these various friendships, however, some o ones retained their original vigor. Indeed, the friendship wi Franklin Pierce, which, during the years of Hawthorne’s consi ship, expressed itself outwardly only in a few letters, was yet have its severest test and to find its surest and deepest affirmatio Of his other college friend, Horatio Bridge, Hawthorne was sti of the conviction that there was no truer man in the world. 1 Bridge, as he had done for many years, he still wrote for advii and help in matters pertaining to the practical world. With Lon fellow he kept up a correspondence, and Longfellow’s name w often upon his lips in literary conversations with English a quaintances. He observed approvingly that Longfellow gre richer and deeper at every step of his advance in life, and 1 hoped that he, too, might improve—that there might in his ov, later fruitage be something ruddier, warmer, and more genia something akin to the golden age of the intellect and the ima ination which his friend seemed to be entering. In his social experiences in England, Hawthorne had sure broadened his familiarity with the world, a process which his co [428] lar duties enlarged likewise, however burdensome and disagree- )le he found them. In those duties, in fact, he himself saw no ;rsonal advantage save the acquisition of a certain readiness of eech, and no pleasure except the emoluments. The consulate, where he was to spend wearily a considerable )rtion of more than four good years of his existence, was situ- ed, as he early decided, in the most detestable part of Liverpool, the neighborhood of some of the oldest docks of the city. In e building in which his office was situated, a narrow and ill- jhted staircase gave access to an equally narrow passageway, bich admitted to an outer office, beyond which lay his own ivate quarters, of very moderate size. From one Avindow he had view, across the narrow street, of a tall, dismal, smoke-blackened ick warehouse, uglier than any building he had ever seen in merica, and from one of the various stories of which bags of It were often being raised or lowered, swinging and vibrating in e air. From without there was a continual rumble of wheels, hich made conversation difficult. His private office, painted in imitation oak, was but duskily yhted. Its walls were hung with maps of the United States id of Great Britain, together with engravings of American naval ctories in the War of 1812. On a bookcase stood a fierce and rrible bust of General Jackson, frowning at any Englishman ho might happen to cross the threshold. Among other decora- Dns, and occupying the place of honor above the mantlepiece, as a hideous, life-size colored lithograph of General Taylor, Old ough-and-Ready, who so early in his term as President, despite is pledges, had ousted Hawthorne from his position in the Salem ustom House. Though from first to last Hawthorne hated the ?ry sight of his little room, he found amusement in its decora- ons as representing contemporary American taste in the fine ts, and as reminding him so delightfully of an old-fashioned merican barber shop. Nothing in his quarters or in his duties, he was sure, provided le genial atmosphere which he needed to ripen the best harv^est ' his mind. The incidents and the characters that occupied his ificial days were entirely apart from his own concerns, and on hich the qualities personally proper to himself could have no [4^9] bearing. His acceptance of his tasks was simply a compromise wii the Real in the hope of attaining at a later date his true Ideal. He discovered, to his horror, that his consular duties cor pelled his attendance at mayors’ banquets and public celebr tions of all kinds, at which he was expected to speak—he wl at college had broken all existing rules to avoid public declam tions, and had taken an inferior rank in his class as a result. No there was no escape. At the occasion of his first speech, he fe his old diffidence, wound up his eloquence as briefly as possibl and was thankful that he had not broken down to an intolerab extent. He came, presently, to feel that there might be great ei joyment in public speaking, though, while standing up to spea! his great object was to get down again as soon as possible. He que tioned whether public speaking tended to elevate the orator, ii tellectually or morally—could not quite see how an honest ma could be a good and successful orator. His reactions to his ow speech-making efforts remained a mixture of dubious pleasui and certain dislike. When, at a dinner given by the Lord Mayor of London, 1 unexpectedly had to respond to a toast, he rose amid much chee ing, and screwed up his courage to the point where he did nc much care what happened, though he was greatly helped alon by cheers that broke in between his sentences. He was aware ( the sympathy of his listeners, and it warmed and animated hin He confessed to being pleased by the praises of his speech, an was glad to get out of the scrape so well. Nevertheless, he quick! cooled down, assured that he had made a fool of himself, an embarrassed all the more when his words later appeared in th newspapers. Happily, at the Lord Mayor’s dinner, he had had an exp( rience which had really concerned him. Across the table, an nearly opposite to him, had sat a young lady of the purest an finest complexion, with hair of a wonderful, deep, raven black- all her features so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable ai beside her. She was slender, and youthful, and, though stately an cold, yet had a soft and womanly grace—an admirable creatun Four years later she was to be transformed in his imagination an^ to appear as Miriam in The Marble Faun—the only artistic cons( quence of his experiences as a public speaker. [430] Not less onerous than public speaking were the other duties of s office. They carried him to prisons, police courts, hospitals, natic asylums, coroner’s inquests, deathbeds, funerals, and ■ought him in contact with insane people, criminals, ruined leculators, wild adventurers, diplomatists, brother consuls, and 1 manner of simpletons and unfortunates. His most generously spired official conduct was subjected to cruel aspersions in the ■ess back home. Almost every day he encountered brutal cap- ins and brutal sailors; heard continual complaints of mutual rong, which he had no power to set right and which, indeed, emed to have no right on either side; had calls of idleness or Temony from his countrymen, who seldom knew what they ere in search of at the commencement of their tour, and never id attained any desirable end at the close of it. Often his days ere taken up by beggars, cheats, unfortunates, so mixed up that was impossible to distinguish one from another, and so, in self- dense, he was driven to distrust them all. There were times hen he was sick to death of his office. When, after his resigna- on, his successor finally came to take over his duties, Hawthorne tanked Heaven, for he was very weary of the consulate. If it were 3t for Sophia and the children, he would have liked to lie down 1 one spot for about a hundred years. The pleasantest incident of his official day occurred when the ce-consul or head clerk made his appearance with the account Doks, and deposited on Hawthorne’s desk, wrapped in a piece t paper, the fees of the day. It was not long, however, before [awthorne discovered that the actual emoluments were by no leans what they had promised to be in those hopeful days when e and Ticknor had visited Washington. The whole yearly in- )me, as Sophia explained in a letter to her father, was only about quarter part of the estimate made of it. Moreover, during Haw- lorne’s incumbency. Congress reduced the fees permitted to itnsuls, and thus added to Hawthorne’s financial worries. He con- mplated resigning; but, in spite of his disappointments, his in- •me, by his former standards, was still a good one. Presently he .‘cided that he had saved enough of his earnings to live upon at )me, with economy, provided that he reckon upon a continual come from literature. It was a vast relief to him to feel that 'phia and the children, in case of his death, would be left in [431] comfortable circumstances. In this respect, the bitterness of deat was past. By December, 1856, Hawthorne had fully decided to resig from his position as consul. On February 13, 1857, he sent to h friend Bridge a letter of resignation, with the request that Bridg deliver it as soon as he thought proper after the inauguration c President Buchanan, Pierce’s successor. Though Hawthorne ha asked to be relieved by the thirty-first of August, 1857, his sui cessor did not come until the end of September. It was an inexpressible relief for Hawthorne to find himse a private citizen again. Thank Heaven, now he was a sovereig once more, and no longer a servant! It was really very singular, h thought, how he looked down upon ambassadors and dignitari( of all sorts, not excepting the President himself. God knew ho’ weary he had been of his office! After four years of unnatural r straint in the consulate, he could be idle again after his ol fashion—as he had been when, after writing The Scarlet Letter, h had for days explored the nooks and corners of Boston; or, earlie one summer in western Massachusetts, he had had all manner ( country adventures. Only now, with his new financial freedon he was free as he had never been free before, free forever, free t observe and think and feel, to journalize and, presently, to writ again. Back home in America, somewhat more than three years b( fore, in No. 6 University Hall, Harvard, Longfellow had delivere his last college lecture. Then, on a hot and weary Commeno ment Day, he had worn his black robes for the last time. He, to( was at last free, free to devote himself to poetry. It was thirt years ago when he had given his college graduation oration 0 “Our Native Writers,’’ and had boyishly pleaded for an uttt abandonment of everything else in a noble self-devotion to th cause of literature. Now, after all these years, after many vici situdes, the two friends had at last realized the ideal of thei youth. When Hawthorne had begun his consular duties at Live pool, he had only recently passed his forty-ninth birthday. F was still bashful in manner and, as always, said little, and spol [432] a low tone. His hair, though receding more and more, was still irk, his eyes, too, giving an impression of darkness under his ;avy eyebrows. Sophia thought that he was wondrous hand- me. As the English years progressed, there were, of course, changes his appearance and manner. While a senior at Bowdoin, he id superciliously carried a cane; now, without affectation, but a gentleman of some worldly importance, and as a matter of •urse, he once more carried a cane, or, as was often the case the rainy weather, an alpaca umbrella—quite in the English shion. Although he continued, for the most part, the practice ■ dressing in somber black, he now sometimes wore tweed, a insiderable revolution. Between humor and some concern, he mself observed that he was becoming a little too John Bullish, id that he must diminish his allowance of roast beef, brown¬ out, port, and sherry. He thought it worth while to note in his ary that he weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. When le members of his family suffered from colds in English fogs, lills and rains, he remained, to all appearances, perfectly well. e himself remarked that he had never felt better in his life. Nevertheless, beneath these surface manifestations of a com- >rtable middle age, there lurked, with an increasing assertive- ess that could not be denied, evidences of autumnal changes, ot only was he sick and weary of his office and its dirty sur- lundings and the heavy hours of official society in Liverpool. He rew weary of seeing so many people—weary of the stupid places here he lived, and weary of seeing fine scenery and notable lings. It was nauseating to find that what he had come to see ad already been looked at in all its lights. The English lakes and lountains were very beautiful; but after eating a score of moun- lins and quaffing as many lakes, he was surfeited. Hotel life in is excursions added to his weariness. Art exhibitions became a ore. He grew tired of antiquity, until it had lost almost all of its larm. In spite of his pleasures in London—that dingy, smoky, lidmost haunt of men—he became weary, weary of London. He earied, indeed, of England, and felt the need of a change. He ecame aware that the four years in England had given him a 'ng shove toward old age. But where was he to go? When he had left the worn-out soil of [433] Salem, he had determined that his children should strike the roots into unaccustomed earth. At Lenox, where he had felt r mote and quite beyond companionship, his soul had sometim( got into a ferment, becoming troublous with too much peace an rest. Only at Concord had he found the genial atmosphere whic he coveted—once in the deep quietude of the Old Manse, an again at “The Wayside,” where, on his wooded hill, he had spei delectable hours reading a book or merely keeping still and b ing reverently happy with Sophia and the children. A return t Concord seemed the answer to his question. The weariness, however, which made Hawthorne long fc a change of clime, was accompanied by a restlessness even moi prominent, a restlessness in part born, perhaps, of that very wear ness which was to increase with the years. He vacillated betwee a desire to return home and a wish to remain in Europe, eithf for a few years or indefinitely. It was not only that he felt that man of refinement and means could live far more comfortabl in England than in America, as he wrote to Longfellow. Anothe consideration was that he was sick to death of the continual fu! and turmoil and excitement and bad blood which America kej up about political subjects. America, where people seemed on th point of beating out one another’s brains, looked, from his sid of the water, like an infernally disagreeable country. Still, in spit of these skepticisms, there were times when he had great hop and faith that all would turn out well in America. When Bridg wrote despairingly of the prospects of the Union, Hawthorn protested that he would like to hang on to it. He confessed tha he sympathized to a large extent with Northern feeling, and tha it was about time to take a stand. If compelled to choose, h would go for the North. At the same time, however, he protestei that the States were too various and too extended to form, reall) one country. New England was quite as large a lump of eartl as his heart could take in. And so the question of staying ii Europe or going home remained precariously balanced in hi mind. The question was further complicated by other feelings o his own and of his family. Though at a very late date in hi residence in England he declared that he had no inclination t return to his house in Concord, a house which his family hai [434] itgrown, there were times when he admitted to being home- ;k. Perhaps such admissions were the more frequent early in the Qglish sojourn. As he sat before a coal fire, in his first residence . Rock Ferry, with the chill rainy English twilight brooding rer the lawn, he felt that he would never be at home there. He ould certainly not want to be buried in rainy England, the aves being too horribly damp there. When the members of his mily were ill and went to Wales for a change of air, he was re that if they could have one week on their Concord hillside, would do them more good than all the English air that they id ever breathed. Before winter had come in the first year at e consulate, he was ready to kick his office to the devil. He as sick of it, he longed for his hillside, and he wanted to come )me again. Even in the later years in England, thoughts of home kept curring. In the very moment of delight in the Scottish High- nds, Hawthorne remembered how much grander were the srkshire hills under the influence of mist and clouds. Satiated ith notable places in England, described over and over again / innumerable enthusiasts, he remembered America, and re¬ iced that there one might still find virgin scenes. In one of the it weeks in England, as he sat with his family at Christmas din- ;r, do what he might, he had, in these surroundings, no feeling home or fireside enjoyment. Despite contrary emotions, there mained for him a yearning for “The Wayside,” a longing to ve a home once more, a desire to be permanently settled from ar’s end to year’s end. ' It was consideration for his family which finally determined r Hawthorne the question of permanent residence. When he d proposed to Sophia that they become cosmopolites, pitching eir tent in any peaceable and pleasant spot they could find, he (Covered that she—who was then at the court of Portugal with 2 O’Sullivans, and saw kings, princes, dukes and ambassadors as niliarly as he saw Liverpool merchants—was homesick, and •uld be glad to return immediately to the old house at “Way- le.” The children, too, when the family in the first weeks in igland was living in a hotel, found the hotel a veritable prison, d thought of “The Wayside” with despair. They continued to lie for it. What Hawthorne feared was that they would forget what home was, and might not, after the strange, vagrant, gypj life that the family was living, ever feel inclined to live long i one place. He feared, moreover, the effects on their characu of this unsettled life. They must not be kept away so long as t lose their American characteristics; otherwise they would f exiles and outcasts through life. It would not do to deprive thei of their native land, which he hoped would be a far more con fortable and happy residence in their day than now in his owi He decided, therefore, after innumerable uncertainties, that fo lowing a year or so in Italy, he would return to America and “Th Wayside” in Concord. But this restlessness and weariness Hawthorne was never asai quite able to shake off; happily its disintegrating power was mit gated by the re-creative influence of the affections which he ei joyed in his family circle. There, in the midst of his family, th cares of his office, the corrosions of the daily routine, and th encroachments of age found such compensation and resolution j earthly existence is given to know. Hawthorne thanked God for his children. He took frequer walks with them, read to them, played with them, and mad merry with them. Once he brought home a number of mask himself donning the face of a simpleton, the gross transformatio seeming very funny to Una and Julian, who, equally grotesqu behind their masks, joined in the nonsense by dancing the scho tische. Fondly he dandled little Rose upon his knees, and hear her recite “Hark, hark, the lark,” “Where the bee sucks, thei suck I,” and other pieces of poetry which she had learned b heart. In the earlier years of his marriage Hawthorne had bee aware of the swift passage of time, so that he had hardly o( casion to grasp the present before it became the past; now h was all the more poignantly conscious of time’s retreating fooi steps. When Sophia, for the sake of her health, spent some eigli months in the milder climate of Portugal and took the two girl with her, Hawthorne, though not depressed, saw the departure c his children not without pain, full well realizing that he shoul not find them again exactly as he left them—Una, in the meat while, quite passing out of her childhood, and Rosebud out c her babyhood. The following New Year’s Eve, when the doc [436] d struck twelve, and all the bells of Liverpool were ringing it together, Hawthorne, sad and lonely, went up to bed, on the ly stepping into Julian’s little room, and there, as the boy slept, ently wished him a happy New Year. The author of “The nbitious Guest” had of course long known that life is unutter- ly endeared by its very transience. That separation, while Sophia and the girls were in Portugal, IS a kind of era in the lives of Hawthorne and Sophia. They d never before been apart so long. But Sophia’s troublesome ugh, which would not go away, made Hawthorne decide that s wife must spend the winter in a sunnier clime. For a while ■ contemplated resigning his position, so that all the family uld go to Italy. An invitation from the O’Sullivans at Lisbon, )wever, solved the problem—Hawthorne thus being able to keep s means of livelihood at the same time that Sophia could escape e chills and damps of an English winter. In this first great parting that he and Sophia had ever had, awthorne had ample occasion to take stock of the happiness at he had in his family. Sophia had been gone scarcely three onths when he sharply realized how low in spirits he was, how tie pleasure he had in anything. A weight constantly upon him ade his tread heavier, and all his bodily movements sluggish, e lay awake late at night thinking sad thoughts, and awoke dore daylight with the same somber fancies still in his mind, s he ascended the stairs to his office, his heart sank from a dim igury of ill news in black-sealed letters. Nothing gave him joy. e remembered Goldsmith’s words—“Remote, unfriended, mel- icholy, slow”—and thought he knew what exile was. Without )phia, life seemed so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble [ carrying it on any further. If it were not for Julian, he did Dt think that he could bear it at all. In Sophia’s letters he found a solace. He was pleasantly sur- ised that the beauty of Sophia’s handwriting was still precisely it had been in their days of courtship, when he had called her ;s Dove. Nobody else ever wrote such letters, so magically de- riptive and narrative. He read them over and over to himself, id then read them aloud to Julian. He just managed to hold It from one of her letters to another. When one arrived, then me life and happiness again. His youth was renewed, his step [437] became lighter, and he went to bed joyfully thinking of wh; Sophia had written. Some comfort, in the absence of Sophia, he had in the fai that now he could afford to have her live and dress and spend, i the court of Portugal, like a lady of station, and to have Una a tend whatever schools that Sophia deemed best. Greater comfoi he had in telling Sophia of his affection, and of having like a surances in her letters; but he wanted her actual presence ii tolerably. As he had told her over and over long ago, he told he now that nothing was real except the bond between them and th children who had grown out of their loves. The people aroun him were still but shadows, and he himself but a shadow till sh would take him in her arms and convert him into substanc( Until then, he did but walk in a dream. The first moment whe they would meet again, however, would set everything right. 01 blessed moment! It was in the family associations that the greatest happinei lay. In their excursions together to sites related to the writing of Wordsworth and Burns and Scott, in spite of Hawthorne’ occasional reservations, they enjoyed themselves in almost pur delight. In her husband’s watchfulness over her health, in his dail tenderness, Sophia found a felicity such as she could hardl imagine. Though they were not always content as they shifte( their residence from place to place—from Liverpool to Rod Ferry, to Southport to Manchester, to Blackheath, to Learning ton, to London—there was happiness enough to outweigh th annoyances. In Leamington, to which they were to return fron Rome, and where Hawthorne a few years later was to completi The Marble Faun, they found what they regarded as one of thi coziest nooks in the world—a paradise of gardens made up o sunny green lawns, and flowers, and shrubbery, and gravel walk —all in the midst of a profound quiet. But it was at Blackheath near London, where, during the summer of 1856, they lived ii the home of their friend Bennoch, who was traveling on the Con tinent with his wife, that the whole family probably spent the hap piest hours they had known since leaving their American home There, in Blackheath, in the deep quitetude of a gardei where there were arbors and garden seats, shrubbery, flowerbecF rosebushes in a profusion of bloom, and pinks, and poppies [438] raniums, sweet peas, and numberless other blossoms in scarlet d yellow, blue and purple, Hawthorne found repose and en- ?ment. There, in that sylvan and rural seclusion, he read lei- rely in Dickens’ Dombey and Son, and, when the afternoon sun 5sed off the lawn, played at bowls with Una and Julian. If ly Sophia’s health had been better, he would not have stinted say that he was as happy as the English summer day was long. And yet, happy as Hawthorne was with his wife and children out him, in the inmost privacy of his thought, deeper down d more secretly burdensome than his restlessness and his weari- ss, were certain dark shadows of memory. If only he could blot im his mind all recollection of the years that he had spent the Salem Custom House! Though he could now modestly 'nk of himself as prosperous and famous, he continued to be ited by the dream which had kept recurring these twenty or irty years—that he was still in college, or even at school, and that had been there unconscionably long, quite unable to make y progress as his contemporaries had made, a dream that his e was a hopeless failure. This dream, he supposed, was the effect that heavy seclusion in which he had shut himself those twelve irs after leaving college, when everybody moved onward and parently left him behind. He thanked God that most of the )om and chill of his life had come when he bore his adversity me, rather than have it come now, when the cloud would in- Ive those whom he loved. When, moreover, he contrasted his esent situation to what it had been in Salem, he saw a vast al to be thankful for. Though its ways were not always clear his apprehension, he was content with what Providence had /en him. While the man, during these four years in England, was oc- pied with such a multiplicity of things, the author was ap- rently in a state of abeyance. In 1854, it is true, Hawthorne isted his publishers, Ticknor and Fields, with a revision for a iw edition of Mosses from an Old Manse, a task which he found bgreeable, for he thought of himself as a good deal changed ice he wrote those dreamy sketches, which he now spoke of [439] facetiously as blasted allegories, the meanings of which, he pi tested, he himself could not now wholly comprehend. Moreov( he wrote a sketch of Dr. Johnson at Uttoxeter for the Lond( Keepsake, as well as a preface to Delia Bacon’s Philosophy of t Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded—both published in 1857, the 1 ; ter subsidized by Hawthorne himself, though he had no fai in Miss Bacon’s theories relating to Shakespeare and Sir Fran( Bacon, his motive in this act of generosity being his compassi( for the devoted and lonely authoress. Only one story did Hawthorne write during his stay in Er land, and that tale he wrote, not for publication, but for a frien It was “The Ghost of Dr. Harris,” which was not to appear print until 1900. Originally Hawthorne had told this story oral at the Liverpool home of Mr. and Mrs. J. P. Heywood, whei one April evening in 1855, as the Heywoods and their gue; sat in the obscurity of a drawing-room before the dim glow of fireplace, a number of tales of English superstition had preced his own. His own story, which he tvrote out for Mrs. Heywo( over a year later, was of no great significance, though that ei ning’s experience was to have a greater effect upon his imaginati life than was almost any other experience he had in Englan for it was on that occasion, in the rich twilight of the Heywo( drawing-room, when all present had been properly attuned 1 listening to a number of ghost stories, that Hawthorne had hea Mrs. Peter Ainsworth of Smithell’s Hall tell a story of a bloo( footstep which marked the threshold of her old mansion. In Mrs. Ainsworth’s story a certain martyr, in Bloody Mar time, being examined before the owner of the Hall and coi mitted to prison, stamped his foot in protest against the injustic Blood had issued from his foot and had left a bloody footma: on the stone pavement, a mark which no scrubbing in all su ceeding generations could remove. Something about this sto at once aroused Hawthorne’s interest. He sought more inform tion in a history of Lancashire and, late in August, visited Smit ell’s Hall, one of the oldest residences of England, an occasic which he recorded in his journal in minute detail. The leger was, of course, all a humbug, though Hawthorne regarded it a good one. Upon his departure, Mrs. Ainsworth’s last request, he drove away, had been that he write a ghost story for her hous [440] d he had promised to do so. His hostess probably never knew the endless effort which Hawthorne, in the last years of his s, was to spend in a fruitless endeavor to give shape to her iry, which he vainly hoped would be his greatest literary work. But it had not been until later that the story of the Bloody otstep had so fully taken possession of his imagination. From ; very beginning of his life in Liverpool, however, though he ote no fiction, for which his consular duties and sightseeing left n no leisure, his mind had at odd moments been occupied by ms for writing. In his journal he noted many characters and ;nes that caught his attention. As he had done twenty years 0, he made journal entries of suggestions for short stories, augh avowedly he had abandoned the writing of short stories, me of these items he was later to include in the abortive story the Bloody Footstep, though at the time there seems to have en in his mind no connection among the details of this mis- [lany. It was only clear that, among many distractions, the old bits of the author continued to assert themselves. It was in the spring of 1854, when he had not yet been in igland a full year, that Hawthorne entered in his journal the mment that his first American ancestor, William Hathorne, had lied some land in Massachusetts to Gervase Elwes, if the latter mid come over to enjoy it. Then, in January, 1855, he wrote to 5 publisher-friend, William Ticknor, that he had the germ of new romance in his mind, which would be all the better for Dcning slowly—though what the story was to be about, he did >t say. On the following April 12, he was more explicit in his Urnal, for there he wrote that in his Romance the original ligrant to America may have carried away with him a family :ret, whereby it was in his power (had he so chosen) to have ought about the ruin of the family. This secret he transmitted his American progeny, by whom it was inherited throughout ? intervening generations. At last, the hero returned to Eng- id, and found that, by means of his secret, he still had it in his wer to procure the downfall of the family. Though in his journal Hawthorne himself made no connec- i'n between the germ of his Romance and his earlier journal try regarding Gervase Elwes, the connection seems clear ough, despite the fact that he had reversed the inheritance. [441] Nor, though he had made the brief journal outline of the pi of his Romance in the week following that in which he hj heard Mrs. Ainsworth tell the story of the Bloody Footstep, d he in his thinking relate the two tales. The proposal to conne the two was to come later. At the time, they were separate e tides, both equally nebulous. The author, it is clear, had from the first determined use his English experiences as grist for his literary mill. The ma in judging the sights that England had to offer, had decided th the cathedrals disappointed him least and, indeed, pleased hi most. But it was in none of the matter considered by the auth as suitable for his Romance, or at the time most pleasing to tl man, that Hawthorne as man and author was most greatly profit in these experiences in England. In his residence in Boston, Hawthorne had of course acquiri familiarity with the art which Boston had to offer. In the a galleries of Boston he and Sophia had had many of their try! in the days of their courtship. In the early years of their marriac too, Sophia had continued her painting. Moreover, upon tl nature of the artist and upon theories of art, Hawthorne had loi contemplated, a truth sufficiently exemplified in such of his stori as “The Devil in Manuscript,” “Edward Randolph’s Portrait “The Prophetic Pictures,” “The Hall of Fantasy,” “Drown( Wooden Image,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “The Great Stoi Face,” and, incidentally, in The Blithedale Romance. It was England, however, where he acquired his first extensive acquair ance with the arts of painting and sculpture, with consequent which, apparently, he never so much as dreamed of while he w still in England. This acquaintance had not begun auspiciously. Because tl British Museum happened to be closed on the day when Ha thorne and Sophia had chosen to visit it, in early September 1855, they made the best of the occasion by viewing a galle of pictures at the Pantheon, and the first picture that they s£ was Haydon’s “Resurrection of Lazarus,” which Hawthor [44^] )ught of as mainly vulgar and disagreeable. The best thing Haydon, in Hawthorne’s view, was a sketch of a portrait of ndsworth, which brought out Wordsworth’s likeness very poet- lly. Almost without exception, however, Hawthorne found s gallery of English paintings very uninteresting. Nor did he /e better fortune when, a few days later, he had his first ex- rience with the British Museum. It was a hopeless and depress- 5 business for him to go through such an immense multifarious )W, with no prospect of seeing it more at leisure, glancing at a )usand things, but really taking in nothing, and getting no good m anything. He glimpsed along among the old marbles—Elgin 1 others—the oddest fragments, many of them smashed by their I from high places, or by being pounded to pieces by barbarians, gnawed away by time; almost always a nose knocked off; some- les a headless form; a great deficiency of feet and hands—poor, limed veterans in this hospital of incurables. The beauty of the most perfect of these objects, Hawthorne lected, must be rather guessed at and seen by faith, than with ? bodily eye; to look at these corroded faces and forms was like ing to see angels through mist and cloud. He supposed that le-tenths of those who seemed to be in raptures about these frag- :nts did not really care about them. Neither did he. Certainly, trying to see so much in one day, he could only wander from II to hall of the Museum with a weary and heavy heart, wishing leaven forgive him!) that the Elgin Marbles and the frieze of the rthenon might all be burnt into lime. Nevertheless, he persisted in what he consciously thought of as education. Very deliberately he took his family for a residence about two months at Manchester for the purpose of studying ; Art Exhibition which was in progress there in the summer 1857. Hence he now had a leisure denied him on his earlier ty visits to the British Museum. He learned, too, to concen- te his attention upon one or two objects of art at a time. Later, D, when the family was in London after the consulate had been igned, he again returned to a leisurely examination of art ex- litions there. The circumstances were such that Hawthorne naturally con¬ ned himself mostly with a study of painting. In his first ob- [443] servation at Manchester, it was Hogarth who pleased him mo because Hogarth most successfully interpreted life to him, thoug Hogarth, like most English painters, could not paint anythin high, heroic, and ideal. He was strong in homeliness and uglines weak in efforts at the beautiful. It seemed to Hawthorne una countable that the English painters’ achievements should be j much inferior to those of the English poets, who had really el vated the human mind. He now respected Haydon more than 1 had at first—and thus, perhaps, unconsciously began that alter tion in his general views which was to characterize his schoolin But as for Turner, Hawthorne at the moment cared no more f( his light-colored pictures than for so much lacquered ware ( painted gingerbread. The only modem paintings that really toe hold of his mind were the works of Hunt, and one or two oth( painters of the Pre-Raphaelite school, though even in these son medium seemed left out—some enchantment. With the most lif like reproduction, there was no illusion. And so, especially during the last two years of the residem in England, Hawthorne’s education in the understanding of scul ture and painting continued. In the Crystal Palace he saw cas or copies of the most famous statues of all ages, those by Micht angelo and Cellini and many other masters. He made numeroi visits to St. Paul’s, to the British Museum, and especially to tl Art Exhibition at Manchester, where he saw portraits by Murill Velazquez, and Titian, and landscapes by Ruysdael and othei Although he had always been an omnivorous reader, at no tin had he recorded in his journals an account of his reactions to h readings in a fullness approaching what he recorded in respon to his examination of these two arts. In this examination his mind was often beset by doubts at disappointments, some of which, however, vanished as time wei on. It was sad to think that mankind, after centuries of cultivatic of the beautiful arts, could produce no more splendid spectacl than those he viewed in these exhibitions. But, though they we not very grand, he confessed over and over again that he himst was not capable of admiring these collections, which were, aft all, the very flower of Time. For a while, he doubted the value of portrait painting, doubt it a genuine idea of a person could come through the conceit the artist and the affectation of the sitter, though presently, er seeing some portraits by Murillo and others, he changed mind. It was with skepticism that he began his observations the nude. It seemed ludicrous, as he looked at the statuary in Paul’s, that so many English warriors were represented as re- ving their death-wounds almost stark naked. He would not be- re that a painter was a man of genius unless he could make the Weness of his subject illuminate and transfigure any given tern of coat and breeches. He protested that he did not mind dity in a modest and natural way; but the women in the paint- ;s of William Etty thrust their nakedness forward with such lice aforethought, and especially so enhanced their posteriors, t Hawthorne felt inclined to kick them. The worst of it was t they were simply not beautiful. As for the naked goddesses of Old Masters, he wearied of them, for they seemed to him ^er to have had any real life and warmth in the painter’s imag- tion—or, if so, it was the impure warmth of the unchaste men who sat or sprawled for them. Quite different was his feel- ; toward a statue by a French artist, a statue displayed in the ^stal Palace. It was of a naked mother, in a sitting posture, with i leg crossed over the other, the woman clasping her elevated :e with both hands. In the hollow cradle thus formed by her QS lay two sweet little babies, as snug and close to her heart if they had not yet been born—the mother encircling and per- ling them with love. The infinite pathos and strange terror en to this beautiful group lay in the fact that the happy mother 5 Eve, and Cain and Abel the two innocent babes. Though Hawthorne, in these English years, applied himself lously to the study of art, he remained skeptical of the con- sseur. He himself, he admitted, might not recognize pictorial :iius where it existed, and he might, in his approval of acknowl- ;ed masters, even be judging by the wrong principles laid down the connoisseurs. True enough, a picture could not be fully oyed except by long and intimate acquaintance; yet pictorial ■ius ought to have the power of making itself known even to uninstructed mind, as literary genius does. If it exists only connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious affair. Hawthorne doubted [445] that the connoisseur was usually a man of deep poetic feelin] one who dealt with the picture through his heart, or set it in poem, or comprehended it morally. It was in the principles and philosophy of art, of cours rather than in its techniques, that Hawthorne’s interest lay, an this was probably the case because in the former he saw so mar parallels with his own literary art. Perhaps no new principL emerged from this study of his maturity; but old ones were sure' seen anew and confirmed with a greater distinctness than ev( before. Though at first he had been repelled by Turner, Hawthon came to appreciate him, at least within limits. But the debt th; he owed to Turner was that that favorite of Ruskin had compelk Hawthorne to examine anew his own theory of the Romance ; he had stated it in the “Preface” to The House of the Seve Gables. There Hawthorne had said that, though the Roman( sinned unpardonably so far as it swerved aside from the trui of the human heart, it would hardly be guilty of a literary crin if it mingled the marvelous rather liberally with the probab and ordinary course of man’s experience. Now, though he can to acknowledge that in some of Turner’s paintings there was ii deed the light that never was on sea or land, too often, it seeme to him. Turner’s pictures did not in the least look like what th( were supposed actually to typify. Hawthorne did not think th; he could be driven out of the idea that a picture ought to ha\ something in common with what the spectator sees in Natur In his observations on the old Dutch Masters, there recurre the same question of the proper blend of the real and ideal. Sue lifelike representations of cabbages, onions, turnips, cauliflowe and peas; such perfect realities of brass kettles and kitchen crocl ery, Hawthorne had never thought that the skill of man coul produce. Yet, strangely, even the commonest household article an earthen pitcher, for example—became suggestive and spiritu; when thus represented with entire accuracy. The success of the: Dutchmen lay in the fact that they got at the soul of comme things, and so made them types and interpreters of the spiritu world. A similar accomplishment Hawthorne had envisioned the pictures in the Boston saloon where Coverdale had met li [446] d acquaintance, Moodie. In those pictures, too, objects were so jrfectly imitated that you seemed to have the genuine article jfore you, and yet with an indescribable ideal charm. It was, erefore, in Hawthorne’s view, the function of the true artist to herealjze the'ideal truth out of the prosaic truth of Nature. These, then, were some of the principles which had become lalities in Hawthorne’s philosophy of art—these and the Plo- niian conviction that beauty consists of an illumination from ithin, as well as the persuasion as old as Plato and Aristotle that major function of art is to elevate the human mind, to educate id refine it. Long before Matthew Arnold had given currency I the idea, it was Hawthorne’s belief also, that all great art is an iterpretation of life. When Hawthorne had paid his last visit to the Art Exhibition Manchester, he recorded in his journal that pictures were cer- inly quite other things to him from what they were at his first sit. And when he went, just before his departure from England, ir the last time to the British Museum to see the Elgin and other larbles, he was glad to find himself able to sympathize more lan heretofore with those forms of grace and beauty—poor, aimed immortalities as they were—headless and legless trunks, idlike cripples, faces beautiful and broken-nosed—heroic shapes hich had stood so long, or lain prostrate so long, in the open r, that even the atmosphere of Greece had almost dissolved the eternal layer of marble; and yet, however much they might be orn away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility :emed as deep in them as the very heart of the stone. It seemed ) Hawthorne now that these qualities could not be destroyed ccept by grinding the stones to powder. Apparently Hawthorne had spent so much time in English :t galleries solely for personal pleasure, a pleasure shared by Dphia, who was indefatigable and boundlessly enthusiastic in er observations of the treasures in such galleries. There is no idication that Hawthorne at the time associated these expe- ences with any writing that he might subsequently do. Unknown ) himself, however, these experiences were presently to lead him ot only to a continued observation of art in Italy; they were to aide him in the choice of characters for his next Romance, as ell as to provide him with auxiliary subject matter to give it [447] substance. It is surely not idle to say that The Marble Faun, whicl treats so largely of art and artists, had some of its most significan beginnings in Hawthorne’s study of painting and sculpture dm ing his sojourn in England. Though the projected English Ro mance was never completed, the four years in England had unex pectedly served the artist well, for it was through The MarbU Faun that Hawthorne was to acquire his widest acclaim. [44^] ^I'/i-e^ Hawthorne left England with his family for le Continent, early in January, 1858, it was his plan to remain jroad another year. But various circumstances, unforeseen or :yond his control, hindered his return home until mid-June, I60. The intervening period of two years and more, spent in aly and again in England, was full of events and impressions gnificant alike to man and artist. He became a seasoned traveler, ith a widened view of man and the world, with such an active icial life as he had never known before, with a new acquaintance ith artists in allied fields, and with augmented experiences in iendship. He had a personal sorrow that pierced his very vitals, e was frequently ill, and he was aware that he was growing der. Still, he was very happy, too—happy in his family, in his isure, in his renewed enjoyment of nature, and in the oppor- inity to be a spectator of some of the greatest art in the world— i architecture, painting, and sculpture. In spite of illness and ►rrow, he effervesced with ideas for his writing, ideas which found tpression in his longest Romance, the publication of which al- lost simultaneously in England and America brought him the idest and most favorable acclaim that he was personally to low. He returned home, not only with the applause of the world, at deepened by experience, and still hopeful that much work— srhaps his greatest—yet lay before him. For twenty years—since Hawthorne’s days at the Boston Cus- •m House—Italy had been a dream, a colorful dream enhanced { 449 \ by the reading of Lord Byron’s description in Childe Harold’ Pilgrimage. Italy was the Mother of Arts, the Parent of our Re ligion. Rome was the city of the soul, the Eternal City, the Niobi of Nations, where still stood the dread statue of Pompey, at th( foot of which Caesar had been killed, the austerest form of nakec majesty; where the Tarpeian Rock had cured all ambition; anc where the Coliseum still provided, in the azure gloom of ai Italian night, an exhaustless mine of contemplation. Florence along the banks of the smiling Arno, was the Etrurian Athens once the home of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio—he of the Hun dred Tales of love. There Galileo had watched the stars from hi tower. There Venus loved in stone, and filled the air around witl beauty, the loveliest dream That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam. Thrasimene’s lake, where Roman and Carthaginian had onc( been locked in storm of battle, now lay like a sheet of silver, hei plain rent by no ravage save the gentle plow. Near by, Clitumnui stream was now a living crystal, which poet might fancy as the haunt of river nymph, A mirror and a bath for Beauty’s youngest daughters or Romancer might imagine as setting of the love of Faun and mortal. In short, Hawthorne—and Sophia, too—approached Ital) with the heightened sentiments of the time, sentiments vivified foi them, as for many others, by their sympathetic and enthusiastic reading of Byron’s poem of travel. If such was the dream, the beginnings of the reality were quite otherwise. The first view of the Mediterranean had indeed been all that had been anticipated—the water had been blue as heaven and bright with sunshine, as fine a sea view as Hawthorne had ever seen; but the train ride through France had been cold and dreary, the landscape bleak, barren, and brown—when it was visible at all through the frost on the carriage windows—and they had arrived in Rome, after an unhappy journey by carriage and four decrepit horses, not much before midnight, half frozen and miserable, Hawthorne having caught a cold along the tvay, with a low fever that took the light and warmth out of everything. Dur [450] g the first fortnight in Rome, Hawthorne had a wretched time, nd this was sunny Italyl When he was able to be about, he one ly took a slide on a great sheet of ice around the fountain in ont of St. Peter’s—just for the sake of doing what he never lOught to do in Rome. Hawthorne thoroughly disliked the place. The atmosphere of ome, he felt certain, had a peculiar quality of malignity. Re- ictantly he supposed that the coming of warmer weather might concile him to the city against his will. At the moment, Rome emed to be characterized by cold, narrow lanes, between tall, ^ly, mean-looking whitewashed houses—sour bread, pavements ost uncomfortable to the feet, enormous prices for poor hous- ig; beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples and broken monu- ents, and clothes hanging to dry about them; French soldiers, onks, and priests of every degree; a shabby population, smoking id cigars; and everywhere—filth. Even through the Forum, or meath the triumphal arch of Titus or Constantine, one had to ok well to his steps. It was safer to look downward than upward, hatever the merit of the sculptures aloft! And reconciled to Rome Hawthorne did become, though with actuating moods and with qualifications. Upon his departure om Rome for a four-month residence in Florence, he realized lat he had a strange affection for Rome—that it was very singular, le sad embrace with which Rome had taken possession of his soul, he city pulled at his heartstrings far more than London did, erhaps because, so it seemed to him, the intellect finds a home 1 Rome more than in any other spot in the world, and wins the eart with it, in spite of a good many things strewn all about to isgust. And when he returned to Rome from the residence in lorence, entering by the Cassian way, through the Campagna, he ;membered his first dismal entry to the city, that wintry mid- Ight, benumbed with cold, ill, weary. Now he had a quiet, gentle, •mfortable pleasure, as if he were returning after many wander- gs. Rome seemed to have drawn itself into his heart, not only ; London had not done, but even as sleepy Salem, or even little oncord itself, never did and never would. Only a week later, however, when another of many colds had iken the life out of him, Hawthorne hated the Roman atmos- lere. All the pleasure of getting back, all home feeling, evapora- [451] ted. Now again he was impressed by the languor, the lassitude ( Rome—its weary pavements, its little life, pressed down by a gre: weight of death. Late in May, 1859, when he was taking his far well walks in Rome, the Pincian, the Borghese grounds, and S Peter’s in the early sunlight never had looked so beautiful, nor th sky so bright and blue. However, he did not wish ever to see an of these objects again, though no place ever took so strong a hoi of his being as Rome, nor ever seemed so close to him and s strangely familiar. Though he had been very miserable there an languid with the effects of the atmosphere and disgusted with thousand things in its daily life, still he could not say that h hated it; perhaps he might fairly own a love for it. But life bein too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments, li desired never to set eyes on it again. When he entered Marseille on his return to England, France in springtime seemed cheerfi and effervescing, after he had lived so long between asleep an awake in sluggish Italy. It was really like passing from death int life. During the year and four months spent in Italy, of course, multitude of sights mingled to shape Hawthorne’s impressions ( city and countryside, pictures characteristic of the land, seem pleasant to look upon, to tuck away in memory, and to thin upon in idle reverie, or perhaps to use in future fiction. On a late April afternoon, when the warmth of the sun w; freshened by the gentle life of a breeze and when it was stimula ingly cool the moment one stepped into the shade, the present lil of Rome had scarcely a greater charm to offer than the scene on th Pincian. There, within an hour or two of sunset, the gardens wer populous, and the seats, except when the sun fell full upon then were hard to come by. Ladies arrived in carriages, splendidl dressed; children were abundant, much impeded in their frolic and rendered stiff and stately by the finery which they wore; En^ lish gentlemen, and Americans with their families; the flower c the Roman population, too, both male and female, mostly dressei with great nicety; but a large intermixture of artists, shabbil picturesque; and other persons, not of the first stamp. A Frenc band, comprising a great many brass instruments, by and by be gan to play; and what with music, sunshine, a delightful atmo phere, flowers, grass, well-kept pathways, bordered tvith bo) hedges, pines, cypresses, horse chestnuts, flowering shrubs, an [452] manner of cultivated beauty, the scene was a very lively and reeable one. The fine equipages that drove round and round rough the carriage paths were another noticeable item. The )man aristocracy were magnificent in their aspect, driving road with beautiful horses and footmen in rich liveries, some- aes as many as three behind and one sitting by the coachman. No less interesting to Hawthorne, in another way, was the azza Navona, which was usually the scene of more business than ;med to be transacted anywhere else in Rome. In some parts it, rusty iron was offered for sale, locks and keys, old tools, and such rubbish; in other parts, vegetables—green peas, onions, uliflowers, radishes, onions, and the like; also, stalls or wheel- rrows containing apples, chestnuts, green almonds in their isks, and squash seeds—salted and dried in an oven—apparently avorite delicacy of the Romans. There were lemons and oranges; ills of fish; cigars of various qualities; bread in loaves or in small igs, a great many of which were strung together on a long stick, d thus carried round for sale. Women and men sat with these ings to sell, or carried them about in trays, or on boards on eir heads, crying them with shrill and hard voices. There was shabby crowd and much babble; very little picturesqueness of stume or figure, however, except, here and there, an old white- arded beggar. A few of the men had the peasant costume—a ort jacket and breeches of light blue cloth and white stockings ;he ugliest dress, Hawthorne thought, that he had ever seen, he women went bareheaded, and seemed fond of scarlet and her bright colors, but were homely and clumsy in form. The azza was dingy in its general aspect, and very dirty, being strewn th straw, vegetable tops, and the rubbish of a week’s marketing; It, so it seemed to Hawthorne, there was more life in it than saw elsewhere in Rome. He was not always, however, a mere spectator of such scenes, metimes he and Sophia were as much a part of the Italian street ama as anyone else, carried quite away by the spectacle and the itiments it engendered. Once, at Florence, in June, on the Eve St. John, they drove in an open barouche to see the sights. They used on the Ponte Vecchio to look westward, up the river Arno, ■was a scene of enchantment. The main bridges were hung with »bes of light, like huge bubbles, and all were reflected in the [453] water beneath. On both sides of the river the parapets wet studded with the same delicate globes, thus making a glitterin comice, doubled beneath; and lighted boats floated quietly i every direction, each one a moving constellation of stars on th surface of the water as well as in the pictured world below. Late they visited the Loggia di Lanzi, which was all illuminated, an there they had a dim vision of the heroic Perseus, with upraise arm, holding Medusa’s severed head, as well as of Michelangelo “David.” Meanwhile, a band of musicians stood in the Loggi: performing symphonies of the great composers. Hawthorne an Sophia ended their evening by eating ice cream, and they wer home exceedingly comfortable. But sometimes their experiences affected them more pn foundly. One spring evening, in Florence, too, after tea, an just at sunset, Hawthorne and Sophia and Una and Julian wer out for a walk, during which they promenaded the whole length t the Via Fomace. All the world was in the street in the warn rosy twilight, which seemed filled with humming voices. Befoi the doors of cafes were tables, at which people were taking n freshments, and it went to Hawthorne’s heart to see a glass c foaming English ale. As they returned home over the Amo, cros ing the Ponte di Santa Trinita, they were struck by the beautih scene of the broad, calm river, with the palaces along its shore repeated in it, on either side, and the neighboring bridges, toe just as perfect in the tide beneath as in the air above—a city c dream so close to the actual one. It was not possible to tell whet the material city ended. The thronging crowds, whether the would or no, became, in their reflections, spiritual beings, wit bonnets, hats, crinolines, and horses that would never be wear and carriages that never would raise the dust. God, Hawthorn was sure, has a meaning in putting such spiritual symbols cor tinually beside us. On the journeys from Rome to Florence and back. Hawthorn saw many bits of rustic Italian life—such as old women tendin pigs or sheep by the roadside, or spinning with a distaff; sturc sunburnt creatures, in petticoats, but otherwise manlike, at avoi side by side with male laborers in the fields. Women and gir bore huge bundles of twigs and shrubs, or grass, with scarlet po] pies and blue flowers intermixed, the bundles so large as almo hide the woman’s figure from head to heel, sometimes reaching ly halfway down her back, so as to show the crooked knife slung lind, with which she had been reaping this strange harvest ;af. A Pre-Raphaelite painter, Hawthorne reflected, would find admirable subject in one of these girls, stepping with a free, :ct, and graceful carriage, her burden on her head; and the scellaneous herbage and flowers would give such a painter all ; scope he could desire for minute and various delineation of ;ure. In the villages all the population seemed to be out of doors: ailor sewing in the open air, with a young priest sitting beside n; children at play; women mending clothes, embroidering, nning the distaff at their own doorsteps; many idlers, letting : morning pass in the sweet-do-nothing; all assembled in the eet, as in the common room of one large household. And every- ere in the villages were beggars, hovering about like a swarm flies, ragged and dirty, and tainting the air with a very dis- •eeable odor from their rags and dirt. Such village scenes were )eated again and again—the same narrow, dirty, time-darkened set of piled-up houses; the same swarm of ill-to-do people, ipe-laden donkeys, little stands or shops of roasted chestnuts, iches, tomatoes, white and purple figs; the same evidence of a tile land, and grimy poverty in the midst of abundance which ture tried to heap in their hands. It seemed strange that they ild never grasp it. As for these Italians themselves, Hawthorne thought them a 'able people—almost all with whom he came in contact. Though ly had great and little faults, they were still sweet, amiable, and ;asant to encounter, save when they begged, or when one had bargain with them. It was not, however, with the eye of a stu- it of sociology that Hawthorne regarded Italian life. Rather, was a man and an artist with a turn for the picturesque. There iio evidence that he ever contemplated writing a novel present- ; Italian manners or customs, or treating problems of contem- rary Italian life. His interest lay in the Italy of the past—its tory, and especially its art. The present Italy interested him iiost solely because theie was cast over it the strange spell of ■ Past. When, finally, he placed his last finished Romance in [455] Italy, it was only setting and atmosphere that he truly employee His characters did not pretend to be real Italians, and his thena was more universal than the Eternal City itself. If, however, there was one aspect of nineteenth-century Ital which engaged Hawthorne’s attention more than any other, was its religion. This was true in large part because the religio of Italy was so commonly associated with its architecture and i painting and its sculpture, subjects which Hawthorne had bi gun to study with unwonted zeal during his stay in England. Th omnipresence of this religion, however, and its relative novelty i his experience, doubtless also called it to his attention. Of coursi the New England of Hawthorne’s day was not wholly unai quainted with Catholicism: Dr. Bentley, in spite of his privat contempt for the sect, had, in the name of freedom of religioi aided the first priest to come to Salem. But Catholicism Wc mainly the religion of the immigrant Irish, laborers and servant neither whose numbers nor whose social station made them coi spicuous. At any rate, in his written record, Hawthorne had sai little about the topic, though, in “Endicott and the Red Cross, he had apparently given tacit approval when Endicott had rippe the Popish symbol from the English flag. On the other hanc though without reference to Catholicism, Hawthorne had n marked, in “The Gentle Boy,” that the utter plainness of th Quaker meetinghouse offered nothing to excite the devotioi which, without external aids, often remains latent in the humai heart. Such external aids and their concomitants Hawthorne noi witnessed in large measure. When he first came to Rome, he cor fessed that he felt embarrassed and unwilling, when visiting th churches, to pass, with his heresy, between a devotee and his saint and his New England breeding made him shy of moving about it a church during the services. When, one day, he stepped into th Pantheon, a number of people were sitting or kneeling around others dipping their fingers in holy water, and bending the kne as they passed the shrines and chapels, until they reached the on [456] lich they had selected as the particular altar for their devotions, ^erybody seemed so devout, and in a frame of mind so suited the day and place, that it really made him feel a little awkward )t to be able to kneel down along with them. It was his opinion at a great deal of devout and reverential feeling was kept alive people’s hearts by the Catholic mode of worship. Everywhere there were inducements to devotion. As he jour- ;yed from Rome to Florence with his family, Hawthorne ob- rved the innumerable shrines in all sorts of situations; some ider arched niches, or little penthouses; or perhaps in some bit old Roman masonry, on the wall of a wayside inn, or in a allow cavity of the natural rock, or high upward in the deep Its of the road—everywhere, in short, so that nobody needed be a loss when he felt the religious sentiment stir within him. At ena he saw an open chapel adjacent to the Palazzo Publico, so ry convenient for the devotions of the crowd on the piazza. No mbt the daily prayers offered at the shrine might be numbered j the thousands, brief but earnest—like those glimpses which awthorne used to catch at the blue sky, revealing so much in an stant, while he was toiling at Brook Farm. In Florence, in the lurch of Santa Maria Novella, he was pleased by the chapels and rines, and thought of the cool, dusky refreshment of these holy aces, which afforded such a refuge from the hot noon of the reets and piazzas, and probably suggested devotional ideas to its squenters, who, when praying, perhaps felt fanned by a eath of Paradise. It pleased him to think that so much religious )servance, as regards outward forms, was diffused through the lole week that these people had no need to intensify the Sabbath cept by making it gladden the other days. It was the confessional, probably, which offered to Hawthorne e greatest novelty, and which he saw on every hand. In Siena, the cathedral, out of mere curiosity, he watched a woman at nfession, just to see how long it would take her to tell her sins, 2 growth of perhaps a week. How long she had been there he¬ re he noticed her, he did not know, but nearly an hour passed fore the priest came suddenly from the confessional, looking ary and moist with perspiration, and took his way out of the hedral. It must be very tedious, it occurred to Hawthorne, for >riest to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace [457] iniquities of the multitude of penitents, when such iniquiti( could not often be redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sii Still, on another day, when he had watched another penitent vei long at her outpourings, he had occasion to think well of th Catholic practice. Her confession over, the woman sat down o the same bench with him—a country woman, with simple, m; tronly face, which, he observed, seemed solemnized and softene with the comfort that she had obtained by disburdening herself ( the soil of worldly frailties, and by receiving absolution. He coul say nothing against the sincerity of such devotion. It was a seer which he was to remember and to incorporate, by and by, ti gether with later qualified reflections, in the substance oi Th Marble Faun. Where, however, Hawthorne’s own predilections most spoi taneously coincided with those of Catholicism was in a certai aspect of its art. In Florence, in the Uffizi gallery, where a laro collection of pictures was hung in chronological order, when h looked at a large, dark, and truly ugly picture of Christ bearin the cross and sinking beneath it, there came knocking at his hear and got admittance there, a sense of Christ’s agony and the fearfi wrong that mankind had done its Redeemer, and the sorrow ( those who loved him. It seemed a pity to Hawthorne that Pn testantism should have entirely laid aside this mode of appealin to the religious sentiment. And this was a conviction reinforce when, at Siena, he saw Sodoma’s famous fresco of Christ bound t the pillar, after being scourged. So far as expression was concernec painting, it seemed to Hawthorne, had never done anythin better. In all the generations since it was painted, it must hav softened thousands of hearts, and been more effectual than a mi lion sermons. The loneliness suggested was one of the strikin characteristics of the picture. And then, too, Sodoma seemed t have reconciled the impossibilities of combining divinity with suffering and outraged humanity. Really, the picture was a thin to stand and weep at. No other painter, in Hawthorne’s judgmen had done anything that could deserve to be compared to this- in employing the handmaiden Art to one of her highest end In spite of the attractiveness of the face of this Italian Cathol coin, it had, in Hawthorne’s view, another side. He observed wit some amusement, in Perugia, after his gift to a beggar had bee [458] warded by copious prayers and benedictions, that a great many essings could be bought for very little money in Italy. In Rome, the basilica of St. John Lateran, when an attendant showed m the table at which the Last Supper was eaten, Hawthorne fleeted that it would be very delightful to believe in this table, i Rome, too, when he visited the old Mamertine Prison, he was own St. Peter’s dungeon, where the Apostle had left the imprint his visage on the wall, and where a spring of water had mirac- ously gushed up to enable the saint to baptize his jailor. It is best, in such matters, Hawthorne supposed, to be simple and lildlike. After all, the belief of a thousand years and more gives sort of reality to such traditions. When Hawthorne tasted the ackish water of the miraculous spring, he suspected, however, at St. Peter still dabbled in this water, and tempered its quali- ;s according to the faith of those who drank it. There were other difficulties, of varying natures. Once, in orence, in the Church of the Annunziata, an old woman in the loir prayed alternately to Hawthorne and Sophia and to the ints, with most success to the latter, he hoped, though certainly IT prayers to him seemed the more fervent of the two. Again, at e entrance of a church in Rome, a pickpocket tried to snatch )phia’s purse, and, failing in this enterprise, he passed in, dipped s fingers in the holy water, and paid his devotions at a shrine, awthorne supposed that, missing the purse, he said his prayers, the hope, perhaps, that the saint would send him better luck ?xt time. If only one could see any good effects in the daily life ■ such people, one might deem it an excellent thing to be able find incense and prayer always ascending. He really wondered at these Catholics were not better people. Hawthorne heartily wished, too, that the priests were better en, and that human nature, divinely influenced, could be de- nded upon for a constant supply and succession of good and ire ministers, their religion having so many good points. But len he visited the church of the Capuchins in Rome, he found filthy, and really disgraceful to behold, the odor of sanctity, if ch it was, not being an agreeable fragrance. Something in the sagreeableness of this experience, perhaps, led him to choose Capuchin for the villian of The Marble Faun. In Florence, in 'iiting the Church of Or San Michele, an old market transformed [459] into a church, Hawthorne remarked that there one could now bu his salvation instead of his dinner—the priests, at any rate, in suring one salvation, and taking the price. In front of severa churches in Rome he had seen an inscription in Latin; “Indm gentia Plenaria et Perpetua Pro Cunctis Mortuis et Vivis,” thai which, it seemed to him, nothing more could be asked or desiref Kissing the iron cross which stood in the center of the Coliseuir he learned, gained one an indulgence of seven years. Catholicism, in short, was not for Hawthorne, though it wa not Catholicism alone which he found an empty shell. In En^ land, he had attended religious services in some of the great catht drals—Chester, Durham, St. Paul’s, Westminster, York—and ha always come away disappointed. He understood the better wh his Puritan ancestors had been out of patience with all this muir mery, these cold, dry sermons—the most superficial rubbish. Th faith of the English Church was but a faith of heavy ceremonial! Nor did he feel more at home in the London Unitarian chape where preached W. H. Channing, once at Brook Farm, and wher the great Joseph Priestley himself used to preach. Hawthorne ot served that a good deal of the form and ceremonial of the Englisl Established Church had been preserved, and that the prayers mus be excessively tedious to the congregation, since the changes mad in those prayers could not leave them with much sanctity attache( to them. But then he had dismissed contemporary Unitarianisc long ago when, at the Old Manse, Emerson had brought Barzilla Frost, Dr. Ripley’s successor at Concord’s First Church. Frosi Hawthorne had thought, was a useful member of his profession for he had never suspected the necessity of that profession to man kind, and therefore labored with faith and confidence, as minister did long ago, when they really had something to do. As for him self, Hawthorne had felt that the world needed a new revelatioi —a new system—since there seemed to be no life in the old one. H himself had preferred to worship in a house not made with hand —at the extremity of Peter’s path, under an oak, on the verge o the broad meadow. His own religious beliefs were limited to a few points, neve systematically stated. He had a sure faith in Providence, in a Prov dence that knows better than man. He thought of Jesus as th Redeemer of mankind, though in what sense explicitly he seem [460] )t to have recorded; he had no sympathy with the concept of sus as an inexorable judge—whether the idea occurred in itholicism or in the Puritanism of his ancestors. He believed that the last day—that is, in all future days, when men see themselves they are—man’s only inexorable judge will be himself, and e punishment of his sins will be the perception of them. He id, finally, an unwavering belief in the immortality of the soul, od himself, he believed, cannot compensate us for being born ort of eternity. All the misery endured here constitutes a claim r another life, and, still more, all the happiness, because all Lie happiness involves something more than earth owns, and :eds something more than a mortal capacity for the enjoyment it. Around these few principles Hawthorne gathered the body of s convictions; in them he found courage and solace; and by em he tried to govern the conduct of his life. All the while that Hawthorne had been filling his mind with ipressions of picturesque Italy, he had also had such a multitude pleasant social experiences as he perhaps never had had before, is own reputation as author and as a former government officer a distinguished position doubtless made such matters the easier r him; but it was Sophia, with her energy and enterprise, who, at Lenox, was largely responsible for leading him away from ose paths of solitude into which his inclinations prompted him. t any rate, there were innumerable breakfasts and teas and nners—not now, as often in England, by way of lionizing or of- :ial public appearances, but friendly occasions, where for the ost part the other hosts or guests were fellow artists—writers, inters, sculptors, English or American—and where the conversa- )n often turned to art. There were many visits, also, to the idios of English and American artists, visits during which topics ; rtaining to art mingled agreeably with conversation on personal family affairs. In these circumstances, far different from those i;ending the solitary walks with Emerson or Thoreau in the ys at the Old Manse, there developed some warm and deep [461] friendships. Visits from old American friends, too, contribute to such a mellowing atmosphere of human relations as Hawthon had often idealized in his writings in the lonely years of his autho ship. Early in the Roman experience, Hawthorne dined wi( Thomas Buchanan Read, the poet and artist, the other gues being painters and sculptors, among them the English sculpt( John Gibson, who, Hawthorne supposed, stood foremost in h profession at the time, who had introduced the novelty of tintir his statues, and whom, together with others, as well as the occasic itself, Hawthorne was later to represent in “An Aesthetic Cor pany” in The Marble Faun. He renewed his acquaintance wil the American painter, C. G. Thompson, who had painted his po trait after the writing of The Scarlet Letter, an acquaintam which became a family friendship. Hawthorne thought of Thom; son as a true artist, and none better among contemporary Amei cans, the beauty of his pictures coming from very far beneat the surface, out of the heart of a man earnest, faithful, and r ligious in his worship of art. Early, too, in the life in Rome, Ha^ thorne met his fellow New Englanders, the sculptresses Miss Ha riet Hosmer and Miss Louisa Lander, for the latter of whom Ha^ thorne sat for his bust, and some of whose characteristics and ci cumstances he was later to attribute, in The Marble Faun, I Hilda, his heroine. Of the numerous writers with whom Hawthorne formed close acquaintance in Italy, his journal entries would seem to ii dicate that none interested him more than Eredrika Bremer, th Swedish novelist who had come to visit him at Lenox; Mrs. Ann Jameson, the English authoress of Shakespeare’s Women and book on the lives of famous painters; and Robert and Elizabet Browning, who most engaged the interest of both Hawthoin and Sophia. It was in April of the Hawthornes’ first spring in Rome the Miss Bremer called to renew the acquaintance begun in the Bed shires. Now his first impression of her was that she was the fur niest little old fairy whom one could imagine, with a huge nos to which all the rest of her was but an insufficient appendag( but he felt at once that she was most gentle, kind, womanly, syn pathetic, and true. There was no better heart than hers, and nc [462] any sounder heads. Then, too, Hawthorne thought that there as a very pleasant atmosphere of maidenhood about her; he was nsible of a freshness and odor of the morning still in this little ithered rose—its recompense for never having been gathered id worn, but only diffusing fragrance on its stem. She was a ost amiable little woman, worthy to be the maiden aunt of the hole human race. Miss Bremer lived in the tiniest and humblest domicile Haw- lome had ever seen in Rome, in a large old building situated little way from the brow of the Tarpeian Rock. She welcomed awthorne and Sophia with the greatest cordiality. They talked good deal about art, although Hawthorne suspected that she lew nothing about the subject. Once they spoke of fleas—insects lat, in Rome, came home to everybody’s business and bosom, id poor little Miss Bremer was tormented with one while she Dured the tea. When the Hawthornes took their leave. Miss remer kissed Sophia affectionately on each cheek, and then, tum- ig to Hawthorne, pressed his hand. Hawthorne feared that she id not like him half so well as he liked her, that she thought him aamiable. He was sorry if this were so, because she was such a lod, kindly, clear-sighted, and delicate person, and therefore apt > have reason at the bottom of her harsh thoughts, when, in rare ises, she allowed them to harbor with her. As they had sat in Miss Bremer’s little apartment, over their a and bread and cake, the day had declined, and there had been most beautiful view over the Campagna from one of the win- Dws. From the other, looking toward St. Peter’s, there had been le broad gleam of a mildly glorious sunset, not so pompous and lagnificent as many that Hawthorne had seen in America, but )fter and sweeter in all its changes. As its lovely hues died slowly vay, the half-moon shone out brighter and brighter; for there as not a cloud in the sky, and it seemed like the moonlight of awthorne’s younger days. Just before their departure. Miss remer had led them down some intricate stairs into a garden, id round the brow of a hill, which plunged headlong with ex- :eding abruptness. It was the edge of the Tarpeian Rock, from e steep side of which, when rock and moonlight had been trans- !rmed in Romance, a loud, fearful cry quivered upward through I e air, and sank quivering downward to the earth—the Faun, [463] meanwhile, having begun his transformation. But neither Mi Bremer nor Hawthorne had at the moment imagined the cons quences of their friendly meeting. It was in his first spring in Rome, too, that Hawthorne ha met Mrs. Jameson. When he had called on her, he had expecte to see an elderly lady, but one not quite so venerable as Mr Jameson proved to be: a rather short, round, and massive persoi age, of benign and agreeable aspect, with a sort of black skullca on her head, beneath which appeared her hair, which was almo white. Her hands, too, were white, and once must have been, an( really still were, beautiful. Indeed, she must have been a perfect! pretty woman in her day—a blue or gray-eyed, fair-haired beaut On a second glance, her hair was not yet white, but only flaxe in the extreme. She was said to be rather irascible in her tempei but Hawthorne thought that nothing could be sweeter than hf voice, her look, and all her manifestations. When he took his di parture after their first meeting, she clasped his hand in both ( hers, and expressed her pleasure in his call, to which he responde with like effusions. Mrs. Jameson seemed to be familiar with Italy, its life an people, as well with its picture galleries. Hawthorne was therefoi not averse to accepting her guidance in seeing some of the sighi of Rome. In her little one-horse carriage they set out, one afte: noon, rumbling along the Via Scrofa and through the den est part of the city, past the theater of Marcellus, and thence b( neath the Palatine hill, and by the baths of Caracalla, throug the gate of San Sebastiano. They visited the little church wher St. Peter is said to have seen a vision of the Saviour bearing hi cross, and alighted, too, at the Basilica of San Sebastiano, whid they entered, Mrs. Jameson, who was very lame, leaning on Hav thorne’s arm. Later, they drove along the Appian Way, saw th green Campagna and the Claudian aqueduct in the distance, an( passed an interminable line of tombs. Meanwhile, they talked about painting and sculpture, Amei ica, England, spiritualism, and whatever came up. Mrs. Jamesoi said that she could read a picture like the page of a book. Haw thorne had found great pleasure and profit in her works, and h had been glad to hear her say that she liked his; but it was impo: sible not to perceive that she gave him no credit for knowin [464 ] ae single simplest thing about art. On the whole, he did not link that she underrated him; the only mystery to him was how le came to be so well aware of his ignorance on artistic points, 'hey had a great dispute about the propriety of adopting the istume of the day in modern sculpture, Mrs. Jameson decidedly bjecting to all items of modem costume, though she expressed, lawthorne was glad to leam, a very favorable opinion of the aintings of his friend Thompson. When they parted after their ay’s expedition, Hawthorne bade her farewell with much good ;eling on his part, and, he hoped, on hers, though he supposed lat, for the time being, they had mutually had enough of one aother. With the Brownings the relationships of Hawthorne—and 3phia, too—were livelier, though they were limited to the month E June, 1858, when both families were living in Florence. Haw- lome had met both the Brownings in England two years before, hen, at Monckton Milnes’, he had escorted Mrs. Browning to le breakfast table. Now it was Browning who renewed the ac- Liaintance by inviting the Hawthornes to dinner. He came him- If to extend the invitation, shook hands with everybody, grown- ps and children alike, and was very vivacious and agreeable, very nd and warm in his expressions of pleasure at seeing the Haw- omes in Florence; and the Hawthornes were very glad to meet m. Browning talked a wonderful quantity in a little time, and id, among other things, what Hawthorne had been very dubious )Out, that the Italian people would not cheat you if you con- rued them generously and put them upon their honor. Haw- ome thought that Browning looked younger and even hand- mer than two years ago, and his gray hairs appeared fewer than ose that had then strayed into his youthful head. He seemed to ? an extremely likable man. When, that evening, the Hawthornes set out for the Browning sidence, they found that the Casa Guidi was a palace in a street )t very far from their o^vn. Browning came into the anteroom greet them, accompanied by his nine-year-old son, and con- icted them to the dim illumination of their great tapestried awing-room, where Mrs. Browning greeted them most kindly, a emorable moment for Sophia. There were other guests, too, in- [465] eluding William Cullen Bryant, on whose editorial page of tl New York Post Hawthorne had been defended in less happy day Such a boy as Browning’s son Hawthorne had never seen b fore—so slender, fragile, and spirit-like, as if he had little to d with human flesh and blood. Hawthorne would not quite like I be the father of such a boy. His parents, he thought, ought to tui their whole attention to making him robust and earthly, and i giving him a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in. The be prided himself on being a Florentine, and he was, indeed, as ui English a production as if he were native of another planet. Neve theless, his face was very pretty and most intelligent. During th evening he helped the guests to cake and strawberries, and joine in the conversation now and then, or sat down upon a couch t enjoy his own meditations. He wore long curling hair, and wj still dressed in frock and short hose. To Hawthorne it was funn to think of putting the boy into trousers. In his present garb h likeness to his mother was strange to behold. As for Mrs. Browning, Hawthorne did not see how her hu band could suppose that he had an earthly wife any more tha an earthly child—so pale, so small a person as scarcely to be en bodied at all; at any rate, only substantial enough to put fort her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, y( sweet, tenuity of voice. She was a good and kind fairy, howevei and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although herse] only remotely akin to it. It was wonderful to see how small sh was, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes, her blac ringlets clustering down upon her neck, and making her face th whiter by their sable profusion. Hawthorne thought it marvelou how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature could iir press, as she did, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seeme( to him there were a million chances to one that she would hav been a miracle of acidity and bitterness. The conversation during the party was, in Hawthorne’s view not very noteworthy, the most interesting topic being what wa to him the disagreeable and wearisome one of spiritual communi cations, in which Mrs. Browning was a believer, and her husbam an infidel. Mrs. Browning tried to tell how, at a spiritual session unearthly hands had placed a laurel wreath upon her head. He voice, however, was subdued by her husband’s flow of eagei [466] nny talk, which rushed and foamed and leaped over her slight aes and gentle words of expostulation. The marvelousness of e supposed spiritual facts melted strangely away, in Browning’s arty grip and at the touch of his logic. Hawthorne was rather rprised that Browning’s conversation should be so clear, and much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry could dom proceed far without running into the high grass of latent ^anings and obscure allusions. If Hawthorne had a qualified admiration for Browning’s po- •y, he nevertheless read it. He had read some of it to Sophia in igland, apparently, and Mrs. Browning’s, too, and both he and phia took pleasure in identifying the settings of Browning’s ilian-placed poems. Perhaps their impressions of Italian art ;re not without reference to Browning’s poems. In any event, •th were admirers of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. The two milies saw each other frequently before the Brownings left for ance. Mrs. Browning, in Sophia’s view, grew lovelier at each seting; and as for Browning himself, Sophia thought him full of e, like a rushing river, his voice glad and rich, a union of oboe d flute tones. When the Brownings left Florence, it seemed Sophia that there was no one in Florence for them now. Haw- orne thought Browning a most amiable man. He especially joyed Browning’s nonsense, which he regarded of very genuine d excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright d powerful mind, a nonsense which Browning let play among 5 friends with the faith and simplicity of a child. Hawthorne ed him much, and wished, if opportunities were favorable, to ike Browning like him. It appears, however, that the two men ver saw each other again after their parting in Florence. If there was an element of sadness in a friendship begun so spiciously, yet left unfulfilled, that friendship was not without ne happy consequences. Through Miss Isa Blagden, made own to him through the Brownings, Hawthorne, after the de- rture of the Brownings, was introduced to a strange old Eng- h gentleman named Kirkup, who in his youth had known By- 1, Shelley, Hunt, and Edward Trelawny, and who now lived 1 an old house, once a residence of the Knights Templars in irence, a house dark, dusty, hung with antique-looking pictures, -i lined with bookcases, containing a very curious library. The [467] old gentleman, it seemed to Hawthorne, was a little crackbraine having immersed himself in necromancy, and fancying that he h; had spiritual communications with Dante. Nevertheless, his root were very interesting, full of paintings and other objects of a out of antiquity, though the greatest curiosity of all, and no a tiquity, was a pale, large-eyed little girl of four, who follow( the old conjurer’s footsteps wherever he went—the merriest litt thing in the world, who frisked through those shadowy o chambers, among dead people’s trumpery, as gayly as a butted flits among flowers and sunshine. She was the child of the necr mancer’s medium, a woman of great beauty, who, when she h: died, had left her baby to the old man. It was all a very strange story, which Hawthorne at once su posed could be put into a Romance—the shriveled, white-beard( old man, thinking all the time of ghosts, and the child herse so pretty, so intelligent, so playful, with never a playmate sa’ the conjurer and a kitten as playful and as merry as the little gi herself. To this old man, freed from his eccentricities and remove to New England, as well as to the little girl and her playful ki ten, Hawthorne was to turn again in The Dolliver Romance, : some fragmentary chapters in which the fire of his literary genii shot up momentarily in some of its greatest brillance before sank in final darkness. Besides these acquaintances, old and new, who added to Hai thorne’s pleasure in this period of his life, there were many othei Elizabeth Hoar came to visit, and brought with her memories e: tending far back before Hawthorne’s marriage, to the days of h courtship, and to the great happiness at the Old Manse. Chari Sumner came, too, with all his associations with Boston and Caii bridge and Longfellow. Horatio Bridge, the ever helpful, faithfu and true friend, stopped briefly on one of his many far excursion Bryant, whom Hawthorne had seen only once in Americ when the poet had stopped briefly at the door of the little re cottage in Lenox, he now saw often—in Elorence and in Rom Now, when Hawthorne first met him in Rome, Bryant had a weai look in his face, as if tired of seeing and doing things. It w: getting rather late in the evening with him, Hawthorne heard hii remark; but, if any age could be cheerful, Hawthorne though Bryant’s ought to be so, for his life had been like the days th; [468] d in pleasant sunsets. He was so good a man and, like the day lich George Herbert had described—so cool, so calm, so bright. ;t Hawthorne took him to be one who could not get closely me to his sorrow (the illness of Mrs. Bryant), nor feel it so sen- )ly as he gladly would; and, in consequence of that deficiency, e world lacked substance to him. In such sentiments, of course, awthorne was expressing the warmest sympathy for Bryant, for ey represented a reminiscence of his own early feelings of lone- less and isolation, such feelings as he had dramatized in the max of “The Christmas Banquet.” And now began a friendship with the American historian hn Lothrop Motley, on the balcony of whose quarters in the )rso Hawthorne witnessed the Carnival in Rome, a spectacle lich then seemed to him strangely like a dream, the balcony d the dream presently to reappear in The Marble Faun. He d Motley took walks along the muddy Tiber or in the Cam- gna, Hawthorne occasionally suggesting hints of the Romance lich was shaping itself in his mind. Later, in England, after he Marble Faun had been published, Hawthorne was a guest Motley’s London home. Motley had been an admirer of Haw- orne since the days of The Token, and, when The Marble mn appeared, he wrote Hawthorne a letter of ardent apprecia- in. Motley’s letter went to Hawthorne’s heart, for in it, as in uckerman’s 1851 comments in The Southern Literary Messen- r, he saw his work comprehended and enjoyed just as he had shed it might be. In Motley, in short, as in Tuckerman, Haw- ome found that sympathetic gentle reader whom he had rather aintively addressed in his prefaces, wondering sometimes wheth- such a reader really existed. Among all these genial friendships, that with the American ilptor W. W. Stor y was one of the most satisfying, in part be- use circumstances permitted Hawthorne to see the vivacious id talented Story so frequently—in Rome, in Florence, and in i;na, where Story was spending the summer of 1858, and where : Hawthornes stopped a week or so on their return from Flor¬ ae to Rome. When Hawthorne first saw Story in Rome (he had own him slightly in America), Story had just begun work on nat was probably to be his best effort—the statue of Cleopatra, i ich Hawthorne saw when it was only fourteen days advanced [4^9] in clay. It was a statue, Hawthorne thought, conceived with dept and power, and being worked out with adequate skill. As he r turned again and again to Story’s studio, it was delightful to e cape to Story’s creation from the universal prettiness which seeme to be the highest conception of the crowd of modem sculptors, ft in Story’s art he was sensible of something deeper than an effo to create beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic name Cleopatra as Story represented her was a terribly dangeroi woman—quiet enough for the moment, but very likely to sprir upon you like a tigress. So fascinating did Hawthorne find tl progress of Story’s creation of “Cleopatra” that he chose to intr duce the statue into The Marble Faun, not only attributing i fashioning to one of his major characters, but associating with i creation some of his own most cherished convictions relating t artistic inspiration, a very high compliment to his friend. But Hawthorne saw Story not only as a sculptor; he thought ( him as one of the most agreeable men he knew, with a perplexin variety of talents—Story being at once a poet, a prose writer, lawyer, a painter, a musician, and a sculptor. Though the tw men talked often of art, they spoke with equal frequency of an number of subjects—of no great consequence, perhaps, but unitin them in pleasant companionship—of the unluckiness of Frida' of the possession of the evil eye among monks and other religioi people, of the writing of a story of Blue Beard, and how the pk should be handled, of Story’s contributions to the Atlantic, an many another topic in equally discursive conversation. It was in Siena where Hawthorne saw Story most intimate! in the midst of his family life. There Story was living for the sun mer in the Villa Belvedere, its lawns and shrubbery having som< thing English in their character, its walls hung with fine ok fashioned engravings from the pictures of Gainsborough, Wes and other English painters. There, early in October, the Hav thornes spent a very pleasant day on the lawn, whence they coul behold picturesque scenes afar, and rich vineyard glimpses nea at hand. Without seeming to make an effort. Story kept eveq one amused and entertained all day long, and Hawthorne wa again convinced that Story was the most variously accomplishei and brilliant person, the fullest of social life and fire, that h had ever met. Toward sunset they took a walk, and when the [470] Hawthorne in 1860 From a copy of the photograph hy Mayall taken in London in that year. Courtesy of the Essex Institute. ae to a well with a stone curb encircling an abundant growth naidenhair fern, Story stooped over and uttered deep, musical es, which were reverberated from the hollow depths with iderful effect. Then they went along paths that led from one eyard to another, and that might have led them for miles across country. Later, until tea-time and sunset, the families sat ding or talking. Story drawing caricatures for the amusement of children, and all of the party sometimes getting up to look Donati’s comet, which blazed brighter and brighter in the sky il it went down into the mists of the horizon. Though charmed by all this tranquillity and enjoyment, Haw- me regarded his friend with feelings of concern and affection, bbling and brimming over with fun as Story was, he yet left wthome with an impression that there was a pain and care— d, it might be, out of the very richness of Story’s gifts and the indance of his outward prosperity. Nevertheless, rich, in the me of life, with children budding and blossoming around him, airly as his heart could wish, with sparkling talents—so many, t if he chose to neglect one or two or three, he would still have mgh left to shine with—who should be happy if not he? It was through another sculptor, like Story an expatriate from lerica, that Hawthorne came to terms with some old and new Dries of art, and with whom, as with Story, he formed an inti- te friendship. When he had first seen, in the home of some ylish friends, a cast of Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave’’ and they I criticized it as being too thin and meager, he had defended IS in accordance with American ideas of feminine beauty, en, however, he saw the same statue somewhat later in the ptian Hall in London, he saw in it little beauty or merit. But m Hawthorne, in Florence, met Powers himself, it was not ^ to dismiss the man peremptorily; nor had Hawthorne any \ to do so, for Powers was no ordinary man. One noticed first, perhaps, how massive and rude of surface rers looked, how careless in dress—his customary garb being lue linen blouse and slippers (whether on street or in his lio) and a little bit of a sculptor’s cap on the side of his head, 1 a cigar between his lips. His consciousness of his own power i plainly to be seen, and the assertion of it by no means with- l, though he gave Hawthorne no idea of vanity. Powers was, in [47^] Hawthorne’s eyes, obviously a great man, as well as, up further acquaintance, a tender and delicate one. He was not, is true, apt to speak in a very laudatory style of a brother arti indeed, there was a good deal of scorn in what he said of even t most noted artists. Nevertheless, with nobody could one me easily get rid of ceremony, so friendly and familiar was his m; ner, so facile his conversation, which dwelt upon the most n cellaneous subjects, his words rushing forth rapidly and forceful His ideas were square, solid, and tangible, and therefore read grasped and retained. He was a very instructive man, and sw( one’s empty and dead notions out of the way with exceedi vigor. Hawthorne liked him and was always glad to encounter i millstream of his talk. Much of the conversation with Powers was on art, sot times in Powers’ studio, sometimes in Hawthorne’s quarte where Powers came for hours at a time, always full of talk. On in speaking of a taste for painting and sculpture. Powers observ that it was something very different and quite apart from t moral sense, and that it was often, and perhaps generally, p sessed by men of ability and cultivation—a perception which Hi thorne had had himself, and which he regarded as being ti because tastes are artificial, the product of cultivation, and, wh highly developed, imply a remove from natural simplicity. Wh Powers showed Hawthorne his bronze statue of Webster, seemed to Hawthorne a majestic figure, a perfect likeness, tri and adequately sculptured, much as Hawthorne had seen Webs making a speech in the open air at a mass meeting in Conco What pleased Hawthorne especially was that this true artist h succeeded in showing Webster through the broadcloth as nati showed him. Hawthorne and Powers were agreed on the use contemporary costume, a subject on which Hawthorne and M Jameson had so radically differed. But Hawthorne and his sculptor friend were not always agreement, and it was in their differences that Powers serv to compel Hawthorne to examine his own convictions. It w for instance, no little shock to Hawthorne, who had been chaniK puzzled, and greatly moved by the expression in Guido’s “Beatr Cenci,” when Powers avowed that that painting was a ba( colored thing. Nor was Hawthorne’s astonishment less great [472] tvers’ comments on Michelangelo’s statue of Lorenzo de’ dici. Hawthorne had thought that no such grandeur and jesty had elsewhere been put into human shape, and he had :n particularly impressed by the face, so calmly somber, when had gazed earnestly into it beneath the shadow of the helmet. A^ers, on the other hand, although allowing the effect of the ;ue to be very grand and mysterious, maintained that it owed 5 to a mere trick, the effect being produced by the arrange- nt of the hood or helmet, which throws the upper part of the s into shadow, and not by the positive efforts of Michelangelo’s sel. If these views of Powers were startling and unsettling, they re relatively mild as compared with what he had to say about “Venus de’ Medici,” which, when Hawthorne had first seen had affected him with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence n he had ever then received from sculpture. To Powers, the ire might be said to be admirable; but the face was that of an 3 t. The eye was less like a human eye than a half-worn but- hole! The ear was placed too low on the head, and as to the uth, it was altogether wrong, alike in its general make as in h niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common ti around them. In a word, as Powers spoke, the poor face was tered all to pieces and utterly demolished; nor, at the moment, Hawthorne listened to Powers’ vigorous and confident state- nts, was it possible to doubt or question that it fell by its own nerits. And Powers’ iconoclasm went still further. When the sculptor ed on Hawthorne one evening, with his usual outpouring of c, both racy and oracular, the conversation turned to human ‘s, which. Powers asserted, did not depend for their expression m color, or upon any light of the soul beaming through them, iny glow of the eyeball, or upon anything but the form and on of the surrounding muscles. He remarked that Hawthorne a very bright and sharp look sometimes, but asserted that it not in the eye itself. Hawthorne, meanwhile, could have m that Powers’ eyes were glowing all the time he spoke; and lembering how many times he had seemed to see eyes glow, ' blaze, and flash, and sparkle, and melt, and soften; and how ooetry is illuminated with the light of ladies’ eyes; and how [473] many people have been smitten by the lightning of an e^ whether in love or anger, it was difficult to allow that all tl subtlest and keenest fire was illusive, and that any other je! in the same socket would serve as well as the brightest eye. Nev theless. Powers must be right; of course he must, and Hawthor was rather ashamed ever to have thought otherwise. From such empiricism, so forcefully delivered, it requir some little while for Hawthorne’s idealism to recover. Of cour when one had grasped Powers’ ultimate thought and perceptic one felt inclined to think and see a little further for one’s s€ Powers’ limitation, Hawthorne concluded, perhaps lay in the f; that he saw too clearly within his range to be aware of any regi of mystery beyond. Nevertheless, Hawthorne enjoyed him mu( Nor did this skeptical factualism wholly characterize the mz Once, in his studio. Powers showed Hawthorne something tl he had made only for himself and his wife—in whitest marb a little baby’s hand, every dimple, every infantile wrinkle of t soft skin lovingly recorded. It was a most delicate representati of the hand of Powers’ own five-month-old daughter. Hawthor was profoundly moved, and, later, drew the detail from the de fissures of his memory to use it in The Marble Faun, wh( Powers’ name appears, together with the idealized hand of Hi! sculptured by Kenyon with equally loving care. It was a merit of Powers, as Hawthorne saw him, that t artistic was only one side of him, and not the principal one. was as a fellow man, rather than as a fellow artist, that Hawthor liked Powers best, and in this relation he had some memoral hours with him. One evening in late July, 1858, Hawthorne a Sophia and Una called on Powers and his family, and sat w) them on the terrace, at the top of the house, until nearly t o’clock. It was a delightful, calm, summer evening, and, elevat as they were, far above all the adjacent roofs, they had a prosp< of the greater part of Florence, its towers, and its surroundi hills, while directly beneath them rose the trees of a garden. Wh the others chatted in one corner of this aerial drawing roo Hawthorne and Powers leaned against the parapet, and talk of many things. When the clocks struck the hour and the bells rang fr( the steeples, as they continually did in Florence, Hawthorne spc [474] :he sweetness of the Florence bells, the tones of some of them, it med to him, being full of liquid melody, though Powers found lefect in their sounds. They talked about instinct and reason, 1 whether brute creatures have souls, and, if they have none, V justice is done to them for their suffering here. They rea- ed high about other states of being, and Hawthorne suggested possibility that there might be creatures inhabiting the earth whose existence and whereabout we could have no perception, ■ they of ours, an idea to which Powers gave hospitable re- »tion, perhaps the more readily because of his Swedenborgian ;h. While they were talking, the moon rose behind the trees, i they speculated on whether the other planets might be in- )ited. In the atmosphere of Florence, Hawthorne observed, netary speculations seemed naturally suggested. Galileo had ind it so, and Hawthorne and Powers pervaded the whole uni- se. At last, however, all the party crept down Powers’ garret irs, the two men parting with a friendly pressure of the hand. Much as all these friendships meant to Hawthorne, none was re full of tender feelings than his renewed fellowship with inklin Pierce. Pierce had come to Italy with his wife when la was still suffering from a very long siege of malaria, from ich, for a time, it was feared that she could not recover, a pe- d of intense suffering for Hawthorne and Sophia. It was to Tce’s care, Sophia thought, that she almost owed her husband’s Pierce had been so sweet, sympathizing, and helpful. Haw- •rne himself had not known what comfort there might be in ■ manly sympathy of a friend; but Pierce, who had undergone reat sorrow of his own in the death of his son, and who had so je and kindly a heart, and was so tender and strong, did Haw- rne a world of good. Hawthorne resolved that he would al- /s love Pierce the better for the recollection of his ministrations ing those dark days. Pierce arrived one March day, during the Hawthorne’s second dence in Rome, when the family was at dinner. Hawthorne rejoiced to see him, though a little saddened to observe the ; ks of care and coming age, in many a whitening hair, and ;iy a furrow, and still more, in something that seemed to have ed out of him, without leaving a trace. His voice, sometimes, nded strange and old, though generally it was what it used [475] to be. Pierce was evidently glad to see Hawthorne and Sop] and the children, though there was something melancholy in tone when he remarked what a stout boy Julian had grown. P( Pierce! He had neither son nor daughter to keep his heart wai But during the month and more of companionship that t allotted them, Hawthorne’s impressions of his friend happ altered. On the very next morning after Pierce’s arrival, as i two men visited St. Peter’s and other sights of Rome, Hawthoi found Pierce less changed than he had at hrst supposed—in he and affections not changed at all. As the days succeeded one other, there were more and more walks, among the Roman ru and old scenes of history, while they talked of matters in wh Pierce was personally concerned, yet as historic as anything arou them. Really, Pierce seemed, after all, singularly little chang the more Hawthorne saw him, the more he got him back, just he was in their youth. One morning, on such a walk, Pier< face, air, and smile were so wonderfully like himself of old t Hawthorne had the impression that at least thirty years were nihilated in a moment. At last, when Pierce was taking his departure, it seemed Hawthorne that his old college friend had changed wonderfi little. Now that he had won and enjoyed—if there were any enj ment in it—the highest success that public life could give him, seemed more like what he was in his early youth than at any si sequent period. He was evidently happier than Hawthorne 1 ever known him since their college days. Hawthorne had found him, there in Rome, the whole of his early friend, and even bet than he used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mi much widened and deepened by his experience of life. They h just the same relation to each other as of yore, and since they 1 passed all the tuming-off places, they might hope to go on gether, still the same dear friends as long as they lived. In addition to all these friendly associations in this port: of Hawthorne’s life, there were, of course, many others. When family returned to England in June, 1859, to remain there anot year, while The Marble Faun was being completed and publish the friendships with Bright and Bennoch were renewed, and th were whole strings of invitations which, to Hawthorne’s own f prise, he accepted without a murmur. He had traveled a long 1 [476] :e he had left his solitary room in his mother’s home on Her- t Street, Salem, where, he supposed, not so many as twenty pie knew of his existence. Despite all these genial friendships and enjoyable associations h. other people, so numerous and so intimate, which many an- er man would have envied, Hawthorne continued to think of iself as shut off from his kind. He doubted that he had ever ly talked with a half dozen persons in his life, either men or nen—an indication, perhaps, more of his large wish to share the common human experiences, whether of joy or of sorrow, . to communicate his own feelings, than of any unusual iso- on. Nevertheless, his impression of himself was that he was , and given to an independent life in his own mind. In that ependent life, as he well knew, his moods rose and fell—left i miserable, or restless, or wonderfully happy. In Rome, for one thing, he rarely felt in the best of health, e atmosphere took the vivacity out of him and left him indis- ed, so that he had no spirit to do anything. When he had en- ;d Rome, he had been perfectly miserable with influenza; and n a feverish cold he was seldom free while he was in what he lically called the genial atmosphere of Rome. During the nths-long illness of Una with malaria, when his own health low, he had particular occasion to curse the malignancy of the losphere of the city. Then, too, the remorseless gray of an ian November, with its icy heart, was extremely depressing and it-crushing. He continued to be restless, also, because, having wandered ut so long, he felt uprooted—hardly sure where he wanted to lie down, if settle down he could with entire satisfaction. But iltalian experiences, in the numerous expatriates about him, wed him the dangers of expatriation. The exile was always erring the reality of life to a future moment, and, by and by, .;rred it till there were no future moments; or, if he did go c home, he found that life had shifted whatever of reality it , to the country where he deemed himself living only tem- [477] porarily; and so between two stools he came to ground, and ma himself a part of one or the other country only by laying 1 bones in its soil. And this question of residence was a top which seemed spin endlessly. Though return home he would, it was not alwa pleasant to contemplate returning to his own hard and dusty N( England, where there were no pictures, no statues, nothing b the dryness and meagerness of a New England village. The: likewise, he would find the piercing shriek, the wild yell, and ; the ugly sounds of popular turmoil. America was so big, furthi more, so without limits and oneness, that, when he tried to ma it a matter of heart, everything fell away except his native sta On the other hand, he had to admit that he was preseni weary of Continental life, and he felt his heart throb at the sig of our national flag. When he walked along the Tiber, which si gested a running mud puddle, or when, on his journey back England, his train sped along the turbid Rhone, he thought tf no streams were so beautiful in the quality of their waters as t clear brown rivers of New England. At last, it made his hea thrill to think that he should soon be on his way home. Perha he should dreamily hope to come back at some indefinite tin rather foolishly, perhaps, for it would tend to take the substan out of his life in his own land. But this, he suspected, was apt be the penalty of those who stay abroad, and stay too long. Among his private thoughts, too, was the awareness that i was growing older. The casual pedestrian who encountered Ha thome on the streets of Rome on one of his innumerable walks, the last months there, saw a man apparently still in the prime life—a man wearing a soft black hat, a dark suit, with a da cloak over his shoulders, cane in hand, walking vigorously. B Hawthorne himself knew that in spite of the heavy brown mi tache, which gave him a brisk, military appearance, three gr. hairs were growing on his head for every one that he had broug from England. He thought sometimes of death, wishing that G( had so ordered it that when we had done with our mortal bodi( they might vanish out of sight and sense, like bubbles. He hati to think of leaving such a burden as his mortality to the dispoi of his friends. It would be delightful, and helpful towards o faith in a blessed futurity, if we could so disappear, leaving p< [478] ips, a sweet fragrance for a minute or two. He continued to ive the conviction that earth is not the permanent home of man, lOugh the root of human nature strikes so deep into its lil, and is reluctantly transplanted, as he had long ago observed i “The Hall of Fantasy,” wherein he had resolved, too, so to live lat the world might come to an end at any moment without aving him at a loss to find a foothold somewhere else. And as he had said in that sketch, earth had, as always, many lings to give him deep joy. The journey from Rome to Florence, irough the Italian countryside, had been one of the brightest id most carefree interludes in his life, and he was happy to link that his children would have it to look back upon. In lorence, he walked the streets for the mere pleasure of walking, id lived in its atmosphere for the mere pleasure of living. He lought that there could hardly be a place in the world where fe could be more delicious for its own simple sake than in lorence. In the Casa del Bello, where the family lived during the rst two months, he was perfectly comfortable, as he hoped that is family was. There Sophia had chosen for his study the very leasantest room of all—a room that was the very luxury of com- )rt, hung with crimson velvety hangings, the doors draped in a raceful way, an ormolu table, stuffed easy chairs, candelabras, randeliers, and a Turkey carpet—the kind of study he had reamed of while he was writing The House of the Seven Gables 1 that slanting-roofed, one-windowed, upstairs room in the red 3ttage at Lenox. Now, in the coolness of a great chamber, he 3uld write a little every day, or take a brief nap somewhere be- veen breakfast and tea, before he went out to see pictures and atues, and mollify himself a little after that uncongenial life of le consulate. And when the summer in Florence was at an end, he thought E it as one that he and Sophia and the children would remember i a happy one, one in which he himself had found peace and leer. Even in Rome, when his stay there was drawing to a close, e had pleasant strolls on delightful afternoons, when there was i the air an indescribable something that was sweet, fresh, and imtle, and that thrilled his heart with a feeling partly senuous, but so surely partly spiritual. Later, in Switzerland, on the north- ard journey back to England, it had seemed that his joy in this [479] world could scarcely go further. He had thought, as he had coi templated the mountains that encircled the Castle of Chillo and the beautiful lake, that he had never beheld a scene s exquisite; nor did he ask of Heaven to show him any lovelier c nobler one, but only to give him such depth and breadth of syn pathy with nature, that he might worthily enjoy this view. It w: beauty enough for poor, perishable mortals. If this was eartl what must Heaven be! [/^] In Italy and in Switzerland Hawthorne recaptured a sympath with nature such as he had not known in England, where a nature seemed to have been subdued by the handiwork of mar Now again he enjoyed that invigorating charm and imaginativ delight wherewith nature had been spiritualized the moment h had stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. It was thi renewed interest in nature, as well as the friendships which h formed in Italy, and the capturing of the past-tinctured atmoi phere of that country, together with an acquaintance with its an and the inspiration which all these matters provided for his fictior that mainly contributed to the final deepening and enriching o Hawthorne’s life. Upon his arrival in Rome, it is true, his relations with nature though pleasant enough, had not been wholly auspicious, for the had been qualified by a recurring fear of the climate. He saw na ture in Rome largely in its villas—the Borghese, Pomfili, Albani and in the Vatican Gardens. How beautiful these villas were with their deep groves, sunny openings, the airy gush of fountains marble statues (dimly visible in recesses of foliage), great urns anc vases, terminal figures, temples; open fields and lawns, moreover all abloom, even in March, with anemones—white and rose-colorec and purple; in short, beauty, peace, sunshine, and antique repos( on every side. And yet, the true master and inhabitant of all thi; beauty was malaria—the curse of Rome and all its neighborhood Hawthorne vowed that he would not sleep in its open air foi whatever his life was worth. Were it not for this prevailing pestilence, the Pontifical [480] jardens would have been a very satisfactory affair—so extensive hey were, laid out in straight avenues, bordered with walls of )0X, not less than twenty feet high, and pierced with lofty arch- vays cut in the living wall; stately walks, with marble sculptures [long the way, fountains gushing up in the sunshine, and rich gardens. Stiff and formal as it all was, Hawthorne thought it a )eautiful place—a delightful, sunny, and serene seclusion. A )air of lovers might find the Garden of Eden there, and never lesire to stray out of its precincts. It would suit him well enough, oo, Hawthorne supposed, to have his own daily walks along such traight paths, for they seemed very favorable to thought, which s apt to be disturbed by variety and unexpectedness. But after ill, pleasant as they were, the gardens made no deep impression ipon him. It was on the road to Florence, the road which Childe Harold lad taken on his Pilgrimage, that what Hawthorne thought of IS the poetry of nature first renewed itself to him. There he saw orests wilder than he had seen since leaving America, of oak trees, hiefly. Among the green foliage grew golden tufts of broom, naking a gay and lovely combination of hues, while buttercups overed whole fields, and poppies burned like live coals along the oadside. At Assisi there was a magnificent prospect of the wide alley beneath. It was so vast that there appeared to be all varie- ies of weather in it at the same instant: fields of sunshine, tracts f storm—here the coming tempest, there the departing one. It /as the picture of the world on a great canvas. It made Hawthorne liserable not to know how to put such a scene into words, though e consoled himself with the thought that when God expressed imself in the landscape to mankind. He did not intend that it aould be translated into any language save His own immediate ne. It would take long, indeed, to read so huge a page. In The iarble Faun, Hawthorne was to muse upon it again in the loughts of the sculptor, Kenyon. In Florence, in the third and fourth months of their residence lere, the Hawthornes had lived in the Villa Montauto, a palace f forty rooms, though a stone tower which was a feature of the ouse held more interest for Hawthorne than the multiplicity of )oms, for on the battlements of that tower, ascended by shaky, ■azy stairs, Hawthorne often sat late at night watching the stars, [481] as the hero of his Italian Romance was presently to do on h estate, rechristened Monte Beni. On that height, in late Septembe the nights were wonderfully beautiful. When the moon was : the full, its light was an absolute glory, such as Hawthorne ha seemed only to have dreamed of before, and that only in h: younger days. Later, when the moon was on the wane, the lustf was gentler, but still bright, and it made the Val d’ Amo wit its surrounding hills and its soft mist in the distance as beautiful scene as existed anywhere out of heaven. This mist, it seemed t Hawthorne, set the scene beyond the limits of actual sense an made it ideal. It was as if he were dreaming about the valley—2 if the valley itself were dreaming, and met him halfway in hi dream. Then, too, there was Donati’s comet streaming through th sky, and dragging its interminable tail among the stars. Hav thome did not know whether it was the vicinity of Galileo’s towei and the influence of his spirit, but he had hardly ever watchei the stars with such interest. Italy, of course, did not offer anything so grand in natura beauty as Hawthorne found in Switzerland. What Lake Lemai had to show was lovely indeed. Nothing was ever more beautifu to his eye than those groups of mighty hills as he saw them, witl the gray rocks, the green slopes, the white snow patches and crests all to be seen at one glance, and the mists and fleecy clouds turn bling, rolling, hovering about their summits, filling their lofr valleys, and coming down far towards the lower world, making the skyey aspects so intimate with the earthly ones that he hardh knew whether he was sojourning in the material or the spiritua world. But it was not for this beauty and this effect alone—the blend ing of the real with the ideal—that Hawthorne cherished the scenery about Lake Leman, for this effect he had experienced many times before—in Salem and in Concord, as well as, recently in Italy. It occurred to him now that these mighty mountains symbolized a great truth: seen individually, they seemed to havf nothing to do with one another; yet, to an eye that could take them all in, they were evidently portions of one grand and beau tiful idea, which could not be consummated without the lowest and loftiest of them. Perhaps only once or twice had Hawthorne so summarized his concept of the unity and meaningfulness of the [482] orld as suggested by Nature. Emerson, in “Each and All,” had id much the same experience when, as beauty had stolen rough his senses, he had yielded himself to the perfect whole; >r had the Psalmist sung anything so very different when he had id that the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament nweth His handiwork. r„i1 ^ It was not his interest in nature, however, which had mainly 'ought Hawthorne to the Continent and Italy. He had gone to aly because he had wished to live cheaply, to write his English omance, and to enjoy the atmosphere and art of the country hich Byron had called the M other of Arts . In this last aim, he id of course been encouraged by Sophia._whose interest in art as ^satiable and whose receptivity in viewing architecture, linting, and sculpture was unlimited and forever fresh. It would Dt be amiss to say that Hawthorne was indebted to Sophia for le inspiration of much of The Marble Faun, for a significant ement of that Romance—its speculations on art—was the conse- ience of their mutual observations in Rome, Florence, Siena, srugia, and other cities. Together, as often as alone, they visited, ly after day, f or ov er a year, cathedrals, churches, art galleries, id mtists’ studios. Their personal acquaintances were, for the ost part, artists—painters, sculptors—or critics of the arts. It ould have been difficult to find conditions more favorable to the udy of this new interest, so engaging to Hawthorne personally, id so relevant to his own art. If, as his sister Elizabeth had said, Hawthorne had made a udy of novels and writing in his youth, he never recorded that udy; but h ^ study of the arts he recorded in copious detail, no her topic, probably, occupying a larger portion of his Italian urnals. He did not, to be sure, make a systematic statement of sImpressions or of whatever theories he evolved from them. His [umal entries, however, were made in complete honesty; for at reason, probably, though they record many varying circum- mces and fluctuating moods, they unmistakably reveal certain ndencies which unite his thought in a consistent whole. [4S3] I In England, Hawthorne had taken delight in the cathedral his reflections on St. Paul’s and on York indicating his preferem for Gothic architecture. He had, in fact, apparently committt himself. But St. Peter’s was not easily dismissed; besides, with h expanding acquaintance, he tried over and over again to say wh: it was that so charmed him in Gothic architecture. Difficult ; that expression was, he disposed of that question more easily ar quickly than the problems which arose in his mind from h observations on painting and sculpture. St. Peter’s, with its classical architecture, was truly beautifu In his first days in Rome, when Hawthorne strolled round tl great church, he found that it continued to grow upon him bot in magnitude and in beauty. At times a single, casual, momenta] glimpse of its magnificence gleamed upon his soul when he haj pened to glance at arch opening beyond arch, and he was su prised into admiration. It was pleasant, also, in winter, to t greeted by that delightful, summerlike warmth the moment f entered that vast immensity of space, the warmth of last summe captured within those massive walls. Still, when he came to thin of it, the size of St. Peter’s was not overwhelming. It was, after al not so big as all out-o’-doors, nor its dome so immense as tffi of the firmament. Nor had Michelangelo made as much as possibl of such a vast pile of material. He balanced everything in sue a way that it seemed but half itself. On the other hand, tvhe Hawthorne came to make his final estimate, he returned to th impressions of breadth and loftiness, of a visionary splendor an magnificence, sentiments such as he had associated with the classi architecture of St. Paul’s. His liking for Gothic art, in whatever form, went back to time previous to his experiences in England. At Lenox, when h had written the Wonder-Book, he had aimed at giving his storie a Gothic or romantic tone, instead of the classic coldness of th' original Greek tales, which he thought as repellent as the toucl of marble. His acquaintance with Gothic art in England had therefore, only reinforced his old inclinations. In Italy, he simph remained, as he himself said, a very sturdy Goth. Hence, when Hawthorne wandered among the I'uins of th Eorum, the remains did not make that pleasurable impressioi of antiquity upon him which Gothic ruins did. Perhaps this wa [484] ), he reflected, because the Forum belonged to quite another astern of society, being morally unlike and disconnected from is own, and not belonging to the same train of thought; so lat we look across a gulf to the Roman ages, an intervening val- ;y in which lie Christianity, the Dark Ages, the feudal system, rivalry and romance, and, in short, a deeper life of the human ice than Rome brought to the verge of that gulf. Gothic art, after 11, belongs to Christian civilization. It was in the cathedrals at Arezzo, at Florence, and at Siena lat Hawthorne saw Gothic art in what seemed to him its most leasing forms, and in his reflections on these cathedrals he made is final efforts to express what it was that he loved in Gothic rchitecture. At Arezzo, he found the cathedral very stately with its great rches; but what pleased him most was the magnificence created by le rich light coming through its windows, the hues being more rilliant than those of any stained glass he had seen in England, ne great wheel window looking like a constellation of many col- red gems. In England the glass had been smoky and dull with ust, so that its pristine beauty could no longer be imagined; nor id he imagine it until he had seen these Italian windows. And rhen, in the Duomo in Elorence, he saw the wreath of circular dndows beneath the swell of the great central dome, as brilliant s the tall and narrow ones below, it seemed a pity that anybody lould die without seeing an antique stained window with the right Italian sunshine glowing through it. Milton’s “dim, reli- ious light’’ was hardly adequate to describe this beauty, which ceded some epithet that should not chase away the dimness, yet lould make it shine like a million rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and )pazes—bright in themselves, but dim with tenderness and rev- rence, because God himself was shining through them. It was a ity that St. Peter’s was not lighted by such windows as these. Of course the tinted windows of the Gothic cathedral were ily a part of one vast effect, which Hawthorne perhaps most suc- ;ssfully summarized, to his own satisfaction, when he visited le cathedral at Siena, during the week or so of his sojourn there, the time that he had drawn so close in sympathy with the many- lented Story. What seemed so impressive and deeply satisfying 1 the Cathedral of Siena was the multitudinous richness of the [485] ornamentation of the front; the arches within arches, sculptun inch by inch, of the deep doorways; the statues of saints, son making a hermitage of a niche, others standing forth; the scor of busts, that looked like faces of ancient people gazing down oi of the cathedral; the projecting shapes of stone lions—the tho sand forms of Gothic fancy, which seemed to soften the marb and express whatever it liked, and then allowed it to harde again to last forever. In this faithful minuteness of Gothic arc! tecture, which filled up its outline with a million beauties th: perhaps might never be studied out by a single spectator, the: was, for Hawthorne, a great moral charm. It seemed to him to 1 the very process of nature. Classic architecture, on the other ham in which he saw nothing but outlin e, aff orded, in his view, r little points, no interstices where human feelings might cling an overgro w it like ivy. It was the solemn whole, however, mightily combined out ( all these minute particulars, which, for Hawthorne, sanctifie the entire space of ground over which the Cathedral of Sien flung its shadow, or on which it reflected the sun. A majesty an a minuteness, neither interfering with the other, each assisting tli other—this was what he loved in Gothic architecture. And it w: in this conviction, as regards architecture, that his thought foun its final expression. In his last journal entry pertaining to th matter, after a visit to the Cathedral at Lyons, France, he recorde his pleasure in the noble height and venerable space of tha structure, so filled with the dim, consecrated light of its picture windows. It did him good, he felt, to enjoy again the awfulne; and sanctity of Gothic architecture, after so long shivering in th classic porticos of Italy. In the areas of painting and sculpture, Hawthorne found i more difficult to express his basic sentiments and judgment! This wa.s-se, in pa rt, b ecause, as he came to see more clearly thai ever before, of the difficulty or impossibility of translating on art into anoth er. Masterpieces of art, he came to believe, are language in themselves, and if they could be expressed as we any way except by themselves, there would have been no neec for instance, of expressing those particular ideas and sentiment by sculpture. When he examined some of the objects of art, s bea utiful an d curious, wrought by the skill of Benvenuto Cellin [486] The Venus de’ Medici Alinari photograph. thought it idle to try to describe them, because language is not rnished gold, with ^here and there a brighter word flashing like diamond—no words, therefore, giving the slightest idea of one those elaborate handiworks. To express painting and sculpture words seemed to Hawthorne only less vain than to try to put o words a grand scene in nature—such scenes being an expres- n in themselves, the hieroglyphics of God. Nevertheless, he ?d, within the restricted limits of his words, to tell what par- Ltlar pieces of art meant to him. Over and over again, moreover, sought to grasp and state what he regarded to be the founda- ns and aims of art. Before he came to terms with himself on these matters, he ind it necessary to clear the ground of miscellaneous problems varying degrees of importance. First of all, he wished to be per¬ tly honest—fearful, as he said repeatedly, of bamboozling him- E by accepting the judgments of tradition or of connoisseurs, tead of making his own. Besides, he saw very well that before could arrive at any philosophical conclusions, he would have resolve some initial questions. He was aware of what Emerson, in his essay on art, had called : adventitious. In its simplest form, he thought that something r • s added to the charm of a picture by appropriate framing, and a timely cleaning and varnishing, though now and then he ndered whether he was not a barbarian for harboring such con- tions. He complained when he saw pictures improperly hung, disorderly array, or in gloomy old rooms where scarcely any- ng could be made out. On the other hand, as in the Vatican, pleasure was enh anced by the magnificence of the arrange- nts—the l ong vistas and beautiful cour ts, and the aspect of im- rtal ity which marble statues ac quire by being kept free from. it. The “Venus de’ Medici” surely showed to advantage, in the jizi Gallery iiTFlbrence, because it stood in the best of rooms, ng with red damask, and properly lighted. Much of the effect lausterity and majesty of the statue of Pompey, in the Spada ace in Rome, was due, no doubt, to the somber obscurity of hall, and to the loneliness in which the great naked statue 3d. It became a very fine point, in his discussions with Hiram 'vers, whether the marvelous effect of the shadow under the :met of Michelangelo’s statue of Lorenzo de’ Medici de- [487] pended upon a fortuitous arrangement of parts—augmented the niche in which the figure sat—or whether it resulted from t positive efforts of the artist, Hawthorne affirming the latter, ai Powers the former. If Hawthorne feared that the adventitious might lead him i to false judgments, he was perhaps even more fearful that might be drawn to admire pictures by prescription and by tra( tion, after the qualities that had won them their fame had real vanished. Impatiently he remarked that he was not going to t any more to receive pleasure from a faded, tarnished, lusterfi picture. The most delicate, if not the highest charm of a picture, seemed to Hawthorne, is evanescent—a painti ng, in the c ourse time, being quite changed from what the artist intended. Not ing could be so forlorn and depressing as Michelangelo’s “Lt Judgment,” all dusky and dim, the very lights having passed in shadows, and the shadows into utter blackness. Even Titiai flesh tints, Hawthorne observed, had not kept their warmt Veronese’s ‘‘Rape of Europa,” in its day, had perhaps been ti most brilliant and rejoicing picture, the most voluptuous, tl most exuberant, that ever put sunshine to shame. What a pi that such a picture should fade, and perplex the beholder wi such splendor, shining through such forlornness! When Ha thome saw Raphael’s ‘‘School of Athens,” he protested that 1 would not pretend to be sensible of any particular rapture the sight of those frescoes, so faded they were, so battered by tl mischances of years, insomuch that, despite all the power ar glory of Raphael’s designs, the spectator could not but be se sible that their groundwork was only an old plaster wall. The truth, it seemed to Hawthorne, is that the lifelikene and the illusion of a picture effervesce and exhale as the pictu; grows old, and we go on talking of a charm that has vanishe forever. Unhappily, the glory^oT^a picture fades like that of flower. Eor his part, he knew no drearier feeling than that i: s^red by a.xuin ed p icture—ruined by time, by damp, or 1 rough treatment. Such pictures, in his view, became the drearie ghosts of perished magmificence. At the sight of them,_li heart sank and his stomach sickened. If, occasionally, he felt oth( [488] ,e about an old picture, it was, for him, only the exception ich proved the rule. When Mrs. Jameson had disputed with Hawthorne about : propriety of adopting the costume of the day in modern Ipture, and they had parted with at least a temporary surfeit each others’ company, she had touched a sensitive spot in Haw- irne’s thinking by asserting a view then fashionable enough— it modern costume degraded the marble, and made high sculp- e utterly impossible. Privately, Hawthorne had decided that, if ■s. Jameson’s view should prevail, he was willing to let sculpture :ish as one of the things the world had done with, as it had ae with many other beautiful things that belonged to an earlier le. It was, in his view, as ridiculous to represent a modem tesman in a Roman toga as it was to depict a contemporary glish general dying on the battlefield in the nude. With the question of the nude, Hawthorne’s experiences with inting and sculpture in Italy often confronted him, though :h no essential changes from the conclusions he had made in gland. He noted with some amusement that Michelangelo had )mptly consigned to hell, in “The Last Judgment,” the man who 1 complained of the sprawling nudities of that picture. As for nself, he regarded the nude with a nice but not a squeamish crimination. In the Fine Arts Academy at Rome, he did not nk noticeably indecorous several pictures, by Titian and others, ich had formerly been kept in a secret cabinet as of a too sen- d character for the public eye; but Titian’s “Magdalen,” with r golden hair clustering round her body, he found very coarse 1 sensual, with only an impudent assumption of penitence and igious sentiment, the artist too carefully having arranged her ih locks to permit those voluptuous breasts to be seen. Canova’s tue of the sister of Bonaparte as Venus, though admirably le, only revealed the artificial elegance of the woman of this rid in spite of whatever simplicity she could find in almost er nakedness. Hence the statue afforded him no pleasure. In the studio of a contemporary artist, it was not the wreath ig leaves lying across the nudity of a statue of Eve that offended 11 , but rather the frightful volume of her thighs and calves, e the naked women in Etty’s pictures which he had seen in Inland, she was simply not beautiful. [489] With the nude appropriately employed, Hawthorne found r objections. That colossal statue of Pompey in the Spada Palac entirely nude except for a cloak hanging down from the le shoulder, he regarded as certainly the sternest and severest < figures, suggesting great moral dignity and intellectual eminenc and worth the whole sculpture gallery of the Vatican. But tl essence of Hawthorne’s attitude toward the nude is perhaps be indicated by a contrast which he himself made. On the wall of room in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, he had seen a painting 1 Titian—Venus reclining on a couch, naked and lustful. In tl same room, and to be taken in at the same glance, he had see the “Venus de’ Medici.” It was her modest attitude, it had seeme to him, which unmade her as the heathen goddess, and softene her into woman, her face so beautiful and intellectual as not i be dazzled out of sight by her form. He had found it useless i try to describe her. There she stood—in chaste and naked grac In his enjoyment of art and in his effort to establish criter for propeT^udgment, Hawthorne found difficulties witliirL.hir self as well as within the subject. Among such a multitude ( objects of art to and with’only one mind to take note of ther the, stamp of each new impression seemed to obliterate a form( o ne. It (ffipressedThis spi rits to go from picture to picture, leavir a portion of his vital, sympathy at every one, so that he can to the~end~with a kind of half-torpid desperation. He regardf his r yeptive faculty as very lim ited, and when it became pe lectly full, he became perfectly miserable. He hardly knew greaterTtnsefyT to see sigMs; after'suclTf^'Tetibh, was to His mir what it would be to his body to have dainties forced down h throat after his appetite was satiated. What was very disturbing was the fact that his moods varie( so that the identical picture or statue left him, on different o casions, with greatly varying impressions. Sometimes he was i no frame of mind for admiration, nor able to achieve that frt and generous surrender of himself essential to the proper estimai of anything excellent. At other times, he had good days, able t enjoy two or three wonderful works of art, and aware that the; were a thousand other wonders around him. It was in his mar visits to the “Venus de’ Medici” that he was most aware of the fluctuations. She might, on one day, be very beautiful, very sati [490] :tory, with a charm that was fresh and new—a very miracle; another day, she seemed little more than any other piece of llowish white marble. Marble beauties, it seemed, suffered the ne eclipses as those of flesh and blood. How strange that a god- ss should stand before him absolutely unrecognized, even when knew, by previous revelations, that she was nothing short of /ine! Only once in a while was he capable of seeing the statue rever new and immortally young. Hawthorne confessed to himself, in short, that he could not vays keep the heights that he had gained. The difficulty was St resolved, he decided, cred iting a work of art with all that made him feel in his best moments. He would try to judge of nierits by the impression it then made, and not by the cold- ss ^nd a pathy of his less genial moods. In his last visits to the tti Palace and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, he had experienced utter weariness of Raphael’s old canvas, and he had thrown his ■ewell glance at the time-yellowed marble of the “Venus de’ edici’’ with strange insensibility. But he knew, nevertheless, at his memory would often tread in those halls as long as he ed. Once, in Florence, in the Pitti Palace, as he and Sophia were Dking at Raphael’s “Madonna della Segiola,” Hawthorne had, in e enthusiasm of the moment, thought it the most beautiful cture in the world. It had seemed to him then, too, that the ctorial art was capable of something more like magic, more mderful and inscrutable in its methods, than poetry, or any her mode of developing the beautiful. What that mysterious mething was, however, which rendered a picture a miracle, he LS always at a loss to say with any finality, though he tried again ;d again. Nor, though he was charmed almost equally by sculp- re, did he feel that he could quite penetrate the secret of the ilptor’s art. There remained, in both cases, a tantalizing and icinating mystery. Hawthorne was not unaware of the technique of art. He V, for instance, that some of the old paintings, though they id ffieir story clearly enough, and wrought out their details with nu jeness a nd fidelity, lacked perspective, the figure of the pic- r ^bein g shadowed forth on a surface of burnished gold. He was [491] I highly-sc n s itiv o to co krr, so much so as to feel that a painting Ic its main charm when the brilliance of its color had faded awa Though he loved the old Dutch wizards with their paintings fruits and flowers, where tulips and roses acquired an immort bloom, and where a fly settled on a peach, or a bumblebee buri< himself in a flower with lifelike illusion, Hawthorne was equal appreciative of the breadth and grandeur o f Raphae l’s design, was surely a wonderful art which could embrace at once tv excellences so far apart. But he questioned whether the highc charm or the final effect was mainly dependent upon technica ties or rules. Indeed, the sculptor might disregard technicaliti and the imitation of nature the better to produce his effect, jr as the painter worked his magical illusions by touches that ha no relation to truth if looked at from the wrong point of view.; the statue of Lorenzo de’ Medici, it seemed to Hawthorne, Mich( angelo had positively reached a degree of excellence above tl capability of marble, sculpturing his highest touches upon a and duskiness. The success of art, therefore, did not for Hawthor ne see to reside solely or even primarily in its technicalities or physic aspects. He found, indeed, an analogy between the nature of a and the nature of man. In Florence, in the Museum of Natur History, the greatest wonders of the museum for him had be( some wax models of all parts of the human frame. It had seem( to him then that it was good to have the wholeness and summe up beauty of woman in memory when looking at the details there displayed. These last were by no means beautiful, for th( were only what belong to our mortality. The essence that mak them truly beautiful is our immortal part, which we shall tal away with us. Hence, t he best art, and perhaps not only th e best, s ugges far more than it shows. The true artist, lifted into power and hk thought by a religious earnestness, is assisted by a strength f: beyond his own skill, and working through his hands. He bi lends his hand to a power that o’er him plans, and so creat better than he knows. Hence, too, in the interpretation of ar profound work of art, there are likely to be as many interpret tions as there are spectators. The artist puts forth a riddle, [49^] ay without himself knowing the solution. The symbol lich he creates, if it means one thing, seems to mean a thousand, id, often, op{x>site things. The image which inspires his art is iritual and divine, and all the subsequent elaboration of his >rk something belonging merely to himself, and serving but to ver up the celestial germ. There was, then, for Hawthorne, a mystery and a miracle in t a§_in nian. In both he saw a juncture of the physical and the vine. With his friend Hiram Powers, Hawthorne had agreed that taste for painting and sculpture is something very different )m the moral sense, and he questioned whether a man is really y truer, wiser, or better for possessing it. Certainly, he did It approve a total separation of taste from the moral sense; nor d he suppose that the separation of these qualities in the artist mself could result in anything other than an inferior art. An- ea del Sarto, though possessing the dexterity to express far ore than many another earlier Italian painter, was not nearly much in earnest, and therefore his painting lacked the soul art and nature and expressed far less than that of some of his edecessors. Unmistakably, Hawthorne did not wish to divorce erne or subject matter—what the work of art has to say—from . purely aesthetic values. There was, for him, a hierarchy in ch matters. He confessed, for instance, an enjoyment in Reu- :ns’ old, fat, jolly Bacchus astride a barrel, the most natural id lifelike representation of a tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is >ssible to imagine; but, amid such sensual images, he caught, lile strolling through the Uffizi Gallery, the divine pensiveness a Madonna’s face, by Raphael, which came to him as a sort revelation. Early in his acquaintance with the “Venus de’ Medici,” Haw- ome had not thought of her as a senseless image, but as a being at lived to gladden the world. She was beautiful indeed, but e seemed to have a spiritual existence as well, her modesty ftening her into woman, and suggesting all womanhood in one. *auty, in Hawthorne’s view, as in Emerson’s, may well be its :m excuse for being, though it is not the last or highest ex- :ession of art. Art, it seemed to Hawthorne, serves best to [493] gladden the world when it blends beauty with high and nob aim—at once refreshing and cheering man through his aesthet sense, and consoling and lifting him by its appeal to his moral an religious nature. While Hawthorne was still in England, he had planned i employ some of his leisure in Italy in writing. On April i, 185 in Rome, after he had settled himself, he therefore began i write in earnest, and continued to do so until May 17, unt shortly before he took his family to Florence for the summer, 1 avoid the pestilential atmosphere of Rome. In the interval, 1 had written some thirty thousand words, though what he ha written was in no finished form—was rather suggestions for story, even the general trend of which, as well as the conclusioi and also the atmosphere, being concepts still imperfectly shape in his mind. Nebulously, he planned now to join the two plots whic had suggested themselves to him in England—the story of bloody footstep and the story of an American journeying to Eni land to claim an ancestral estate, the contrasting characteristu of England and America to constitute some of the substance c the thought. The moral, if he could evolve it properly out of th events of his plot, was to let the past alone, not to seek it or n new it; but rather to press on to higher and better things, or, at a events, to other things—assured that the right way can never b that which leads back to the identical shapes long ago left behinc The hero and heroine were to become, in the development c this theme, the Adam and Eve of a new epoch and the fittin missionaries of a new social faith, of which there should be cor tinual hints through the book, the book to be brought to an en( unexpected by everybody and, he humorously supposed, no satisfactory to the natural yearnings of novel readers. Hawthorne planned, too, an introduction, in tvhich he wouli disclaim all intention to draw a real picture, his experiences a consul merely suggesting the theme of an American claiming a English estate. The descriptions of scenery and the like might b [494 ] rrect, but he would give a tinge of the grotesque to all the aracters and events. He did not, in brief, wish his story to be picture of life, but a Romance, grim, grotesque, quaint—the igic and gentler pathetic not to be excluded by the tone and satment. It should have so much of the hues of life as to make e reader sometimes think it was intended for a picture, yet the mosphere should be such as to excuse all wildness. Furthermore, must be a humorous work, or nothing. If he could but write one central scene in the proper vein, ; was confident that all the rest of the Romance would readily range itself around that nucleus. The trouble was, as he recog- zed in spite of all the tentative pages that he had written, that ; had not yet struck the true keynote of this Romance, and un- 1 he did, and unless he did, he should write nothing but tedious- :ss and nonsense. After almost two months of unfruitful labor, ; therefore dropped the whole project, still hopeful that it could ; finished when the proper inspiration came. While Hawthorne was thus trying, by the strength of his will, to rect his energy, the mysterious powers of creative thought were rrying him in a quite different direction from the one he had diberately chosen. The process, as it appears in retrospect, had ready begun even before he had put pen to paper in the begin- ngs of the English Romance. While wandering about the streets : Marseilles, on the journey to Rome, he had been impressed, in public square, by a bronze statue of an ecclesiastical personage, retching forth his hands as if bestowing a benediction, a pose awthorne was to see again in Italian statues, apparently with ^epening impressions. Later, in Rome, when he and Sophia were siting the church of the Capuchins, they saw a dead monk, pre- ired for burial, from whose nostrils there suddenly oozed a ream of blood, which stained itself in Hawthorne’s memory, hat repulsive experience, superficially, seemed to have no rela- m to his great pleasure in Guido’s “Archangel Michael Over- ming Lucifer,’’ or to a lonely walk on a path leading from e Appian Way, or to the lively dinner party at T. B. Read’s, Here he met various artists. The juncture of these and other mis- dlanies was still to occur; for the time being they had only been [It away in memory. None of these experiences had moved Hawthorne deeply. [495] It was quite another matter when, in the Barberini Palace, 1 first saw Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci, the spell of which 1 found indefinable, the most profoundly wrought picture in tl world. It seemed impossible that any artist did it, or could do again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted better the he knew. Sophia, too, had found the portrait a masterpiece th baffled words. Never, it had seemed to her, had looked out fro a human countenance such ruin of hope, joy, and life, thoug at the same time, there seemed to be no comprehension of tl cause of this great loss. Beatrice seemed a spotless lily of Edei trailed over by a serpent, and unable to understand the desecr tion, yet struck with a fatal blight. Hawthorne turned away from the painting wondering if a that he and Sophia saw in it could be seen by some spectator ( deep sensibility who knew nothing of the Cenci tragedy. But 1 came back to the picture again and again, trying to resolve i mystery, looking closely into the eyes, which gazed at him oi of a remote and inaccessible region, where it was frightenin to be alone, and where no sympathy could reach—suggesting being unhumanized by some terrible fate. Though Hawthomi when he first gazed at that picture, so greatly moved by it, m apparently unaware of what it was presently to mean to hin he had already begun the train of thought which was to be on of the major themes of The Marble Faun. At the moment, h was conscious only of his plans for his English Romance, whic he had not yet actually begun. Of Hawthorne’s recorded inclinations to write about Italia matter, the first seemed slight indeed. In the first winter in Rom he had a number of times walked to the Corso to witness th Carnival, though his initial impressions were not very favorabk A person must have very broad sunshine within himself, he re fleeted, to be joyous on such shallow provocation. Nevertheless little as he had enjoyed the Carnival, he thought that he couh make quite a brilliant sketch of it without very widely departini from truth. Still, it seemed no great matter then—nothing ira portant enough to suggest a very earnest or sustained effort. All these experiences Hawthorne had had before he had begui work on his English Romance. He had worked on that projec only three days, and written only some three thousand words [496] lien there began the hrst of a series of conscious urgings to write e story which was presently to displace all his determined Forts to tell the tale of the bloody footstep and the ancestral tate. It seems to have been Sophia whose interest was first at- icted to Praxiteles’ statue of a faun. At any rate, on February 1858, she casually recorded that she and her husband had seen e statue in the museum of the Capitol, together with the Dying Gladiator,” the “Antinous,” the “Amazon,” the “Cen- urs,” and others. Somewhat less than a month later, they saw copy of the faun in the Vatican, and this time Sophia employed ;r journal in detail to express her pleasure. There was an aston- ling grace in the figure, she thought, and a cheerfulness like a nny afternoon. The gleam on the face and form suggested nshine on rippling water. Delightful idleness was never so iquisitely expressed. The Faun seemed perfect good nature, ealized with a thousand fine amenities. On that February visit to the Capitol, it was the “Dying ladiator” that Hawthorne had been eager to see, his eagerness aking all the other treasures of the gallery seem tedious. If : as much as noticed the Faun, he made no mention of it in his umal then, or even later when he saw the copy in the Vatican, was not until he saw a third faun, in the Villa Borghese, and a mcing one, that he found it exceedingly pleasant to look at. e liked these strange, sweet, playful, rustic creatures, linked so rettily, without monstrosity, to the lower tribes. They seemed a itural and delightful link betwixt human and brute life, with mething of a divine character intermingled. Their character, I far as he knew, had never been wrought out in literature. It xurred to him that something quite good, funny, and philo- 'phical, as well as poetic, might very well be educed from them. Though Hawthorne was now engaged on his English Ro- ance, his fancy kept hovering about these enchanting fauns, ack at the Capitol again, late in April, he was sensible of a xuliar charm in the Faun of Praxiteles. It had a sylvan beauty id homeliness, friendly and wild at once. The lengthened, but )t preposterous ears, and the little tail, which he inferred, had 1 exquisite effect, and made him smile in his very heart. It ;emed to him that this race of fauns was the most delightful of [497] all that antiquity imagined. A story, with all sorts of fun ai pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species ha ing become intermingled with the human race, a family wi the faun blood in them having prolonged itself from the class era till the present. The tail might have disappeared, but the pret hairy ears should occasionally reappear in members of the famil and the moral instincts and the intellectual characteristics the faun might be brought out, without detriment to the hums interest of the story. Fancy this combination in the person of young lady! The idea of writing a romance about this Faun of Pra> teles in the Capitol kept recurring to Hawthorne, and he wei once more to take particular note of it, to record his observ tions minutely in his journal. It is not surprising, therefore, tha though he kept doggedly at his English Romance until short before he removed his family to Florence for the summer, wht he took up his pen again, in Florence, he cast the English R mance aside, and began the tale which he was to entitle Tl Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni. The possibilitii of the transformation of a faun into a human being, throug the deepening of his character, together with reflections on tl fatality which had pursued Beatrice Cenci, as he had imagine it revealed in Guido’s portrait, had combined with a force whic he seemed powerless to resist, the English story meanwhile fadin into relative unimportance. To begin the actual writing, however, had not been easy. I spite of the luxury of his study in the Casa del Bello, such a Sophia thought the Artist of the Beautiful ought to have, so coc and comfortable, with its adjacent summerhouse or arbor ii which to sit and dream, Hawthorne was kept idle by the sens of being unsettled. What he needed, he felt, was the monoton of an eventless exterior life before he could live in the worl( within. It was not until he had seen Florence tolerably well, ii July, that he began sketching out his romance. During the mont) of August, after the removal of the family to the Villa Montautc he usually spent the whole day at home, planning and sketching though he put the tvriting aside by the end of the month. In spit of a plethora of ideas, he could not seriously accomplish anything [498] though the Italian atmosphere was good to dream in, he found unfavorable to the close toil of composition. What he needed put him in working trim, it seemed to him, was to breathe ; fogs of old England or the east winds of Massachusetts. Never- ;less, he meant to be busy during the winter at Rome. In Rome there were hindrances, too. For one, there was the »om of the Italian winter, with its shivering winds, its drizzle, d its pouring rains, much more than enough. An English coal if he could but see its honest face within doors, might com- usate for all the unamiableness of the outside atmosphere; but Rome one might ask for the sunshine of the New Jerusalem th as much hope of getting it. Besides, in October, Una took ? Roman fever, lay desperately ill, hovering uncertainly be- een life and death. When writing was possible at all, it was so ly as an anodyne. Nevertheless, before the end of the winter, iwthorne was able to tell his publishers that he had written a )mance—a larger amount of scribble, he said, than any of his :mer Romances. It still required, to be sure, a good deal of /ision, trimming off of exuberances, and filling up vacant spaces, ffering so many interruptions, the story had developed itself in very imperfect way; but he was confident that he could make the necessary changes in a month or two. It was in Concord that Hawthorne had intended to complete > Romance. To take advantage of an English copyright, and rhaps for other reasons, however, he decided to return to Eng- id. There, briefly at Whitby and for about three months at ^dcar, where the North Sea borders on northernmost Yorkshire, was constantly at his book, writing in the morning, and tak- 5 long walks in the afternoon over desolate sands, seating him- f occasionally on tussocks of sand-grass to meditate upon his try. Redcar was as secluded a spot as he had ever seen, and erefore very favorable to literary labor. For the better part of Dse three months there was never a caller or visitor. At last he id the monotony which he had felt necessary to live in the world 'thin. On September g, 1859, Hawthorne gave his manuscript to phia to read, although he had not yet written the denouement. 1 the eighth of November, at Leamington, where they were now [499] living, Sophia recorded in her diary, in very large script, to er phasize the happy event, that her husband had finished his boo The Romance of Monte Beni. It had required much more woi than he had supposed. Hawthorne’s own attitudes toward his latest book fluctuate as they had done in the case of his earlier publications. To Soph he confessed he thought it good for nothing, since it was bast upon a foolish idea which nobody would like or accept, an opinic which she dismissed as merely representing a disgust with wh; had occupied him so long. In spite of such cold fits, when 1 thought it the most infernal nonsense, Hawthorne sometimes a( mired it exceedingly. He came, presently, to think of it as h best Romance; at any rate, if he had written anything well, should be this book, for he had never thought or felt more deep] than in the composition of it. Still, he thought that he coul see why none of his work might appeal to the popular mine Oddly enough, his own individual taste in reading was for quit another class of works than those he himself was able to writi If he were to meet with such books as his own, he hardly b( lieved that he would be able to get through them. In spite of Hawthorne’s fears that his book might have n popular appeal, it sold well, the English publisher printing thre editions in less than two months. There were, it is true, con plaints from some critics that the story left too many question unanswered—a criticism which Hawthorne met, in the second ed tion, by adding a conclusion in which he humorously admitte his own curiosity about these matters, and pretended to make few lucid explanations, though he really left all as it was before- his supposition being that a Romance had its own laws and pre prieties which the discerning reader ought implicitly and in sensibly to acknowledge. But such complaints were submerge( in the general acclaim. The Marble Faun became Hawthorne’ most widely read book, the most distinguished critics of the da applauding it as the greatest of his works. Financially, Hawthomi found himself well off, and after so long an interval since he hac appeared before the public, he was especially surprised ant pleased by all the praise—the daily notes of congratulations, th^ requests for autographs, and the invitations to dinner. It was lik a welcome back among friends. [500] Nowhere, wrote Henry Bright, upon reading Hawthorne’s (V Romance, could one find such beautiful descriptions of me. He supposed that no one would now visit the Eternal ;y without a copy of his friend’s book in his hand. Two :ades later Henry James was to say that The Marble Faun was leed a part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon itor to Rome, and was read by every English-speaking traveler o arrived there, who had been there, or who expected to go. c.e Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage some forty years earlier. The mance of Monte Beni reflected, in its external aspects, the [timents of cultivated readers whose intellectual roots were still nly entwined in the soil of classical history and literature, idem history and modern literature not yet having displaced im in formal education, thus almost entirely effacing a whole rid of understanding and feeling. However rebelliously the boy Byron had complained that college had taught him nothing of how his fathers had bled of what Avon’s bard had written, the adult Byron threw over ssical Italy such a charm of poetry as it had not known in glish literature before. The boy Hawthorne, in the country lege at Brunswick, Maine, had experienced no such rebellion, i the contrary, indifferent as he had been to most of his col- ;e subjects, he had retained an interest in the classics, his sole pearance in public declamation occurring when he had read his tin essay, “De Patris Conscriptus Romanorum.” Eor him, in inhood as in boyhood, Italy was a sort of poetic or fairy pre- ict. When he had at last had the opportunity to visit Italy, the aerience had been the fulfilment of a dream long dreamed he ideal becoming real. When he came to write his Romance, wrote freely and with self-enjoyment, his memories of Italy— mories of the antique, the pictorial, the statuesque—shining t vividly in a blend of boyhood visions and manhood realiza- ns. Spontaneously, then, Hawthorne wrote of the sights and scenes Italy. Like Byron, he had walked and meditated in the moon- . Coliseum, with a pleasure renewed when his company of lists, sitting on the steps of the Christian shrine, enjoyed, in [501] almost equal measure, the moonlight and shadow, their presei gayety and their gloomy reminiscences. Like Byron, too, he ha stood on the brink of the Tarpeian Rock, the promontory whenc in Roman days, the traitor’s leap had cured all ambition. It w natural, therefore, that the villain of his Romance should I hurled from this precipice, the descent accompanied by all tl imaginable accumulated terrors of the Past. With sentiments aki to Byron’s, Hawthorne had many times visited St. Peter’s, move by its vastness and magnificence, seeing in it an eternal ark ( worship—sentiments revivified for him in Hilda’s climactic seer of confession. Byron, standing in the Pantheon, had noted a ligl that Glory had shed through its sole aperture. Hawthorne, stan( ing beneath that circular opening, had found it pleasant to see tf clouds flitting across it, sometimes covering it quite over; the permitting a glimpse of the sky, then showing all the circle ( sunny blue. Once, through the ragged edge of a cloud, a gre: slanting beam of sunshine was visible all the way down to th pavement, falling upon motes of dust or a thin smoke of incens imperceptible in the shadow. In that broad, golden beam, sloping cataract of sunlight, re-created in the delight of Har- thome’s memory and imagination, the penitent Miriam kneelec her upturned face invisible behind a veil. So with a hundred other matters. Out of the darkness of th Catacombs and Hawthorne’s somber emotions came Miriam Spectre, the ominous villain. In a visit to the Villa Borghese wit his family, Hawthorne had escaped from the warm sunshine an had made his way to a large fountain, surrounded by a circula stone seat of wide sweep, there to sit and enjoy this most beautifr place—its deep groves, sunny openings, the airy gush of fountain; and the marble statues—all these works of art looking as if the had been there long enough to be at home, and to be on friendl and familiar terms with the grass and trees. In the casino itsell among other works of sculpture, he had seen a dancing faun exceedingly pleasant to look at. And all this beauty and hi pleasure in it he was to know again in the sylvan dance of hi own faun and nymph in their one hour of gayety at a suburbai villa. The journey from Rome to Florence and back again Hat\ thome had enjoyed exceedingly as one of the brightest and moi carefree interludes of his life, an enjoyment that came back t [302] Ti as he wrote of scenes by the way when Donatello and Kenyon trneyed from Monte Beni to Perugio, there to meet Miriam and receive the bronze pontiff’s benediction. Again the graceful iscan girls carried their bundles of tangled twigs and blossoms, lin the tailor sewed before his door, and again the idlers of the lage let the warm day slide by in the sweet, interminable task doing nothing. Hawthorne had, indeed, written The Marble Faun with deep ;ling and great self-enjoyment. He had not, however, regarded ; settings merely with the sentiments of the casual tourist; her he had employed them with the deliberation of an artist iting Romance. He wrote with the hope of putting his readers ;o a state of feeling most often experienced, he believed, in Italy vague sense of ponderous remembrances; a perception of such ight and density in a bygone life, of which Italy was the center. It the present moment might seem pressed down or crowded t, and our individual affairs and interests but half as real there elsewhere. The life of the flitting moment, existing in the tique shell of an age gone by, it seemed to him, had a fascina- n not to be found in either the past or present, taken by them- ves. It was his hope, therefore, that, seen through the medium the massive Roman Past, his own narrative—woven out of the mmonest stuff of human existence, but intermixed as it was with :h airy and unsubstantial threads—might not seem widely dif- ent from the texture of actual life. His setting, in short, was :h, he hoped, as to deter his readers from insisting upon ac- ilities. Out of the atmosphere of Italy he might draw that spell hoar antiquity and that subdued tinge of the wild and wonder- which he had sought since the days of his young manhood en he had written the “Legends of the Province House” and he Threefold Destiny.” For Hawthorne, the atmosphere of Italy emanated not only im its scenes of antiquity—its battlefield by Thrasimene’s lake, : Forum, its Coliseum, its Tarpeian Rock. Italy was for him, »re personally than for Byron, th e Mot her of Arts. In Italy l:re culminated for him that experience with the great art of “ world which had begun during his sojourn in England. If, an artist, he took delight in the historic past of Italy, which )vided so ideal a medium for his kind of writing, he found no [503] less felicity in its treasures of static art—its painting and sculptu —which stimulated anew and interisified the^^old and tantalizi questions of the nature of beauty and the function of art and t character and obligations of the artist—questions which he h long meditated upon and endeavored to dramatize, as in ‘'T Artist of the Beautiful” and a half a dozen other tales or sketch TSTbwT'when he came to write The Marble Faun, all these refli tioris on art interfused with his impressions of the antiquity ItalY^_^at vague sense of ponderous remembrances thus blSuti with those at once teasing, charming, and solacing elements whi are a p^t~o f the quest for beauty. Significantly, therefore, all the major characters of The Marl Faun but one are'amstsj Ihto"their thoughts and words and acti ties Hawthorne wove his observations on the study of art whi he had so long and so sedulously pursued. It is Hilda who remai that it is the spectator’s mood that transfigures Raphael’s “Trai figuration” itself, as it is Hilda who, when she visits the famo picture galleries of Rome, finds them empty and without comh to a heart in affliction. It is Kenyon and Miriam who humorou; and inconclusively discuss the validity of the nude in mode sculpture. But that these sentiments are really Hawthorne’s oi is clear enough, mingling so indistinguishably as they do wi the remarks made by the author in his capacity as producer ai director of the drama. It is obviously Hawthorne of the joum; who speaks when he observes that the paintings of Giotto ai Cimabue are but poor, dim ghosts of what they were when th were first created, just as it is he who confesses that the spectat must look with the eye of faith and read into a picture to knc its highest excellence. In _ one way or another, then. The Marble Faun expres: Hawthorne’s final conclusions on art and the artist, conclusio lifted from his journals and woven into the texture of his stoi In the Romance reappear his minor concern with matters tech nique, an d his major interest in expression, in meaning, traits, loftinesses, amenities, in that indefinable nothing, that i est imable somethin '^ that constitutes the life and soul throu; whic h a wor k of art gets its immortality. The imbuing of i animate canvas or stone with thought, feeling, and all the att butes of the soul remained for Hawthorne a mystery and a mirac [504] lOugh the artist may contribute a good deal of thought, emo- h, and toil of brain and hand, he cannot know how his work nes about at last. He can only be aware that he has worked bet- than he knew, as Emerson had said in “The Problem.” Only indirectly, it seemed to Hawthorne, as it had seemed Plato and Longinus and Milto n before him, can the artist aid the miracle of his art. He must not essay to express to the rid what he has not in his own soul. He must, however, feel thin himself a certain consecration and a priesthood, the only dence of which, for the public eye, will be the high treatment heroic subjects, or the delicate evolution of spiritual, through iterial, beauty. The final end of art, as Hawthorne saw it, is the enjoyment, j education, and the elevation of man. Ideally, it is for the artist ' see the unity among the seemingly discordant elements, to in- pret, to show men what they cannot discern for themselves, make the world the richer through the beauty which the artist :ates . When art does not stray from its legitimate paths and aims, aught to soften and sweeten the lives of its worshipers, and, in highest function, it should lend its aid in behalf of religious ith. Art, after all, is but a handmaiden to serve something ^tfiT-than herself—the character and sou l of man. Aristotle had d something of the kind when he had remarked that the aim the highest art is the refinement of the emotions. Emers on d heard the sw eetest music not in the oratorio, but in the man voice when it speaks, from its instant life, tones of tender- 5S, truth, or courage. After a lifetime of devotion to art, after ndering the subject in manifold ways in his private thought and his fiction, there remained for Hawthorne, as well as for his Iptor, Kenyon, something dearer far than art—namely, the man affections, by whose greater strength the most divine tue becomes only a heap of worthless fragments. The sentiments on art expressed in The Marble Faun repre- : ted, of c ourse, the climax of Hawthorne’s meditations on the »ject! No wonder, then, that he wrote his Romance with great :>enjoyment. He wrote with great joy, too, because he wrote gely freed from outward vexations. In Italy the enervating ■mth of summer in Florence and the benumbing cold of winter iRome, as well as the paralyzing effects of Una’s dreadful ill- [505] ness, had made writing difficult. But in Redcar and in Leamin ton, gone were all these hindrances. Gone, also, were the pL guing poverty and the uncertainties of livelihood which had besi him at Brook Farm. Memories of the Salem Custom House ep sode were at worst only an occasionally disturbing dream. Not in his maturity, he enjoyed a large fame and an ample income free to think and feel and dream as he had always wanted. No he was utterly at leisure to live in the borderless regions of h imagination, where dream and fact blended into the ideal, whei there was no time, but where past and present and future becan one—where, in short, all the past creations of his own imagin tion, the events of his own life, his own convictions as man an artist, as well as his hopes and aspirations, marshaled themselv before him to be directed according to the judgments of his fu and disciplined mind. As Hawthorne wrote, his memory went far and deep into tl past. That fair young girl with mirthful eyes, real or imagint from his boyhood days in Stroudwater, Maine, whose image : she stooped over him had been the vision of the fountain, stoopc again as woman or sprite over the Italian spring when Donatello ancestor knelt down to drink, her lips coming up from the litt depths to touch his mouth with a kiss. Out of a cherished recc lection came once more that slender, brown-haired Swampsco girl, a creature of the imagination and yet real, who had gla dened the village uncle’s youth and age. She came now wearir such a white dress as Sophia had worn when Hawthorne had f( the first time met her in her Charter Street home in Salem, posses ing, too, some of Sophia’s personal qualities, as well as some « those of Miss Louisa Lander, the sculptress—all these character tics blending with the stuff of imagination into a young woman f; more complex than the simple but sunny and lovable Susan wl had moved Hawthorne’s youthful fancy—a young woman at on( a sensitive artist and yet distinctly a daughter of the Puritaii Hawthorne had christened her Hilda, after that St. Hilda froi whose abbey tower at Whitby, in the earliest days of Saxo Christianity, a light had shone out over the sea to cheer at guide those who sailed in ships. During his brief residence Whitby, St. Hilda and her tower, as well as some of her traits character, had become fused in Hawthorne’s imagination wi [506] i heroine and a tower in the Via Portoghese, Rome, about which » artist friend Thompson had told him a legend, and at the ^ of which Hawthorne had chosen to locate the studio of his ;w England girl. How far Hilda had come since she had been san—and how far Hawthorne had traveled, too! When he had 5 t seen Susan standing on a bridge over a little stream near the i, the breezes playing with her skirts, he had thought of her as bird that might skim away at her pleasure, and of himself as a rmit in the depth of his mind, one who had wandered out of e real world and got into its shadow. Now he was a mature m who had found his place in the world, as well as a large hap¬ less, a part of which was still this tender memory. There were other remarkable transformations. The color and s redundant energy of Rappaccini’s daughter, Beatrice, were lewed in Miriam, who inherited, moreover, the moodiness of nobia, as well as the beauty of the Jewess whom Hawthorne d seen at the dinner of the Lord Mayor of London. Perhaps, 3 , in her love for the untutored Donatello, Hawthorne saw in r somewhat more of Zenobia, together with something of the il Margaret Fuller, who, shortly before her tragic death, had irried a man, it seemed to Hawthorne, much beneath her in- ilectually. As for Donatello, his immediate origin was of course at sculptured dancing faun which Hawthorne had seen with ch pleasure at the Villa Borghese, though the Faun of Praxiteles the Capitol had added tangibility to the first tentative glimpses an idea. But when Donatello stepped out of the cold marble the statue and became a warm and vibrant youth, he acquired e clustering curls and vivacious countenance of that young 'eigner who was one of the seven vagabonds whom Hawthorne, 1 the spring of his life and in the summer of the year, had met, lily or imaginatively, one rainy afternoon on the road between !ston and Stamford. And when Donatello and Miriam ran races with each other, Ited each other with flowers, and played together like children the delightful groves and sweet wilderness of a suburban villa, iif they were living in the Golden Age, they were that young ‘eigner and his pretty companion whose voice had sounded so ■asant in Hawthorne’s ears. Moreover, whe n Donatio and :riam dan ced in those sunny glades to the accompaniment of [507] h arp and flute and violin of those vagrant Italian musicians, th music mingled with those faraway and delectable sounds of th bai jel org an of the old gentleman in whose covered wagon all th vagabo nds ha d long ago found shelter. The Merry Andrew of tha organ, who had nodded his head and winked his eyes, as if he wet r idicul ing all t he oth er figures of his little world, now merge with that miscellaneous crowd of Italians who joined with Donj tello and Miriam in their wild dance . But he was no longer Merry Andrew of pointed cap and motley coatTinstead, thoug still the sole excep tion to the geniality of the moment, he was a American, one who sneered at the spectacle of all these ligh hearted dancers, and declined to compromise his dignity by mal ing'pm'Tof it—obviously a satirical hit at Hawthorne himself. Almost innumerable were the memories which Hawthorn recalled and refurbished for new and altered use in The Marbl Faun. That dismal figure, wrapped in a black velvet cloak, wit a broad-brimmed hat over his heavy brow, who had cast such gloom over the hope and joy of Adam Forrester and Lilias Fai emerged now from the catacombs of Rome dressed afresh in O voluminous cloak of buffalo hide and a pair of goatskin breechc with the hair outward, such a satyr-like figure as Hawthorne ha seen among the peasants on the Campagna on his return to Rom from Florence. If the Spectre of the Catacomb, in addition to hi heavy brows, had acquired a dusky wilderness of mustache an beard, into which his wild visage seemed to float away, he n tained, nevertheless, that baneful lunacy of old Walter Gascoign which was to work newly imagined harms for Miriam. And tha unnamed painter of “The Prophetic Pictures,” to whom no li\ ing creature could be brought near enough to warm his heari and who possessed the melancholy gift to see the inmost soul, anc by a power indefinable even to himself, to make it glow or darkei upon the canvas in glances that expressed the thought and sent: ment of years, came forward once more as the sculptor Kenyor Happily, in his new incarnation, the artist, inspired by th warmth of heart which his creator had found in his own life i: the intervening years, was no longer insulated from human kinc Instead, he knew now the meaning of the friendship and lov which keep a man from extravagant thoughts and desires an hopes. Instead, too, of creating a work of art prophetic of wil [308] ssion and grief and terror, he now, with a skill and insight be¬ nd his own consciousness, modeled a bust of Donatello, repre- iting, not the features of the young man as he appeared at the jment, but as he was presently to be—the face illuminated with ligher meaning, a growing intellectual power and moral sense igically suggested. Perhaps it would not be amiss to say of the fabric of The arble Faun that the new warp is brighter than the old weft, le prevailing colors, at any rate, are the brighter, suggestive a deeper and more confident, if still quiet, hope. Even old iscoigne, whose hostility had once been thwarted only at the ive, now perishes as the Capuchin monk, at the same time serv- y as the medium whereby Miriam and her lover attain a high dusky happiness. Every^vhere throughout the Romance are the :ustomed devices to effect that blend of homely truthfulness th weird and ghostly shadows which Oliver Wendell Holmes d found accomplished with such consummate skill in The ouse of the Seven words, phrases, images, characters, nations, and sentiments coming from as remote a past as Fan- iwe and emanating from Hawthorne’s whole repertory of tales, etches, and romances, a host of details too numerous and too luous to capture in a few words, but all combining to create at atmosphere, at once indistinct and luminous, which the )rld has been able to describe only as Hawthornesque. Out of this atmosphere of ancient Italy, and art, and the lights d shadows and echoes of former creations, emerge memories of ents and sentiments and convictions that belong to the man as dl as to the author. In that picture of Hilda, dressed in white, long the doves high in her shrine, it was Sophia whom Haw- ome saw, Sophia as she was in the days of their courtship, when, his love letters, he addressed her as his Dove. When Hilda Id out her hand to Kenyon, who was glad to take it in his own, only to assure himself that she was made of earthly material, it .s Sophia and Hawthorne who were re-enacting a scene from nr youth, when, in the old house beside the Charter Street irying ground, Sophia had stood with the width of the room be- een them, looking like a vision, so spiritual that Hawthorne’s iman heart wished to be assured that she was clothed in earthly sture. And when Donatello, in his apparent simplicity, had [309] exclaimed that he anticipated being happy forever because he wj in love, Miriam recognizing in his sentiment that profound coi viction of its own immortality which genuine love never fails t bring, it was not only the characters in a story who were speal ing; it was, likewise, Hawthorne himself remembering what h had once told Sophia—that in their affection for one anotht they had become inheritors of eternity. There are, in The Marble Faun, numerous scenes and sent ments of such an autobiographical character. Scattered througl out, too, are a miscellany of reflective thoughts! arising from Hav thome’s personal experiences. When, for instance, Hilda, an ui willing witness of murder, first became aware of that dismal ce tainty of the existence of evil in the world—though she might ha\ fancied herself fully assured of the sad mystery long before—he despair, the chill and heavy misery which only the innocer can experience, was a reminiscence of Hawthorne’s own unhapp misfortune at the Salem Custom House. Out of his relations wit Goodrich and the Bewick Publishing Company he had, tru enough, drawn the inference that the world is full of rogues, i he had told his sisters; but it was not until he had been so falsel and brutally charged with corruption and fraud that he knei how bruising and bewildering can be the discovery of evil in th nature of man. But he had learned, after a while, that the sk had not actually tumbled down, and that his catastrophe had nc involved the whole moral world. At Lenox, among its rural sol tudes, in the midst of his family and a few friends, he had, lik Hilda after her scene in the confessional in the World’s Cathedra’ found infinite peace after infinite trouble. In its very essence—that is, in its basic theme—T/te Marbl Faun represents the almost lifelong course of Hawthorne’s prc foundest convictions, and so, in a large sense, is autobiographical as were his other Romances—T/te Scarlet Letter, The House of th Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance. As early as tlr writing of “The Maypole of Merry Mount,’’ if not before, hi mind had dwelt upon an awesome mystery—that the deepest jo may spring from earth’s doom of care and sorrow, that man ma never rise so high as when chastened by adversity, as Wordswort had chanted so solemnly yet so exultingly in his great odes. Ii The Scarlet Letter, knowing now the bitterest pangs of suffei [510] g, but roused and stimulated by such ideas as Emerson had ex- essed in “Experience” and Goethe in Faust, Hawthorne en- rged his convictions and projected the hope that not only out of Iversity and sorrow, but out of error itself can man rise to gher things. If such a strain of thought was only implicit in he Scarlet Letter, leaving his kindly contemporary readers izzled, and his unfriendly critics fearful of his apparently un- thodox involvements, that strain became unmistakably ex- icit in The Marble Faun, however hedged about by devices of udence or art. In part, the theme of The Marble Faun had been anticipated r Milton in Book XII of Paradise Lost. After the expulsion from iradise, and after the Archangel Michael has explained to Adam e Divine plan to redeem mankind from Sin and Death, and to ceive the faithful into a bliss far happier than that of Eden, dam exclaims: O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce. And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand Whether I should repent me now of sin By me done and occasioned, or rejoice Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring, To God more glory, more good will to men From God, and over wrath grace shall abound. ilton, of course, had told his story as a Divine event beginning a remote past and consummating at the end of the world. Haw- ome, it is true, writes not without reference to Biblical impli- tions; but it is the distinctive feature of his Romance to repre- nt the fortunate fall not as an isolated event in a remote past. It as a drama re-enacted over and over again in the history of an. Sin or error, he suggests, may, like sorrow, be an instrument ost effective in the education of intellect and soul, a struggle rough which man may attain a higher and purer state than he uld otherwise have acquired. Donatello, as Kenyon had ob- irved, and as Miriam had remarked, had passed from thoughtless iyety through a crime and a pain and remorse which had awak- ened his soul, developing a thousand high capabilities, moral an( intellectual, which could never have been associated with th faun-like youth before his transformation. Every human life, it seemed to Hawthorne, if it ascends ti truth or delves down to reality, must undergo, through grief an( pain, a change similar to Donatello’s. Sometimes, perhaps, th instruction comes without the sorrow, and more often the sorrov may teach no lesson that abides. In this Romance, however. Haw thorne chose to accentuate the blessing that may come in a strangi disguise. Nor did he limit his affirmation to the main course of hi story, for it is not only Donatello who re-creates the world by th new eyes with which he comes to regard it. Miriam undergoes ; transformation likewise. That dark fatality which had so lonj pursued her, like that which had occasioned the ruin of Beatrio Cenci, vanishes when she dissolves her whole heart into sympathy and lavishes it all upon the Donatello whom she had once re garded indifferently as a simpleton—a new and tender gladnes beaming out of her eyes, her face acquiring a new appearance o health and bloom. Paradoxically, though she had beguiled Dona tello into evil, as Eve had beguiled Adam, she might yet, by dedi eating herself to his good, guide him to a higher innocence tliar that from which he fell. Even the severe Hilda, who had felt hei own spotlessness impugned when she had first learned of th( crime of Donatello and Miriam, was softened, presently, out oi the chilliness of her virgin pride—became the tenderer for hei experience, and took a deeper look into the heart of things. Aftei all, it was Hilda who, in the end, foresaw the sunlight which wai yet to shine into the lives of Miriam and Donatello. The Marble Faun, however, is no tract, any more than Tht Scarlet Letter is a morality drama. Indeed, the story of Donatello, Romance though it is, unfolds like life itself, leaving the othei characters in the story aware of the wonderful transformation that has taken place in Donatello’s nature, yet divided as to the significance of that transformation. It is Miriam, the woman of force of intellect and energy of will, whose sad experiences have given her a depth of understanding, who draws the analogy be¬ tween the Biblical story of the fall of man and the Romance ol Monte Beni, and who proposes the idea that sin may be the des tined means by which, over a long pathway of toil and sorrow [5^2] an is to attain a higher, brighter, and profounder happiness an his lost birthright gave. It is not Miriam, however, but Ken- »n, the sculptor-philosopher, who is first cognizant of the trans- rmation of Donatello, and it is largely through his eyes, as well through his art in the sculpturing of Donatello’s bust, that the ader is apprised of the transformation. Kenyon sees clearly lough the mixture of good there may be in things evil. He sees e fact as a paradox, a moral enigma. If he seems poised in inde- sion, or vacillating between the force of Miriam’s experience id intellect and Hilda’s purity and severity, yielding at last to e latter, it must be remembered that he is represented as a lover well as a philosopher. Intellectually aware of the unworldli- jss and impracticableness of Hilda’s theory that in any mixture : good and evil the good is turned to evil, not the evil to whole- meness, he is quite in character when, as the homeless and nely lover that he is, he turns for solace to the gentle steadfast- ?ss of this daughter of the Puritans. When, therefore, Kenyon proposes as the moral of Donatello’s Dry the educative value of sin, and then at once denies his own 'oposal when he perceives that it shocks Hilda beyond words, it ay seem superficially that Hawthorne has developed his thesis such length only to show its untenability, if not its offensive- ;ss, too. But Kenyon’s denial of what is patently the true theme : the story has a history and an explanation in Hawthorne’s leory of art and in his experience with affairs of the world. Haw- lorne had doubtless expressed his honest conviction, in the \uthor’s Preface” to The House of the Seven Gables, that when Romance does really teach anything, it is usually through a far ore subtle process than the ostensible one. A high truth, he had id in that preface—a high truth fairly, finely, and skilfully rought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final welopment of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is iver any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page an at the first. How confident he was in this view is illustrated 1/ the fact that of course The House of the Seven Gables does iDt at all illustrate the moral which Hawthorne facetiously at- libutes to that Romance. In The Marble Faun the high truth lat is to be developed appears, indeed, very early in the story, ud is unmistakably clear following the incident at the Tarpeian [5^3] Rock. So little is the Romance in need of a pointed moral that tf author can appear to deny his theme, quietly assured that he not only avoiding a device distasteful to him, but that his di cerning reader will understand perfectly well. Then, too, Hawthorne had learned from experience that a author has to deal with readers other than discerning and syn pathetic ones. Although, in The Scarlet Letter, he had sought t show a high and consoling truth brightening a dark world, the Romance had been received by some of the contemporary n ligious journals as gross and foul, or simply as a dirty story, som( thing to be ashamed of. He was charged with investing adulter with all the fascinations of genius, and it was suggested that th book reflected highly derogatory characteristics of his own natui as a man. Of course Hawthorne could have quite ignored such cri icisms. The personal aspersions, however, were irksome becaus they were associated with the political charges of fraud and coi ruption made by the Salem Whigs—the critics maintaining tha The Scarlet Letter clearly revealed the unprincipled man wh had employed his genius to undermine the morals of the Saler Custom House. It was, therefore, doubtless difficult for Hav thome to be wholly indifferent to such matters, however far the were in the past when he came to write The Marble Faun. Bu the apparent prudence he exercised in the presentation of th theme of his last Romance, which probed the subject of goo( coming out of evil in a situation more serious than that examine! in The Scarlet Letter, must be accounted for by some other mean than the assumption that the author wished to avoid further un favorable criticism, though that may have been one of his aims Beyond question, Hawthorne had a pixy-like humor whicl asserted itself, sometimes, quite unexpectedly. Far in his past in “The Haunted Quack,” and later in “Mrs. Bullfrog,” it hat been very obvious. It had been much more subtly expressed ir the preface to The House of the Seven Gables when he had witl apparent solemnity assured his reader that, not to be deficient ir the customary stress upon moral purpose in fiction, he had pro vided himself with a moral, too. That the stated moral was a per fectly good one, however irrelevant to the story, was part of th fun. The critics of The Scarlet Letter could find no fault witl [514] e moral of the later Romance, the author having the satisfaction : disarming them at the same time that he quietly laughed at lem. In The Marble Faun this humor attains its greatest subtlety, r there it appears in a situation which is a positive stroke of ;nius. Not only is the hostile critic amusingly disarmed when enyon yields to Hilda’s avowedly Puritan sentiments. The pur- 5ses of art are fulfilled, too—the purposes as Hawthorne had riously conceived them in the preface to The House of the wen Gables. The situation is somewhat analogous to that in [ichelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” which had so diverted Haw- lorne when he had seen the painting in Rome. In that picture [ichelangelo had immortalized his critic—the critic of nudity for¬ mer sprawling in his own unwanted nakedness in a great work of 't, the artist having retaliated with an amusing finality. “The Last Judgment” is, of course, a serious painting, the stail of the artist’s humor being absorbed in the solemnity of le picture as a whole, and quite unknown and unnoticed by the isual spectator. So, too, with The Marble Faun. Indeed, in no )mance does Hawthorne explore darker depths, though nowhere oes he express higher hopes. The old hope of immortality, in hich numerous early tales found their resolution, is retained; ut in The Marble Faun the author places the emphasis on that lysterious process by which, in his view, our earthly life instructs s for another state of being. If gayety or innocence is lost, they lay fortunately be supplanted, whatever the pain and grief, by a understanding and a joy that are Heaven’s best gifts to earth, > well as a foretaste of blessings to come. Stated quite simply, ne can perhaps say that, by whatever routes Hawthorne had aveled in attaining his persuasions—whether in company with /ordsworth or Emerson or Goethe or Milton—there is in The larble Faun a joining of the Christian faith in immortality with le Socratic conviction that in wisdom lies the salvation of man. lind and Heart, those colleague pastors whose disputations, long 50, in “Sunday at Home,” had been so difficult to reconcile, ad through a long experience, at last apparently attained accord. on June 30, i860, two days after Haw thome’s return to America, Longfellow saw his old friend a the office of Ticknor and Fields in Boston, the poet observec that Hawthorne had been browned by sun and sea, and that h( seemed a little bewildered and sad at getting back from Europe It was evidently for him the schoolboy’s Blue Monday—vacatior over, work beginning. Nor was Longfellow’s surmise far amiss Hawthorne had come home reluctantly—loath to leave behind him his one great adventure, and with fearful forebodings re¬ garding political affairs in his native land. Very soon did the workaday world begin to press in upon him. His three children were growing up now, and the “Wayside” cottage proved to be much too small for comfort—especially after the forty rooms of the delightful villa in Florence. For the better part of a year, therefore, family life was at odds and ends while “The Wayside” was being enlarged, and carpenters and painters and paperhangers appeared to be creating a new pandemonium. Out of this confusion and clatter, however, Hawthorne drew the assurance, not only that his family was to be comfortable, but that he himself was to have a study such as he had dreamed of—or at least as akin to his dream as the limitations of Concord would perrnit. It was not the study that Hawthorne had imagined at Lenox —all finished in red and with red draperies to conceal all angles; rather it had its origins in his memories of a curious old place in England, Stanton Harcourt, a feature of which was a tower, some ;eventy feet high, in an upper room of which Alexander Pope lad had his study, where he had written a considerable part of lis translation of Homer, and on the top of which, through the embrasures of the battlement. Pope had no doubt come to peep apon the varied landscape. It seemed to Hawthorne at the time ;hat he had never seen a place he should like better for a study Jian this—so comfortably small, in such an airy height, with wide /iews over a gently undulating tract of country. Then, in Rome, lis artist friend Thompson had taken him to see an old palace ivith a tall, battlemented tower, about which Thompson had re- :ounted a strange legend, which Hawthorne had subsequently reshaped in The Marble Faun, where the uppermost chamber of this tower became the studio of the artist Hilda. Later, in Florence, in his residence at the Villa Montauto, he had himself had a gray lid tower, not as a study, but as an observation point, from which it had seemed as if all Italy lay under his eyes, and from which, late into many a night, he had watched the stars. Hence, above the ridgepole of the ancient part of rebuilt “Wayside” projected a third-story square tower, with windows fac¬ ing all directions, the two front ones looking out upon lane and meadow, beyond which lay the tranquillity of Lincoln Woods and the peace of Walden Pond. In this study, with its desk and fireplace and its walls covered with paper of a pale golden hue, Hawthorne hoped that he could escape the tumult of life and be alone with his thoughts and his pen. Unhappily, when all bills were paid, Hawthorne discovered that the repairs and additions to his house had cost him more than four times the original estimate. His vision of a leisurely life of the imagination was therefore once more marred by a com¬ pulsion to earn money to meet the increasing needs of his family. Besides, he presently discovered, in the spring following his re¬ turn from Europe, that there was no seclusion into which the disturbing influences of war did not penetrate, so that he was compelled, reluctantly, to suspend the contemplation of his fan¬ tasies. Moreover, by degrees, so that he was at first unaware of its approach, a never-diagnosed illness disintegrated his health until ivriting became a hopeless task, and death came as a welcome relief to helplessness and pain, though he was not yet sixty. The story of the last four years of Hawthorne’s life is a story of [ 5 ^ 7 ] troubled mind, of illness, of waning physical and literary powers and, at last, of an easeful death, for which he had fervently prayed But this is not the whole story. If he did not attain long life, h^ nevertheless had come to possess that which should accompan' old age—honor, love, fair issue, and troops of friends. It was hi good fortune to have near him companions of proved affectioi with whom he could wear out his vanishing years. In the treasurec precincts of his home he knew many hours of that kind of jo^ which he had so often represented in his writing—quiet, deep and true. If the shadow of mortality hung over it, that fact onh made it more precious. That shadow, moreover, dispersed in th< brightness of his old faith that earth is not the final home of man In the fall and early winter of i860, Hawthorne was bus) with household affairs, writing anxiously for more and more money to his friend William D. Ticknor, who managed his fin ancial affairs. He had left off reading newspapers, and hence knew only from hearsay that people were complaining that the times were bad and that the Union was falling asunder. Late in the winter, before the snow was off the ground, he was up in his sky-parlor, at his desk, working at a new Romance, vaguely aware of threatening war, and rather nonchalantly hoping that the North might become a separate nation. But after Fort Sumter had been attacked, when troops began to muster, and people talked of nothing but war, and even the Old Comer Bookstore of Ticknor and Fields in Boston was filled with gloom, and the very atmosphere seemed heavy with the impending doom of the nation, Hawthorne confessed that the war had invaded his study- retreat and that writing, under the circumstances, was becoming more and more difficult. Momentarily the excitement had had an invigorating effect on him. It had actually seemed delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time and to feel that he had a country—a con¬ sciousness which seemed to make him young again. When he heard the drums beating and saw the colors flying and witnessed the steady marching, he felt like shouldering a musket, and going [5/^] aff to war himself—except that certain silvery monitors hanging It his temples suggested prudence. Therefore, amused at the ludicrous image of himself in uniform, he decided to keep quiet until the enemy got within a mile of his own house. Such excitement soon lost its influence and gave way to very iober thoughts. Though he approved of the war, he had to admit :hat he had only a misty idea of what the country was fighting lOr—whether for states’ rights, liberty, and independence, as the South said; whether for the Union, as the West said; or only, as ;he East said, for liberty for the blacks and the annihilation of ilavery. God himself must be sorely puzzled how to decide among (uch numerous and contradictory appeals. Whatever happened lext, Hawthorne rejoiced that the old Union was smashed. It leemed to him that we had never been one people, and never really been a country since the Constitution was formed. He vould fight to the death for the northern slave states and let he rest go. The North would be the better off without the South—better and nobler than hitherto. Surely it would be an ibsurdity to spend all northern strength for the next genera- ;ion in holding on to a people who insisted on being let loose. In the midst of these perplexities, his writing at a standstill, Hawthorne went with Julian to the seashore above Salem, where le had often walked in boyhood and youth, to seek seclusion. He saw no newspapers, and so had respite, for a while, from the iaily repetition of telegraphs about skirmishes, victories, and de¬ feats, and could almost be content to remain in the same igno- :ance till the war was over. Though he did not know, at the noment, whether the Rebels had taken Washington, or whatever )ther misfortune had happened, even in his seclusion he could lear, over the water from Marblehead or Salem, the noise of irums, and, for an hour together, the thunder of cannon; so that le began to think that the war had overspread the whole country except just the little precinct in the neighborhood of West Beach. There was no escape from the intrusion of the war upon his vriting. It seemed, finally, a kind of treason to insulate himself Tom the universal fear and sorrow, and to think his idle thoughts n the dread time of war. So, after the struggle to do otherwise, le gave himself up to reading newspapers and listening to the flick of the telegraph, like other people; until, after a great many [519] months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that h( determined to look a little more closely at matters with his owi eyes. In company with his friend Ticknor, therefore, in ar atmosphere full of a vague disturbance, he journeyed to Wash ington to visit Horatio Bridge and to see and learn, from th( vantage point of the nation’s capital, what he could of the war. For approximately a month, in March and April, 1862, ir company with Ticknor or Bridge, Hawthorne witnessed the ac tivities of wartime Washington. He went occasionally to attenc sessions of Congress, shook hands with President Lincoln (th( President apparently unaware that he was meeting a famous bu modest writer of fiction), and visited, in Alexandria, the taverr where Jackson, the proprietor, shot Colonel Ellsworth, and when Jackson himself was slain a few moments later; and from the ram parts of Fort Ellsworth, he had a beautiful view of the Potomac, as well of the unsightly fortifications of the region. He was personall) introduced to General McClellan at the General’s headquarters, and witnessed a review of his troops. He saw a group of contra¬ bands escaping from the mysterious depths of Secessia. One of his excursions was to Harpers Ferry upon invitation of the Directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad—on the first trip over the newly laid track, after its breaking up by the Rebels. There he saw the dismal remains of the United States arsenal and armory, con¬ sisting of piles of broken bricks and a waste of shapeless demoli¬ tion, from which projected gun barrels in heaps of hundreds to¬ gether, and there he was guided to the little building which John Brown had seized upon as his fortress. Another expedition was to Fortress Monroe, where lay the Union ships of war, and where he boarded the flagship, and ex¬ plored with astonishment the interior of the strange Monitor, which he regarded as a terrible improvement in the science of war. At Newport News he witnessed the sight of the few sticks that were left of the frigate Congress, as well as the slanting masts of the Cumberland rising midway out of the water, with a tattered rag of a pennant still fluttering from one of them. At Willard’s Hotel in Washington, then the genuine center of Union interests, he saw representative men from all parts of the country, a motley crowd enveloped in a constant atmosphere of cigar smoke. All in all, from these and many other experiences, he gained a pretty [520] lively idea of what was going on. Incidentally, he had his por¬ trait painted by the artist Emanuel Leutze, who was then work¬ ing at his great fresco in the Capitol. Incidentally, too, he did not escape lionizing, and on the expedition to Harpers Ferry he made a speech, probably the only one he ever made in America. To Ticknor it seemed that Hawthorne had returned home with renewed cheerfulness of spirits. Perhaps it seemed so ex¬ ternally; but when Hawthorne came to reflect upon his Washing¬ ton experiences, his doubts were unquestionably renewed. Not without sorrow he had seen the lines of soldiers, with shouldered muskets, which had put him in mind of similar spectacles that he had seen in European cities. Would the time ever come again, he wondered, when people in America might live a half a score of years without once seeing the likeness of a soldier, except in the festival march of a company on its summer tour? Not in his generation, he feared, nor in the next, nor until the Millennium; and, he supposed, even that blessed epoch, as the prophecies seemed to intimate, would advance to the sound of the trumpet. When he had seen that group of contrabands, he would not, for the sake of the latent manhood in them, have turned them back; but he should have felt almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger’s land, his thought being that whoever might be benefited by the results of this war, it would not be the present generation of Negroes, the childhood of whose race was now gone forever, and who must thereafter fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms. On behalf of his own race, Hawthorne was glad that he could hope that an inscrutable Providence meant good to both parties. When he contemplated the final consequences of the war, Hawthorne saw little to give him cheer. Since the matter had gone so far, there seemed to him, of course, no way but to go on winning victories, and establishing peace and a truer union in another generation, at the expense, probably, of greater trouble, in the present one, than any other people ever voluntarily suf¬ fered. Perhaps, though he doubted it, a quiet household might come of it at last; or, if not, heaven was heaven still, as Milton sang, after Lucifer and a third part of the angels had seceded from its golden palaces—and perhaps all the more heavenly, be¬ cause so many gloomy brows and soured, vindictive hearts had [52/] gone to plot ineffectual schemes of mischief elsewhere. In the midst of all these doubts, one old conviction remained from the wreck of his delusions at Brook Farm—namely, that no humar effort on a grand scale has ever resulted according to the purposej of its projectors. The advantages are always incidental. Man’s accidents, as he and Sophia had agreed long ago at the Old Manse^ are God’s purposes. We miss the good we sought, and do the good we little cared for. It was not only in terms of such abstractions that Hawthorne regarded the war. Its terrors kept encroaching upon the events of his personal life. Early in the call to arms, the carpenter whc had built his study-tower left wife and six children to join the Concord Volunteers. In the following October came the news ol the wounding, in an engagement on the Potomac, of Lieutenant Holmes, the son of his friend Dr. Holmes. In February, 1863, the effects of the war came to the very Hawthorne doorstep. Una, re¬ turning from Boston, happened to arrive on the train which brought Louisa Alcott home from hospital service in the army- ill, looking ghastly, and a sheaf of flames as she lay in Una’s arms. It was a severe trial for Una, and she could not recover from it for some time. Louisa was delirious for days, haunted by hos¬ pital scenes, with eyes bloodshot and wild. The consternation in the Alcott family radiated to the Emersons and the Haw¬ thornes, Sophia suffering Louisa’s ills and those of Louisa’s weary, sorrowful father and mother and sisters. By the summer of 1863 Hawthorne realized that writing had for him become practically impossible. The Present, the Imme¬ diate, the Actual, as it seemed to him, had proved too jx)tent. It had taken away not only his faculty, but even his desire for imaginative composition, and had left him sadly content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon the hurricane that was seem¬ ingly sweeping every one into a limbo where the nation and its polity might be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as his unwritten Romance. As for his individual share of the catastrophe, however, he protested that he afflicted himself but little, assured that he could easily find room for his abortive work on a certain ideal shelf, already occupied by many other shadowy volumes of his, more in number, and very much su¬ perior in quality, he supposed, to those which he had succeeded [522] in rendering actual. As the Man of Fancy in “A Select Party,” he had long ago, in one of his castles in the air, possessed a splendid library of volumes which other authors, now like himself, had only planned, without ever finding the happy season to achieve them. Resignedly, Hawthorne surrendered his pen. It was the women tvho knew him who most sympathetically and anxiously sensed his catastrophe. Mrs. Fields, whose friendship he had learned more and more to cherish, observed how strangely inert and re¬ mote he had become upon the subject of the war—partly, she sur¬ mised, from his distress over everything sad. He seemed to feel IS if he could not face it and live. Sophia, as she confided to Mrs. Fields, saw with solicitude that her husband was no longer able to endure the jarring elements of the world. He was made of too fine porcelain. As she contemplated him through the warm ind shimmering haze of her affections, he was an Estray from the regions of Eternal Day, incapable of becoming acclimated to the shocks of the turbulent times. Even in the days of his young manhood at Brook Farm, the intrusion of outward circumstances into labors of the imagination iiad been painful and disturbing to Hawthorne. It had long been difficult for him to attain that nice balance of the inward and the Dutward that had been necessary for his best writing. Now the distress he suffered from his reflections upon the great Civil War was the more disturbing because during the four years after his return from Europe his health diminished with alarming rapidity. His inability to contend with what he called the Actual was not i weakness in his philosophy or character. He was simply a very ick man whose zest for life had quite deserted him, and he was nfinitely weary. The evidences of this illness became apparent to him and to iophia not many months after their return to America, and they ncreased in clarity and intensity, though there were periods when le seemed very well, so that their hope alternately rose and fell, n September, i860, on a trip to New York, he had caught what [525] seemed merely a bad cold; presently he assured Sophia that he was perfectly well, and she thanked God for his recovery. In mid- May, 1861, Hawthorne felt confident that his health was rather better than it had been for some time, though he already doubted that he should ever again be so well as he used to be in Eng¬ land. He fancied that perhaps it would have been better had he established himself by the seashore instead of in the inland town of Concord, a yearning for the seashore and a faith in its restorative powers growing upon him as his illness increased. By July, 1861, Sophia, weighed to the earth by her sense of her husband’s depressed energies and spirits, counseled a change of scene—so apathetic, so indifferent, so hopeless, so unstrung he seemed. And hence the remaining years became a succession of journeys in search of renewed health, with reassurances of im¬ provement and with subsequent recognitions of an inevitable decline. With Julian as companion he went to Pride’s Crossing above Salem for a week or so to enjoy its rocks and beaches and noble woods of pine, regretting that he had built his tower in Concord rather than in the midst of this beautiful landscape. The trip to Washington with Ticknor in March and April, 1862, had been motivated not only by a desire to visit Bridge and to see the war close at hand, but by the hope that it would renew his energy. Though all thought him greatly improved by the jour¬ ney, already in the following July he felt the need of another ex¬ cursion, going this time for a couple weeks to West Goulds- boro, Maine, on the mainland opposite Mt. Desert, where, with Julian, he went boating or fishing or swimming, or sat for hours beneath the shadow of a rock, smoking a cigar and enjoying the scene, or going on a picnic with young country men and women, or watching them dance in a bam to the accompaniment of a fiddle. It was all very much like the days at Lenox when he and Julian played along the shores of the pond below the red cottage, or like the much earlier time when he had enjoyed innumerable country adventures among the Berkshire hills. But by the next summer, Sophia did not know what to do' with him; she was convinced once more that he needed change immensely. She was afraid that Concord was not the best place for him—that he required a city life, with a secure retreat in its midst. But Hawthorne vetoed a change of residence, and so there [5^4] were other joume\3 to recruit his health—to Rockport. Maine, Vihth Una in September, 1863, and to New York and Philadelphia with Ticknor in March and April, 1864. When, on the latter trip, his friend Ticknor suddenly died in Philadelphia, the blow to Hawthorne was such that it became apparent that all such expedi¬ tions were in vain. The external manifestations of Hawthorne's illness were all this while becoming more and more apparent to his friends and f a m ily. In February, 1863, when Longfellow saw his old com¬ panion at the Comer Book Store for the first time in several months, he found him looking gray and grand, but mth some¬ thing very pathetic about him. Sadlv Sophia recognized that the splendor and pride of his strength had succumbed. "SVlien Haw¬ thorne had stayed overnight with Fields on his way to New York with Ticknor, Fields was shocked by his invalid appearance— his vigor gone, his limbs shrunken, his voice subdued, and he quite deaf. The Fieldses had heard him walking restlessly about in his room during a long portion of the night, as if waiting and watching for his fate. On his return, after the death of Tick¬ nor, he was in an excited state, talking incessantly of the sad scenes he had been through. Dr. Holmes, who met Hawthorne in Boston only a few days before the latter's death, walked with him a half hour, and noted how almost wholly white his hair was. how shmnken he seemed in all his dimensions, how he faltered along with an imcertain, feeble step, as if everv move¬ ment were an effort. Holmes observed, too, how very gentle Hawthorne was, and with what calm despondency he spoke when he said that his work was done and that he should work no more. Hawthorne’s despondency over his work had been rising and falling and rising again with the waxing and waning of his health. In the midst of preparing for the Atlantic that series of English scenes which later appeared as Our Old Home, Hawthorne con¬ fessed to Fields that though the subject had seemed interesting to him when he was in England, he now felt a singular heaviness of heart in reopening his old journals. Later, after he had prom¬ ised Fields an instalment of the projected Dolliver Romance, he saw something preternatural in his reluctance to begin, for, as he lingered on the threshold, he had a perception of very disagree¬ able phantasms to be encountered if he entered. He was really not robust enough to begin, and he felt that he should never carry it through. Those verses of Longfellow, entitled “Weariness,” which had recently appeared in the Atlantic, seemed to him pro¬ foundly touching. He, too, was weary, and looked ahead to that wayside inn where toil should cease and rest begin. When the first chapter of the Romance had finally been -written, he could not find the courage to read the proof sheets, an ordeal that he contemplated with a terrible reluctance, such as he had never felt before. This one last book he should, indeed, like well enough to write—a book that might be his best, full of wisdom about matters of life and death—though, in the very breath with Avhich he expressed his hope, he felt prompted to say that it would be no deadly disappointment to him if he were compelled to drop it. He qualified his hope in this way because he was quite aware that his mind had lost its fine edge, at least for the present. He had an instinct that he had better keep quiet. If he quietly waited, as Avhen, at the Old Manse, ideas and Avords Avould not come and he had tliroAvn doAvm his helpless pen, perhaps he should have a neAV spirit of Augor; perhaps not. But he really knetv pretty Avell Avhat the case Avould be. He Avould never finish his book. At least he could not finish it unless a great change should come over him; and if he made too great an effort, it Avould be his death. He did not think that he Avas loAV-spirited, or fanciful, or freakish in thinking thus. Rather, he Avas confident that he Avas looking reali¬ ties in the face, and that he A\'^as ready to take Avhatever might come. If, hoAvever, he could only go to England again, perhaps all Avould be Avell. "What he Avas ready to face Avas the miserable illness tliat Avas encroaching upon him—but beyond Avhich lay the rest as Avell i as the fulfilment Avhich he had ahvays anticipated. By the begin- 1 ning of May, 1864, he Avas too Aveak to take care of himself. He 1 could not AA'^alk ten minutes Avithout Avishing to sit. Even that ' all-saddening smile, Avhich Mrs. Fields had observed during onei of his last Adsits to Boston, had left his face, and his eyes Avere quite. filmed by an infinite Aveariness. He agreed to go upon one more i expedition—this time Avith his friend Pierce—Avith no real hope of recruiting his strength, but rather Avith the Avish of saving Sophia ; the anguish of seeing him fade aAvay. They Avould driA^e in a [ 5 ^- 6 ] private carriage into country places, by trout streams and old farmhouses, away from cares and news, perhaps to fish, to rest, and to talk or to muse upon youth and manhood and all the years that had intertwined their lives. On May ii Pierce met his friend at the Bromfield House, Boston, and the two set out by train for Concord, New Hamp¬ shire, from which point it was their plan to travel by carriage far beyond the WTiite Mountains to the wild scenery of Dixville Notch in the uppermost reaches of the state. Pierce, who knew how much Hawthorne had always loved the sea, was astonished that his friend should choose to spend his last hours in this rugged country'; but it was countiy' which Hawthorne had traveled in his youth, and in which he had placed his story of the Great Stone Face, that Emersonian story of the beneficent influences of Nature in shaping the thought of Man. Moreover, he was on his way to die, and it was fitting and natural that he should ^vish to lift his eyes up to those mountains which, in his youthful travels, had led his mind to the sentiment of Omnipotence. Among the mountains of Switzerland, he had asked Heaven to show him no scene any lovelier or nobler, but only to give him such depth and breadth of syTnpathy with Nature that he might worthily enjoy what was before him. If this was earth, what must Heaven be! Noav, he was soon to know. Their carriage took Hawthorne and Pierce leisurely, on May i6, northward out of Concord through the picturesque region of Franklin, and Laconia, and Center Harbor. On the piazza of the hotel at Center Harbor, Hawthorne enjoyed the noon hour look¬ ing out over the wide expanses of Lake W’innipesaukee, the gentle height of Red Hill, and the pleasing pictures in the direc¬ tion of Wolfeboro and Belnap Mountain. In the carriage Haw'- thome protested that he felt more comfonable, alone with Pierce, than he could be anywhere else. Sometimes they rode in silence, Hawthorne’s thoughts engrossed with mountain, valley, lake, or .running stream. Sometimes they talked of past times and old companions, as when they spoke of Bridge, of whom Hawthorne remarked that neither he nor Pierce had ever had a more re¬ liable friend. Hawthorne recalled Thackeray's death, and re¬ marked what a boon it would be if one could pass away without a strusfSfle. [5-T] On the i8th the sun was just sinking behind the hills when the friends arrived at the Pemigewasset House, Plymouth. They retired early for the night, Pierce leaving open the door between their rooms, so that his lamp would enable him to see Hawthorne on his bed. When Pierce awoke before twelve, he saw that! Haw¬ thorne was lying in a perfectly natural position, like a child, with his right hand under his cheek, his noble brow and face, it seemed to Pierce, more grand and serenely calm than ever before. To¬ ward three o’clock, when Pierce awakened again, he observed that Hawthorne still lay in the identical position that he had noted hours before. Pierce hastened to his friend’s bedside, and could not perceive that any change had come over his features; but he could feel no pulse, and when he ran his hand down upon the sleeper’s bare side, he discovered that that generous heart was beating no more. The boon for which Hawthorne had prayed had been granted. Evidently, as he had imaginatively en¬ visioned the mystery in “The Haunted Mind’’ years ago, his soul had indeed entered its eternal home without wonder or dismay. On the afternoon of May 23 the Unitarian church of Concord, Massachusetts, was filled with those who had come to pay their last respects to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Someone had tastefully decorated the church with spring flowers, all white, the fragrance of which permeated the whole building. Upon the coffin lay a wreath of apple blossoms from the Old Manse. Emerson, as he looked upon the remains of his townsman, thought the face noble and serene in its aspect—nothing amiss, a calm and powerful head. The minister, James Freeman Clarke, spoke of Hawthorne’s lit¬ erary accomplishments—how he had glorified New England life and poured over it the poetic beauty which was in his heart; how no other author had manifested such sympathy with the dark shadows in the life of man, though, at the same time, his books were full of sunshine. The minister spoke, too, of immortality— that man may at times doubt, but not in the time of death. Man may doubt sometimes, but when he looks upon the pale face of a loved one, he cannot question his immortality. The friend to whom they were saying farewell had finished his work, he had gently fallen asleep, and he was now with God. Sophia, even in that breathless moment when she became aware that all that was visible of her husband was about to be [}28] shut out from her for her future mortal life, was strengthened and uplifted in spirit. She and her husband were the new Adam and Eve again, as they had been at the Old Manse, and in the cool of the day they walked in the garden—in a garden in which there was no Death. Attending the hearse on its way from the church to Sleepy Hollow cemetery were members of the Atlantic Club—in two columns, headed by Emerson and Longfellow: Dr. Holmes, C. E. Norton, J. S. Dwight, E. P. Whipple, Alcott, Judge Ebenezer Hoar; and Agassiz, George Hillard, Judge B. F. Thomas, Pro¬ fessor G. W. Greene, Lowell, and J. T. Fields. Pierce was with Sophia and Una and Julian and Rose. Bridge was invalided in bed, as the result of an accident, and could not leave Washington. Many townsmen and distinguished visitors walked in the funeral cortege. The day was a pomp of sunshine and verdure and gentle winds. All the way from the village church to the grave the birds kept up a perpetual melody. The orchards were in fresh flower, and the banks were literally blue with violets. The lovely town was white with appleblooms, And the great elms o’erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread. It was, indeed, the bridal day of Spring, and all was so bright that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, as if death had never entered the world. At the grave, among the hills where Haw¬ thorne and Sophia had once played and laughed like children, and where they had dreamed of building their ideal home, the birds continued their songs, and the pines were musical with the soft winds they sweetened. Honor, friendship, and love were gathered there; and everywhere, filling every heart, was beauty. Despite his illness, the perplexities of the times, and his conse¬ quent inability to write, Hawthorne had had compensations which had made his last years as rich with blessings as any he had imag- [5^9] ined in his brightest Romance, and of the very kind he had praised. If, unlike the youthful Ambitious Guest, he had come to doubt that there was anything worth having in the literary reputation he had attained, whether the best achievements seem to have any substance after they grow cold, he had never doubted the worth of friendship or family affection, with their accompanying happy sadness or their lightsome shadows. When Hawthorne had returned from Europe to Concord, the friends whom he had made during the days of the idyl at the Old Manse were still there to greet him. The intervening years had indeed brought changes—destroying illusions, diminishing hopes, raising barriers of events or of diverging temperaments, yet leaving agreeable memories and still shared thoughts and feel¬ ings and companionship. Those wild, free days of boating with Channing were now far in the past, as were the fantastic speculations in which the two had indulged as they had sat on the banks of the Assabet beside their fire of fallen boughs. Channing still went boating on Walden with Emerson, and Emerson still saw how magical the poor pond became under Channing’s eyes, what wealth it had when seen through Channing’s sensibilities. But Alcott was finding Channing more and more capricious, the victim of his moods, whimsical as any spoiled child, and holding his best friends on his own terms or none. For the most part, now that Hawthorne had given up his long walks, confining himself to pacing the path upon the hill above “Wayside,” Channing and Hawthorne saw each other only when the former came occasionally for tea or for a sociable glass of wine. Though Channing had once spoken facetiously of the Dutch details of The House of the Seven Gables, he had never¬ theless been deeply affected by the sorrows of Hepzibah, and he was almost ashamed to tell Hawthorne how often he had read The Marble Faun and The Blithedale Romance, the latter of which he regarded as the best of Hawthorne’s writing. When he had called on Hawthorne shortly before that fatal journey to New Hampshire, Channing had been solicitous of Hawthorne’s deli¬ cate health—had wondered what mysterious disease it was that had thus unhappily transformed his once vigorous friend. In these years Hawthorne had perhaps seen Thoreau even less frequently than he had seen Channing—because Thor- [530] eau, too, had been ill from the first winter of Hawthorne’s re¬ turn, and had been unwilling, much of the time, to risk going abroad. During the early summer of 1861, he had spent several months in Minnesota in a vain attempt to restore his health. That winter it had became apparent that the end was near, though in his confinement Thoreau remained lively and busy with his journals. Sophia, for his entertainment, sent over their old music-box, to whose tunes she had once danced for her husband, and which Thoreau had once borrowed on one of his visits to the Old Manse. When the end had come, early in May, 1862, Hawthorne and Sophia and the children had attended the funeral services in the Unitarian church, where, in the vestibule, Thoreau lay in a coffin strewn with wild flowers, while Alcott read from Thoreau’s writings, and Emerson delivered an ad¬ dress, and those assembled sang a lyric written by Channing. After these services, Hawthorne and Sophia had walked to the grave to see Thoreau laid to rest in the old hill burying ground, where the church had stood in Revolutionary days. Thence they strolled to the Old Manse, where there were many memories of rowing and skating and walking and talking with Thoreau, and where Hawthorne had found him a healthy and wholesome man to know. If Hawthorne remembered that he had once found something iron-pokerish in Thoreau, he was also aware, on that May day of Thoreau’s funeral, of an indebtedness to his old companion, for it had been Thoreau who had told him of a tradition of a deathless man who had once occupied “The Wayside,’’ a story to which Hawthorne was even then trying to give shape. By and by, a year or so later, it occured to him that it would be appro¬ priate to preface his story with a sketch such as he had written for Mosses from an Old Manse and for The Scarlet Letter, a sketch into which he would introduce Thoreau and “The Way- side.’’ When he had such a fair opportunity, it seemed his duty to perpetuate Thoreau’s memory, though he supposed that Tho¬ reau would scorn him for thinking that he could do so, and Tho¬ reau would probably be right. Nevertheless, though Hawthorne never wrote the sketch or finished the book, he had had Thoreau in his thoughts while planning what he hoped would be his best and wisest writing. As for Thoreau, he had found Hawthorne [531] unspoiled by his years in Europe; he had found him as simph and childlike as ever. If, however, either man ever read th( other’s books, the fact is not a matter of record. Each valued th( other mainly as a man, and not as a writer. In these last years, if Hawthorne saw Channing and Thoreai only infrequently, he saw Alcott more often, perhaps becaus( their properties adjoined, and Alcott was his immediate neighboi to the west, or because their wives and children were on ver^ familiar terms. The relations of the two men were, in fact, pri marily on a simple human basis. The Hawthorne children at tended parties at the Alcott home, or the Alcott girls came ovei to the Hawthornes for a game of cards. Sometimes Alcott and hi; wife came for a cup of tea, or Alcott called to bring apples and cider, or to help landscape the Hawthorne yard. Once in a while Hawthorne came down the lane from his hillside walk behind his house to call on Alcott, though it seemed to Alcott that he was a restless guest, apparently wishing to rise and leave at the first easy pause in the conversation. Most often Alcott saw Hawthorne in the glimpses he got of him among the trees on his hilltop, acting, it appeared to Alcott, as if he feared that his neighbor’s eyes would catch him as he walked. It was as a coy genius that Alcott regarded his neighbor—a coy genius to be won by stratagems, as a young woman might be won, and as difficult of approach as Channing was, but less capricious, and having nothing of impudence in his bearing. His avoidances, it seemed to Alcott, had a certain reasonableness, nothing sullen or morose about them, and excited a pitying af¬ fection, as if he were their unwilling victim and would gladly meet you if he dared disobey the impulse that dogged him to solitude and study. He was continually grave and melancholy, and it was only by shafts of wit and a flow of humor that he could deliver himself for a moment. There was a soft sadness in his smile and a reserve in his glance that told how solitary and isolate he was. Obviously, he was tender and kindly, with a voice that a woman might own, the hesitancy so taking, and the tones so re¬ mote from what one might expect. But he never seemed to be one of his company while with it. If Alcott’s view was only a partial one, it was nevertheless founded on genuine affection. It was with heartfelt regret that [552] Alcott saw Hawthorne so seldom and communicated with him so incompletely. A few days before Hawthorne went on his last journey, Alcott, taking a walk with his little grandson, met his ueighbor at the latter’s gate, and saw how feeble Hawthorne was, how unequal he seemed to be to meet anyone. It was deeply touching to Alcott when the dying man asked him whether he was well. And when Hawthorne had been laid to rest in Sleepy Hol¬ low, Alcott reflected sadly that he was no more to see his friend traverse his hilltop. Fair figures were one by one fading from sight, now that Thoreau and Hawthorne had gone. Of his vil¬ lage circle, only Emerson and Channing remained. As for Hawthorne’s attitude toward Alcott, he truly wished to see Alcott more often than he did, and was hindered from do¬ ing so in part because it was true, as Alcott had observed, that he spent most of his time in his tower with his pen and the solace of a cigar, desperately trying to write another Romance. There were, of course, other hindrances, including his own reticences, as well as an antipathy to certain aspects of Alcott’s character which Emerson had suggested when he had spoken of Alcott as a tedious archangel. Years ago even the animality of the old Inspector at the Salem Custom House had seemed desirable, as a change of diet, to Alcott. Now, after a wide experience with the world, Hawthorne could regard the idiosyncrasies of his unworldly neighbor in the quiet humor of doggerel verses celebrating the “airy Sage of Apple-Slump.’’ But none of these impediments to a completely ideal friendship denied Hawthorne’s appreciation of Alcott’s great kindness and gentleness. It was impossible to quarrel with Alcott because he took all harsh words like a saint. Haw¬ thorne thought of him as one of the most excellent men he had ever known. In these last years, as always before, it had been Emerson, □f the Concord group, who had most assiduously endeavored to cultivate Hawthorne’s friendship. In i860, when Hawthorne re¬ turned from Europe, Emerson was near the height of his literary career, which was to be accentuated, in that year, by the publica- :ion of The Conduct of Life, his climactic wisdom. Indeed, he and Hawthorne were sharing the reputation, each in his own field, Df being the most distinguished prose writers of their country. Emerson, of course, was already aware that he was growing older, [533] though within he did not find wrinkles and used heart, but un spent youth. He was still charmed by the whistle of the chickade( and by the bluebird’s song, and Nature and the green leaves h( still found a million fathoms deep. With Ellery Channing he con tinned to enjoy fine walks, with a cornucopia of golden joys ir sunlight, in cricket-cry, in the brook through the wood—in beaut) that nobody could buy. He still sought hopefully to find in friend ship the unspeakable benefit of a reasonable creature to talk to, On the very day of the Hawthornes’ return to “Wayside,” Emerson busied himself preparing for a party to welcome Haw¬ thorne home. On the next evening there gathered at the Emer¬ son home—for strawberries and cream—Hawthorne, Thoreau, Al- cott, the artists William Morris Hunt and Seth Cheney, and Emerson’s Concord friend, John S. Keyes. There were other sim¬ ilar festive occasions at which Emerson and Hawthorne met—din¬ ners at Emerson’s home, at Fields’s home in Boston to greet the English novelist, Anthony Trollope, at the Saturday Club at the Parker House, Boston, from which Emerson and Hawthorne and Judge Ebenezer Hoar would return to Concord together—from Boston to Waltham by train, from Waltham to Concord in Judge Hoar’s carriage drawn by his big black horse—occasions which surely provided close companionship. There were, too, the bonds formed by their wives and children, who saw each other often, the two homes being only a brief walk apart. Of his old Concord acquaintances, Hawthorne probably saw none more frequently than Emerson. Unmistakably, however, there were barriers—perhaps more than there had been during Hawthorne’s first residence in Con¬ cord. Then there had apparently been certain fundamental agree¬ ments, as when, in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson had expressed his doubt that society advances, or, in “Experience,” that reform ever accomplishes quite what it had set out to do. Hawthorne, fresh from his disillusionments with Brook Farm, had been in accord. Now, Emerson had taken up with the reformers, had come round, apparently, to be near the camp of Theodore Parker, to whom he had once been averse, and had declared in a public lecture that the hanging of John Brown would make the gallows glorious like the cross. Hawthorne had regarded Parker as a monomaniac, and had probably drawn upon his character in the satire of The [534] Blithedale Romance. As for John Brown, Hawthorne thought that nobody was ever more justly hanged, and he shrank unutter¬ ably from Emerson’s apothegm, hoping that it had been falsely attributed to so honored a source. Emerson thought Hawthorne unlucky in having for a friend Franklin Pierce, a man who, be¬ cause of his political views, could not be befriended, one whom Emerson regarded as either the worst or the weakest of all our Presidents. When Hawthorne had dedicated Our Old Home to his friend Pierce, Emerson had cut the dedication pages from his copy, indignant at what seemed Hawthorne’s perverse politics, yet moved to pity for him, and hoping that he would come right at last. What Emerson unhappily did not appreciate was that Hawthorne’s dedicatory letter was a very sincere and generous expression of a friendship begun in the hopefulness of youth, the memories of it now blended with a sorrowful farewell to art. There were other barriers. Our Old Home itself Emerson regarded as pellucid but not deep. He thought of The Marble Faun as mere mush. After Hawthorne’s death, when Emerson recorded in his Journal his final reflections on Hawthorne, he confessed that he had never read any of Hawthorne’s books with pleasure; they were, it seemed to him, simply too young. In these reactions of Emerson there was an inexplicable failure to see what might have joined the two men in a more nearly ideal friendship. They were, of course, fellow-idealists. In their theories of art, their basic convictions were in accord. Both held to the Neo-Platonic concept of art—that art should mirror the ideal. For both a major function of art was the character-educa¬ tion of man—art being, as Emerson said, only initial, and inferior to character. Finally, as Emerson had said as early as Nature and as Hawthorne said in The Marble Faun, they agreed that man’s salvation resides in the joint powers of intellect and love. That Emerson was blind to these accordances is sad evidence of how good and great men may be held apart. One can only say that Emerson was never really a reader of fiction, and certainly not of a kind of fiction that often reveals its thought by a kind of in¬ direction. If Hawthorne understood Emerson’s writings the better, as “The Great Stone Face’’ and many incidental allusions to Emer¬ son’s works indicate, there were difficulties for him, too. Doubtless [535] for him, as for Emerson, it would have been a happiness to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. What it was that ma de it hard for him to speak freely to Emerson, when he had no difficulty in conversing with such dissimilar personalities as the genial Dr. Holmes and the highly self-assertive Hiram Powers, the evidence does not reveal. But, when he was with Emerson, he said so little, and Emerson talked so much, that the latter stopped, fearing to exceed. This is not to say that they never had good talk, for they did; it is only to say that they wished for more than their respective temperaments permitted. Furthermore, if Emerson did not care for Hawthorne’s writings, he admired the man, whom he found simple, amiable, truth-loving, and frank in his conversation—a high compliment, after all, since, for Emerson, a man’s character was always more important than his art. If any final proof is re¬ quired to show how affectionately Emerson regarded Hawthorne, or how intimately and warmly Emerson had received the esteem of Hawthorne and his family, and how public was the knowledge of these tender relations, one has only to consider one of the last acts in the drama of their friendship. When Pierce had tele¬ graphed to Emerson the fact of Hawthorne’s death, it had re¬ mained for Emerson, the old friend that he was, to walk over to “The Wayside’’ to carry the heavy news to Sophia. In these last years Hawthorne had not been limited to Concord friendships. He was by no means so solitary and isolate as Alcott had imagined, and Emerson was quite wrong when he supposed that Hawthorne’s solitude was so painful as not to be endured, and that Hawthorne had died of it. On the contrary, he was rich in friendships that helped to make life sweet. Though he was not again to see Bennoch and Bright, his friendship with them remained as affectionate as ever, as their correspondence reveals. With Lowell, Holmes, and Longfellow, too, he continued an un¬ interrupted friendship, all of these men being unwavering ad- , mirers of Hawthorne’s writings and character as a man. If they met only infrequently, as at the meetings of the Saturday Club, each knew of the other’s unfailing regard. With Longfellow, Hawthorne’s relations were perhaps most intimate. They had known each other, of course, since they had been boys, and they had been close friends ever since Longfellow [ 53 ^] had written that generous review of Twice-Told Tales and Haw¬ thorne had given Longfellow the story of Evangeline. Since those days they had been drawn together by numberless ties. When, in July, 1861, Mrs. Longfellow’s summer dress caught fire from a fallen match, and death followed this awful accident, Hawthorne could not reconcile the calamity to his sense of the fitness of things. There ought, truly, to be no such deep sorrow in the life of a man like Longfellow. Now, how could sunshine ever pene¬ trate this blackest of shadows? Hawthorne thought that he should be afraid ever to meet him again; Longfellow could not again be the man whom he had known. Before his friend’s unspeakable sorrow, Hawthorne stood reverent, silent, and appalled. But he did meet him again, and with deeper and more sensitive feelings. It was to Longfellow that he had revealed his hope that he might write one more book, full of wisdom about life and death. To Longfellow, too, he had confessed his doubt regarding the worth of literary reputation, a subject of which, he was sure, Longfellow knew much more than he. In Longfellow’s verse, Hawthorne never ceased to take delight. When he found his own name in the Prelude of the Tales of a Wayside Inn, he was as pleased, he wrote Longfellow, as if he had been gazing up at the moon and detected his own features in its profile. In Evangeline he continued to find the excellences he had described in the review he had written while a surveyor at the Salem Custom House. When, on Hawthorne’s very last Sunday at home, Julian had read to him the concluding portion of the poem, it had seemed to the weary and dying Hawthorne that nothing could be better than Evangeline’s simple last words, “Father, I thank thee.’’ Longfellow’s attitude toward Hawthorne had been one of growing concern—from the time when Hawthorne had returned from Europe (bewildered and sad, it had seemed to Longfellow) until he had last seen him, in Boston, in the spring of 1864, much worn and wasted and discouraged about himself. One day, a soft rain falling all day long, Longfellow had spent the day reading The Marble Faun, and had thought it a wonderful book, but with the old, dull ache in it that he had always found running through all of Hawthorne’s writings. At Hawthorne’s funeral, with Emer¬ son, Longfellow had led the pallbearers, his own white hair [537] waving in the wind. He had not been able to imagine anything at once more beautiful and sad—the day had been so lovely and the village all sunshine and blossoms and the song of birds, though, alas, he should not again see Hawthorne’s beautiful face. The parting was the more sorrowful for Longfellow because no one more than Hawthorne had so linked him to memories of his youth. When, in June, he had written some verses to express his impressions of the occasion, he could not but realize how im¬ perfect and inadequate they were to tell his feelings—the splendor of the day, the voices and faces of familiar friends, and the un¬ seen presence that filled the air. Channing, Thoreau, Alcott, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Long¬ fellow—these were among Hawthorne’s literary friends in the last years of his life. There were, however, other friends whom Haw¬ thorne continued to see—some, like George Bradford, with as¬ sociations going as far back as Brook Farm, and others, like Pike and Burchmore, from the Salem Custom House days. But the two men whom he saw most frequently in these years, and with whom he carried on his most extended correspondence, were his pub¬ lishers, Ticknor and Fields. If the relationship with these men had some of its roots in the worldly matter of business, it went far deeper than that. They were the best of friends, united in the best of human instincts and convictions. Upon Ticknor, Hawthorne leaned as if Ticknor knew more of the world of affairs and could be depended upon fairly to trans¬ late that world to a man of pensive thought, and to shield him from it. It was Ticknor who, in 1853, had accompanied Haw¬ thorne to Washington to arrange for the Liverpool consulate, and it was Ticknor who had made the arrangements for the Wash¬ ington journey. Later, Ticknor had escorted the Hawthorne family on their ocean voyage to England. In his financial affairs, Hawthorne relied unquestioningly upon Ticknor’s judgment and honesty, Ticknor serving as banker for Hawthorne’s funds. To Ticknor, Hawthorne wrote numerous letters, often in such a jocular, mock-worldly vein as he wrote to no one else, though beneath this surface the men were joined by the gentlest of af¬ fections. In 1862, when Hawthorne again went to Washington, to see the war near at hand and to recruit his health, it was again Ticknor who accompanied him; and, in the spring of 1864, as [555] Hawthorne’s health ebbed away, it was once more Ticknor who made all the arrangements for the trip to New York and Phila¬ delphia, a trip which, it was hoped, would bring relief to Haw¬ thorne. Then, when quite unexpectedly Ticknor became ill, it was Hawthorne who nursed the failing man, meanwhile—such was the uniqueness of the relationship of the two men—making his amused observ^ations on medical science and on the sad and comic aspect of human misery, and remembering from the event Ticknor’s humor as he lay dying. Hawthorne thought of Tick¬ nor as one of the best of men, thoughtful, good, and kind. With Fields, it seems, Hawthorne’s relations were even more intimate than with Ticknor. Fields’s great service to Hawthorne was not only to publish Hawthorne’s writings advantageously, but to encourage him when he doubted the worth of what he was doing, to enter understandingly and sympathetically into his lit¬ erary plans, all the while permeating these associations with the most genuine and the warmest friendliness. Unquestionably Fields admired Hawthorne as an author and loved him as a man. When Hawthorne wavered in the publication of the series of English sketches in the Atlantic, it was Fields who induced him to write more and more, and to prepare the series for publication in the volume entitled Our Old Home. It was for Fields a memorable occasion when, one morning, he walked with Hawthorne the hilltop path behind “Wayside” while Hawthorne confided to him his plan for a Romance suggested by Thoreau—the story of a man who thought that he should never die. From then on Fields unceasingly used his best efforts to encourage Hawthorne to com¬ plete the tale. Hawthorne disclosed to Fields his alternating hopes and fears with an intimacy such as he had not entrusted to any man save his boyhood chum Horatio Bridge—and with fears such as he did not speak even to Sophia. In these confidences it is imjxjssible to separate man from author, for in them Hawthorne revealed his very innermost thoughts, the reflections of his other¬ wise secret soul, though he did all this with a play of humor, as if to shield himself and his friend from an unmanly display of sentiment. The sentiment, however, was unmistakable. It displayed it¬ self in family affairs, as well as in the relations of the two men. Sophia and Annie Fields kept up an animated correspondence, [539] and there were numerous exchanges of visits, the Fieldses’ home providing a welcome shelter not only for Hawthorne and Sophia, but for the children as well when they went to Boston. As for the Fieldses, they thought it worth twenty visits elsewhere to sojourn under the roof of “Wayside.” For Fields, it was a happy thrill to walk on the hillside with Hawthorne, or to stroll with him to the Old Manse. Once, on such a visit to the Old Manse, Fields and Hawthorne had lain on the grass in the cool shadows and talked, listening, meanwhile, to the songs of the young voices of a boat¬ ing party on the river. It had all been very lovely. Fields thought. After the return to Boston, he and Annie had sat at their window overlooking the bay, while he read the introduction to the Mosses to her, and in the twilight they watched the boats go tilting by, and reviewed their visit to Concord in pleasant reverie. To induce Hawthorne to come to visit him was one of Fields’s constant endeavors. In his frequent letters there were numerous inducements—Hawthorne’s old room overlooking the bay would be awaiting him, swept and garnished, and with claret in the closet; he promised Hawthorne his favorite chowders; the house would be cleared of other visitors, so that there would be no one to molest. If Hawthorne did not come as often as Fields wished, that, as Hawthorne explained, was precisely because Mrs. Fields’s drawing-room was one of his choicest ideal places. He really never came to see the Fieldses without feeling the better for it, though he did not wish to test so precious a remedy too often. When he did come, however, he felt com¬ fortable and at home, speaking freely as, in these years, he seems rarely to have spoken to other of his friends. In December, 1863, when Hawthorne spent a day or so with the Fieldses after attending, at Concord, New Hampshire, the funeral of Mrs. Pierce, he spoke of his memories of the oc¬ casion—how Mrs. Pierce had looked like a carven image laid in its richly embossed enclosure, with a remote expression as if she had nothing to do with the present; how deeply impressed he had been with Pierce’s exquisite courtesy, for even at the grave, while overwhelmed with grief. Pierce had drawn up the collar of Hawthorne’s coat to keep him from the cold. On this visit to the Fieldses, too, as they sat in their drawing-room, and as the sunset deepened, Hawthorne reminisced about his [540] boyhood and youth. He told of how, in Maine, he had roamed all the summer days at will, gun in hand, through the woods, learning there a nearness to Nature that had never left him, but acquiring there also what he called his cursed habits of soli¬ tude. He spoke of Bowdoin and of Longfellow, whom he did not appreciate at the time, because Longfellow was always finely dressed and a tremendous student, whereas he himself had been careless in dress and no student, but reading desultorily right and left. But now, fortunately, he and Longfellow were good friends. Such confidences were only a part of the evidence of the close friendship between Hawthorne and Fields. Friend and publisher were united in Fields when, in 1862, he dedicated the Household Edition of Lockhart’s Lije of Sir Walter Scott to Hawthorne, Fields knowing very well of Hawthorne’s life¬ long liking for Scott, who had done so much for his happiness when he was young, and whose writings he still continued to read with pleasure. It was a gesture which gratified Hawthorne exceedingly and which he acknowledged in a letter that Fields kept among his treasures. He did not deserve so high an honor, Hawthorne wrote, but if Fields thought him worthy, it was enough to make the compliment acceptable, no matter who might dispute his title to it. For Fields’s good opinion he cared more than for that of a host of critics, and for an excellent reason, because his literary success, whatever it had been or might be, was the result of his connection with Fields. Some¬ how or other. Fields had smitten the rock of public sympathy in his behalf, and a stream gushed forth in sufficient quantity to quench his thirst, though not to drown him. He was sure that no author could ever have had publisher that he valued so much as he did Fields. Obviously, the associations with Fields provided one of the deep satisfactions of Hawthorne’s life, which he thus gratefully affirmed. Satisfying as were these friendships with Ticknor and Fields, and helpful in brightening his declining days as were his associa¬ tions with his literary acquaintances, Hawthorne’s best friends, after all, were Bridge and Pierce. With both he had sympathies, acquired in impressionable boyhood, that had not been suffered to die. In his deeper consciousness he retained for both a sense of [54r] their characters as among the few things that time had left as it had found them. Long ago, in dedicating The Snow-Image to Bridge, Haw¬ thorne had declared his indebtedness and his affection. Nor had he forgot that they had been lads together at a country college, where Bridge had helped set him on his course of authorship, or that, by subsidizing the publication of Twice-Told Tales, Bridge had brought him out of the depths of his obscurity. In later years, too. Bridge, unliterary as he had been, had served as literary confidant, and had been helpful as guide in the mazes of politics and counselor in the affairs of the world. Hawthorne thought of Bridge as one of the truest and warmest friends. If, in these last years, they saw each other less frequently than in the days of their youth and young manhood, separated by Hawthorne’s illness and Bridge’s duties in Washington, Hawthorne nevertheless continued to have the utmost reliance upon Bridge, a reliance which he re¬ garded as one of the secure solaces of his life. Pierce, however, Hawthorne saw frequently in these last years. Many incidents had continued to draw them together since those youthful days when they had strolled arm in arm across the sandy campus at Bowdoin or, as Bowdoin Cadets, had campaigned against President Allen. What especially had obligated Hawthorne to Pierce was Pierce’s friendly and quite unpolitical gesture in ap¬ pointing Hawthorne as consul at Liverpool. It was in his deter¬ mination to repay this indebtedness that Hawthorne demon¬ strated climactically his affection for his lifelong friend. When, early in May, 1863, Our Old Home was in prepara¬ tion for printing, it seemed natural enough that Hawthorne should contemplate dedicating the book to Pierce. It was, after all. Pierce who had made these observations on England possible; moreover, such a dedication would be very gratifying to Haw¬ thorne himself as an expression of his feelings for Pierce. Haw¬ thorne was well aware that such a dedication would encounter a storm of protest from the innumerable enemies of the now un¬ popular Democratic ex-President. Indeed, when Fields sent Haw¬ thorne the proofs of the dedication and dedicatory letter, the publisher warned Hawthorne that fellow-publishers, bookdealers, and literary friends had assured him that Pierce’s name would ruin the sale of the book—that, in fact, such a dedication would [5^2] be the most damaging move Hawthorne could possibly make. It was a question not to be lightly settled, and Hawthorne pondered deeply over Fields’s remarks, and smoked many cigars over it. But, in the end, he saw the matter clearly enough. He found that it would be a piece of poltroonery in himself to with¬ draw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. His long and intimate personal relations with Pierce rendered the dedication altogether proper, especially because this book would have had no existence without Pierce’s kindness; and if Pierce was so ex¬ ceedingly unpopular that his name was enough to sink the vol¬ ume, there was so much more the need that an old friend should stand by him. Hawthorne felt that he could not, merely on ac¬ count of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what he had deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if he were to tear out the dedication, he should never look at the volume again without remorse and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept his book precisely as he thought fit to give it, or let it alone. And so the volume was inscribed to Franklin Pierce, “as a slight memorial of a college friendship, prolonged through man¬ hood, and retaining all its vitality in our autumnal years.’’ Fields had only warned Hawthorne of the consequences; he had not ad¬ vised him against the dedication to Pierce. Rather, he and Annie thought it a beautiful incident in Hawthorne’s life—this deter¬ mination at all hazards to dedicate his book to his friend. In the friendship of Hawthorne and Pierce, it had been Haw¬ thorne who had been the vocal one. Pierce, no writer, had ex¬ pressed his sentiments in actions—man of action that he was. He had aided in manifold ways, mainly in helping Hawthorne in practical affairs, more especially in assisting him to obtain his several political appointments. But he had shown himself to be a man of feeling, too, as when, in Rome, during Una’s illness, he had demonstrated to Hawthorne the comfort to be found in the manly sympathy of a friend. It is not surprising that Hawthorne, in his helplessness, should choose Pierce as his companion on his last journey, to rest upon Pierce’s strength along the way, and to repose in Pierce’s affections when it came to die. If Pierce could not very well say all that he felt, as when he wrote to Bridge of Hawthorne’s death, he was perhaps sufficiently eloquent [543] when he told Bridge that they had lost the dearest and most cherished among their early friends, and that he himself was lonely and full of sorrow. In the midst of these friendships, it is strange that Hawthorne regarded himself as having few friends. These sentiments, how¬ ever, were rather a measure of his own immaculate modesty than of the actual circumstance. That he possessed such qualities as made him loved by those who truly knew him was among the facts which he hid from himself. To have boasted of possessing many friends would to him have been unthinkable; yet it is perfectly clear that he was remarkably fortunate in friendships both numerous and extraordinarily durable. In his family relationships, he was even more fortunate, as he had recognized during the first happy days at the Old Manse as well as during the period of adversity at the Salem Custom House, or at the height of his literary triumph following the publication of The Marble Faun. His marriage had brought him the unexcelled joys of home, which in these last years gave him their climactic solace. The happiness which fate had had in store for Clifford of The House of the Seven Gables had been his quiet home in the old family residence with the faithful Hepzibah, the long summer afternoons with Phoebe, and the Sabbath festivals with Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist in the Pyncheon garden—a hap¬ piness the more precious because so ethereal and intangible and passing so quickly into the past. Now, at “The Wayside,” it was as if all these things were being dramatized again in Hawthorne’s own life. There were many winter evenings when the family sat together while Hawthorne read aloud, perhaps from some book of contemporary interest, or more likely from one of the long¬ loved romances of Sir Walter Scott. Though he was too dissatis¬ fied with most of what he was himself "tvTiting now even to speak of it to anyone else, he did, occasionally, read to Sophia what he was currently writing, as when he read to her his sketch of his impressions of the war which he was preparing for the Atlantic [544] Monthly. It was as he had dreamed it would be before their marriage. On fine, warm summer days he and Sophia walked the hilltop path and sat in conversation or meditation under his favorite tree—occasions, Sophia thought, of ineffable feli cit y. There were parties of young people at the house sometimes, and then, toward the end of the evening, Hawthorne would come down from his tower to bid them good night, looking, in Sophia’s eyes, like a grand Olympian in a golden age. When Sophia was away from home, Hawthorne still wrote her such letters as he had written when they were young, with the familiar “thou” of his early love letters, and with the old complaint that life was sus¬ pended until she should return again. When he had come home from that month-long visit to Washington, the family were all in a state of rejoicing. Rose, on her way to bed that evening, burst into an original song to the tune of “John Brown,” whose soul went marching on—all in reference to Papa’s going and re¬ turning from Washington. Sophia joined in, too, and as they completed each verse, they almost expired with laughter at their own fun, just so wild with joy were they. As the evidences of Hawthorne’s illness had increased, the family moods had of course grown more serious, the affection deepening all the while. When Sophia saw the first signs of her husband’s illness in his restlessness and depression, she insisted that if he wished her to be happy, he must consent to spend the dog days of July at the sea. She could not think of a purer pleas¬ ure for herself, she assured him, than when he was fairly away from the dead heat of Concord. It was her heart’s desire to get him to the sea under pleasant auspices—the sea only, and no people. Though she remained in sultry Concord, she was refreshed by the influences which invigorated and restored him on his jour¬ neys. And when she waked to clouds and rain, while he was away in the sunshine, she did not care, for he was not there to be de¬ pressed. When he was away, she busied herself with her house¬ hold affairs, putting all in order, so that all might be quiet and leisure when he came home. With the death of Ticknor in Philadelphia, the extent of Hawthorne’s illness had become alarmingly apparent. Upon his return to Concord Hawthorne had walked the long distance from the railway sation to “The Wayside,” and he had arrived [545] with a streaming brow, his face white and scored with fatigm and pain, so that Sophia had been frightened out of all knowledg( of herself. He had needed to get home, where he could fling of all care and give way to his feelings. It had been a relief to breal down as he told Sophia of the shock of Ticknor’s sudden and un expected death. Sophia saw how weak he was, how much h( wanted rest, and she hovered over him with tender solicitude for more than ever she realized that he was her world and all thi business of it. She waited on him, she accompanied him up ant down the stairs, she read to him, and at last made him laugl with Thackeray’s humor, though it grieved her to see how strang( was a smile on the face once radiant with those smiles whicl had so charmed her in the days of their courtship. Like Clifford in The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthom( was at home, where there was nothing but love. Before him la’ only a step to that Eternity whose music he had always heard the earthly echoes of which he had long tried to capture in hi; art. [/H After his return to Concord from Europe, Hawthorne pub lished no more fiction. When, in the summer of i860, he wai asked to write a short story for the benefit of the Essex Institut( of Salem, he responded that his mind had lost the plan anc measure of such narratives, in which it was once so unprofitabl] fertile; and so he sent, instead of a story, a memory sketch of ar old house near Salem, “Browne’s Folly,” about which he hac once planned to write a story, though he had quite forgotten whai it was he had planned to say. For the Atlantic Monthly for July 1862, in “Chiefly about War Matters, By a Peaceable Man,” he wrote his impressions of the war after his visit to Washington an essay accompanied by caustic footnotes in which he criticized his own views, and including a familiar, humorous characteriza tion of President Lincoln which Fields, as editor, thought besi to omit. Between October, i860, and August, 1863, Hawthorne published in the Atlantic a series of ten English sketches which he had garnered from his journals, sketches about which Fieldi was very enthusiastic, and which were very popular with Atlantic [546] readers. These items, together with an introductory chapter and a :hapter on Lichfield and Uttoxeter, revised from an earlier pub¬ lication in England, appeared again in the autumn of 1863 as Our Old Home. His abortive Romances, which the world knows is Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life, and The Dolliver Romance were not published until after hiis death. In Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret (so titled by Julian Hawthorne when he edited and published the book in 1882) Hawthorne tried once more to tell the story he had begun in Italy as The Ancestral Footstep. Once again he endeavored to unite that leg¬ end of a bloody footstep, which had so impressed him at Smith- ells Hall during his visit with the Ainsworths in their ancient residence near Bolton, England, with a tale of an American seeking to establish his ownership of an ancestral estate in Eng¬ land. At what period after his return from Europe he began to work on the revised story does not appear, though he certainly worked diligently, for by the autumn of 1861, when he seems to have dismissed the project as futile, he had produced a manu¬ script of such bulk as to warrant a large volume. Despite his efforts, he recognized that he had not breathed life into his plot, nor did he see how he should attain the necessary spark of pas¬ sion. Impatiently he wrote among his notations that some damn’d thing was the matter, though he knew not what. When he had brought his story to such a conclusion as he could, he indicated his dissatisfaction in an ironic gloss of mingled humor and dis¬ gust: “Bubble-and-Squeak!” And so Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret remained a book of parts and patches, fragments of order and beauty floating about in chaos. It suggests a dream in which cause and effect and logical relation prevail or vanish with an impartial indifference, a dream in which the conclusion seems only dimly if at all related to antecedent events. But dreams may have their charm, as has this book. Be¬ yond the middle of the tale, the hero tells the story of his life to an English friend, who, having filled his pipe, settles in his easy-chair in a most luxurious posture, smoking slowly and thoughtfully, and listening in leisure. If the reader is willing to accommodate himself to a similar posture and patience, he, too, may spend some agreeable hours with this romantic dream—to [547] the accompaniment, perhaps, of such midnight chimes as lulh the English listener. Just as Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret lacks a finished plot, so it lad a body of high truths such as are wrought out in Hawthorne completed Romances. What substance it has, apart from tf fragmentary plot and the characterization, lies in a series of coi trasts between English and American life as had often occupie Hawthorne’s thoughts during his residence in England. Thes are values rather evenly balanced, with no climactic choices trul consummated, for, when the hero appears to prefer the life of a English country gentleman to his prospects of becoming presider of the United States, the plot suddenly shifts, and the covete English estate falls into the hands of a minor character—to th equal astonishment, probably, of hero, reader, and author alik< The merit of the book must be sought elsewhere than i: plot or ideas; nor will the search be in vain. The crusty old do( tor, his portrait left unfinished though it may be, nevertheles emerges fiom the story with the breath of life in him, and th little boy and girl of the earlier chapters hauntingly sugges aspects of childhood, as well they may, since they embody reir iniscences of Una and Julian as their father observed them in th Mall Street days at Salem. Even the passive schoolmaster, diml as he comes through the mist, is not without interest as Haw thome’s imaginative concept of his neighbor, Bronson Alcott who as Colcord, is a lonely creature, without any very deep com panionship in the world, though when, by some rare chance, h( meets a soul distantly akin, not incapable of holding a certain higl spiritual communion. If Alcott regarded Hawthorne as solitar and isolate, Hawthorne, it seems, thought of Alcott as no les! lonely. The merit and the charm of Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret lie main ly, however, in its atmosphere, which, at its best, is characteris' tically Hawthomean, and is scarcely anywhere better than it is in this quiet book. The reader enters the spell of Hawthorne’s old Marvelous as soon as he is introduced into the grim doctor’s residence, cornered on a graveyard as it is, a graveyard where the little boy and girl chase butterflies and gather dandelions, and play hide and seek among the slate and marble tombstones. Slight as this sketch is, it has, of course, immortalized the Charter Street [548] burying ground in Salem, as well as Dr. Peabody’s house where Hawthorne courted Sophia. But it is perhaps in the second portion of the book, after the scene has shifted to England, that the reader finds himself sur¬ rounded by that greater enchantment which Hawthorne himself felt among English scenes. Here the reader walks ancient, well- trodden footpaths along rural hedgerows—green, impenetrable, and beautiful. A lark rises out of a grassy field, soars aloft, and makes a cheery melody that is like a spire of flame. A cuckoo, in some inscrutable hiding place, sings softly in a flutelike note. Here, too, in Bennoch’s Blackheath garden remembered, the reader reclines in the sweet, mild summer weather, basking in the sun in a cozy seclusion, and enjoying a sense of safe repose. Here, in England, he is ravished by an English dinner—the stal¬ wart English cheer of the sirloin, and the round; the vast plum puddings, the juicy mutton, the venison. O, the old jolly kitcheni how rich the flavored smoke that goes up its vast chimney! how inestimable the atmosphere of steam diffused through it! Here he tastes a Madeira, so splendid a wine as to bring with it an ec¬ stasy, followed, perhaps, by retributive gout, though some pain ought to follow as the shadow of such a pleasure. It is when the hero enters what he supposes to be his old ancestral mansion and has his mysterious adventures there that the reader experiences again such a sense of the hoary past as he had known in The House of the Seven Gables, and that de¬ licious, thrilling uncertainty between reality and fancy which had been the essence of “The Haunted Mind.” This old mansion had that delightful intricacy that can never be contrived, never be attained by design, but is the happy result of many builders, many designs, many ages—a house to go astray in, as in a city, and come to unexpected places, a house of dark passages and antique stair¬ ways where one might meet someone who might have a word af destiny to say to the wanderer. It was a dim, twilight place, where one felt as if he were on the point of penetrating rare mys¬ teries, such as men’s thoughts are always hovering round, and ilways returning from, as if some strange, vast, mysterious truth, long searched for, was about to be revealed; a sense of something ;o come; an opening of doors, a drawing away of veils; a lifting [549] of heavy, magnificent curtains, whose dark folds hang before : spectacle of awe. Though Hawthorne had abandoned Dr. Grimshawe’s Secre as impossible of completion, he was not long idle, for by Septem ber, 1861, as he had informed Fields on one of their hillside walks he was already contemplating the story of the deathless man toh him by Thoreau. A month later, as he wrote to Bridge, he wa at his desk blotting successive sheets of paper, hopeful that h( would have something ready for the public before long. Septimiu Felton, however, like its predecessor, was destined never to b( completed, though Hawthorne labored at it until early in 1863 In its most finished version it was edited by Una Hawthorne with the aid of Robert Browning, and published in 1872. There seems to be no evidence that Hawthorne ever showec his manuscript to anyone. He abandoned it deliberately as un finished and unsatisfactory. But fragmentary as it is, it is cer tainly not without interest as a record of some of his final effort; in Avriting and thinking. In one of its minor aspects, it is a mo saic of memories of details from earlier stories going back as fai as college days and Tales of My Native Land and Fanshawe. Th( devil who laughed among the flames of “The Devil in ManU' script reappears, as do the Black Man and the church members who attended the witches’ meeting in “Young Goodman Brotvn.’ The poison flower of “Rappaccini’s Daughter’’ blooms again, but so, fortunately, do the dreams of the lovers in “The New Adam and Eve’’ and of The House of the Seven Gables. Out of “The Haunted Quack,’’ seriously transformed but still unmistakable in their original lineaments, come the quack doctor. Granny Gor¬ don, the crabbed manuscript, and the elijdi^of life. That young officer in “The Young Provincial” Avho had received a fatal wound in the breast and who lay dead by the wayside on the road to Lexington, his lips gently parted, and looking as if profoundly wrapped in meditations on distant scenes and friends, renews his beauty and has his hopes crushed again when his drama is re¬ enacted along the hill at “Wayside.” Once again, too. Dr. Heideg¬ ger performs his experiment as he had done in Twice-Told Tales; and once more, more fully and with deeper wisdom, comes the author’s conviction that there is in man something celestial Avhich requires, after a certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to pre- serve it from decay and ruin—a truth originally learned from the Wandering Jew in “A Virtuoso’s Collection.” In part, Septimius Felton is only another effort to tell the story begun with The Ancestral Footstep and Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret. The English estate reappears, as does the bloody footstep, as well as some remarkable spiders and a head of golden hair which has continued to grow on a dead woman in her coffin. But these matters have all been relegated to a subordinate position in the story of a man who seeks an immortal life on this earth. As a story, however, it fails. It is fragmentary and disjointed. The plot is undeveloped, the conclusion, in which the hero receives an English estate in lieu of an earthly immortality, being offered, apparently, in a kind of ironic desperation. There is little such characterization and less such atmosphere as distinguish Dr. Grim- shaioe’s Secret. It is a record of effort and of failure, a record painful to behold, the record of a dying artist whose agonies were infinite and unspeakable. And yet something—much, indeed—comes through. The path which Septimius wore on his hilltop, the path which Hawthorne himself so often trod, has surely attained a literary immortality. Every reader of the story will be forever haunted by his memory of the death scene of the young English officer and the burial on the hill. Eurthermore, what is vastly more important, nowhere has Hawthorne, again and again, more persuasively or more beau¬ tifully expressed his conviction of the necessity and the blessing of death—for the simple reason, perhaps, that he was never be¬ fore so close to his subject. Now it seemed to him a kindness of Providence that life is made so uncertain; that death is flung in among the possibilities of our being; that these awful mysteries are thrown around us, into which we may vanish. For without it, how would it be possible to be heroic, how should we plod along in commonplaces forever, never dreaming high things, never risking anything? Man is truly more favored than the angels, and made capable of higher heroism, greater virtue, and of a more excellent spirit than they, because he has such a mystery of grief and terror around him. God gave the whole world to man, and if he is left alone with it, it will make a clod of him at last; but to remedy that, God gave man a grave, and it redeems all, while [ 55 ^] it seems to destroy all, and makes an immortal spirit of him in the end. Something of the kind Hawthorne had written to Sophia in one of his love letters. Early and late his stories had often had their final resolution in the hope of immortality. Now, at the end of his life, as in boyhood, he turned again to that thought for solace. Distressful as it must have been to Hawthorne to abandon the story of Septimius Felton, he was not yet ready utterly to give up the story of an earthly immortality and its consequences. Pre¬ sumably about the time he completed Our Old Home, in the summer of 1863, he began The Dolliver Romance, which, upon Fields’s urging, he agreed to publish serially in the Atlantic, though the date of publication of the first installment was post¬ poned again and again. In the first week of December, on his way to attend the funeral of Mrs. Pierce, he left with Fields the first part of a story of which he himself thought little, and which, he said, he would never finish—a true prophecy, for, after his death, this initial fragment and two others were apparently all that he had succeeded in writing. The first two appeared in the Atlantic after his death. The third, discovered later, was published first in the collected works. Once more, in The Dolliver Romance, Hawthorne utilized the theme of earthly immortality and an elixir of life. Once more, too, the setting is the Charter Street, Salem, home of Dr. Pea¬ body, and the adjacent burying ground, as in Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, though the crusty Dr. Grimshawe and his little wards, Ned and Elsie, have been replaced by the gentle Grandsir Dolliver and his diminutive grandchild, Pansie, together with the latter’s playful kitten. Where the plot was intended to carry these char¬ acters and the reader does not appear in the extant fragments. With only slight hints offered, one can only guess the final effects of the magical elixir with its power of rejuvenation, though some things seem clear: Grandsir Dolliver is a much more integrated, a much wiser, man than was Septimius Felton; and, in its opening. The Dolliver Romance attains something never realized in Sep¬ timius Felton, Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, or The Ancestral Footstep —namely, a true keynote, a pervading tone. In short, here is the best writing of Hawthorne’s last years, a final victory of the spirit of the artist. In their immediate antecedents, the decrepit old man, the little girl, and the kitten obviously go back to old Mr. Kirkup and the large-eyed little girl and her Persian kitten playmate whom Hawthorne had one day visited in Florence under the guidance of Miss Blagden, friend of the Brownings. It had at once occurred to Hawthorne then that the conjurer, the girl, and the playful kitten might well be put into a Romance. But of course Dr. Dolliver and Pansie go back even farther than the experience in Florence for their inception, for they partake of some of the characteristics of Grandfather and little Alice of Grandfather’s Chair, Grandfather sharing with Grandsir Dolliver, not only his mellow humanity, but also his skepticism of the value of an earthly immortality, and Pansie having all the win¬ someness of Hawthorne’s early dream-child. One might do worse than to conjecture that Dr. Dolliver’s name was not unrelated to the Dr. Oliver who tutored Hawthorne for Bowdoin, and whose admirable qualities Dr. Bentley had praised in his diary. It is surely a strange and thought-provoking coincidence that the char¬ acters of this story enact their drama at the very spot where Haw¬ thorne had placed the best scene of what is probably his earliest extant story, “Alice Doane’s Appeal,’’ curious evidence of what deep impressions had been made upon his mind by the old Char¬ ter Street burying ground. It is in its characterization and in its emphasis upon the preciousness of human affection that the great fascination of the story lies. From the very moment that the old gentleman awakes one morning—pulls aside the faded curtains of his ancient bed, and thrusts his head into a beam of sunshine that causes him to wink and withdraw it again—his loveableness captivates the reader. As he dresses and undertakes the perilous adventure of coming down the stairs, he is the very picture of Old Age, the very Last Leaf, inimitably conceived by one who himself now knew the unstable steps of age—experience and imagination blending in consummate art. And when, during the day, in his play with Pansie, the good old doctor is cheered and invigorated by the tight grasp of the child’s warm little hand, some inflection of her voice setting his memory ringing and chiming with forgotten sounds, [553] the reader is glad with the old man to be alive and reverently happy. Sometimes, after a particularly happy day, when Pansie has been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sits by his fireside gazing in among the coals, it is as if, in his twilight mus- ings, the gate of heaven has been left ajar so that he may catch a glimpse within. Nowhere else does Hawthorne dwell more tenderly upon the preciousness of humanity and the affections, or more gently yet confidently suggest the spiritual possibilities in the nature of man. In these words of farewell to life and art, one finds the very epit¬ ome of the thought which Hawthorne had been dramatizing during his whole literary career, a thought here again presented in that unequaled repos e which Edgar Allan Poe had long ago regarded as the essence of Hawthorne’s style. [ 554 ] search of the whole range of Hawthorne’s writings (his letters, his journals, his fiction)—no search, how¬ ever diligent—will reveal there anything approaching a systematic or ordered statement of his basic beliefs. Hawthorne was not Franklin, and drew up no assertion of “First Principles”; nor was he Emerson, and so wrote no Nature at the beginning of his career and no Conduct of Life near the end of it. Nevertheless, neither Franklin nor Emerson wrote more consistently from a recognizable point of view, or revealed more clearly the funda¬ mental traits of man and writer. In this significant respect, Haw¬ thorne was like his great compatriots: man and writer were one, the writing of the author inspired by the same principles that motivated the man, though he was a drarnatist, and no phi¬ losopher. Perhaps at the very center of all of Hawthorne’s convictions”^ —going far back into the very earliest of his boyhood expressions, and everywhere manifest throughout his lifetime—was an explicit faith in Providence. Though he was aware that this was a faith_ which he had been taught in childhood, it was not for that reason that he clung to it. Rather, he was supported in his belief by his instincts and intuitions, by his yearnings and aspirations, by a recurring consciousness of a past Eternity such as Plato wrote of in the Phaedrus. All around him, too, tvas the wonderful [555] beauty of the world, an endless source of joy and a continuing pledge of conformity between the soul and nature, and of a beneficent Creator. In the events of his own life, furthermore, he sensed the guiding hand of Providence, convinced that what seemed misfortune proved, in the end, the best that could pos¬ sibly have happened to him, even though the mode of the bene¬ fits should never be made clear to his apprehension. If the ways of Providence were inscrutable, if man’s accidents were God’s purposes, that was a mystery to which he was resigned, confident that Providence was wiser than he. Inextricably interwoven with his faith in Providence was Hawthorne’s faith in the immortality of man, a faith going back, likewise, to boyhood, and enduring to the end, implicit every¬ where in his fiction, sometimes supplying the resolution of the story, and most often, as in “The Lily’s Quest,’’ when the author’s .^eming gloom is darkest. The sense of man’s and earth’s in¬ completeness which tantalizingly permeated Hawthorne’s thoughts from boyhood through manhood was to him assurance that man must elsewhere find what earth can only suggest. That the painter Washington Allston left his canvas of “Belshazzar” unfinished at his death was sad indeed, but proof that man’s highest longings need another sphere for fruition. (“Ah, but a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for?”) In Haw¬ thorne’s happiness on a glorious September day at the Old Manse (O perfect day! O beautiful world! O beneficent God!) he had felt that such a day was the promise of a blissful eternity. Our Creator would never have made such weather, and given us the deep heart to enjoy it, above and beyond all thought, if he had not meant us to be immortal. When Hawthorne had looked at his poor dying mother, he had felt assured that God would not have made her close so dark and wretched if there were nothing be- yond. It remained his faith, that all misery here constitutes a claim for another life, and, still more, all the happiness, because all true happiness needs something more than a mortal capacity for the enjoyment of it. In this assurance, and in his faith in a beneficent Providence, Hawthorne found the ultimate sources of sustenance and solace. • It was a part of Hawthorne’s thought, however, that the root of human nature strikes down deep into earthly soil, and that [ 55 ^] it is but reluctantly that man submits to be transplanted, even for a higher cultivation in heaven, for Nature has many charms providing innumerable earthly joys, though at last it is the func¬ tion of these charms to remind man of his source and of his destination. - Hawthorne was aware, of course, of the perplexing dichotomy in Nature—that it is at once friendly and indifferent, if not down¬ right hostile. In the lovely wilds of Maine, he had learned, as a boy, of bears and rattlesnakes, of lakes and streams that engulfed the helpless, of arctic winters in which the unwary perished. His sister Louisa, among the terrors of a steamboat explosion, had had to choose between death by burning or death by drowning. Early in his fiction, in “The Ambitious Guest,” he had drama¬ tized the tragic story of the mountain family and the avalanche in the romantic Notch of the White Hills, and in The Blithedale Romance, in the suicide of the magnificent Zenobia, he retold the events of that scene of midnight horror he had witnessed among the beauties of the gentle Concord River. Real and undeniable, in Hawthorne’s view, as were such un- amiable aspects of Nature, they were, in his eyes, dwarfed by grander and more persuasive truths, whatever the deep and mys¬ terious chasm between. In the presence of Nature, when outward and inward senses were properly attuned, no calamity seemed beyond repair, as Emerson, too, had felt. That he found the world very beautiful, Hawthorne said over and over again in ex¬ pressions of delight. Some times it was only a simple delight, as he realized when, at Lenox, on a windy May day, he watched the light shift over the mountain with magical alterations, and as when he shared with the meadow flowers their spontaneous joy in living and growing. Sometimes, at Lenox, too, as on a summer afternoon he lay beside the lake, smoking his cigar and soothed by sunshine and waves and fluttering trees, and as memories of the unhappy Salem Custom House episode faded away, he knew how healing can be the power of Nature. There were, however, deeper experiences with Nature than these, experiences accom¬ panied by a haunting and awesome sense of mystery, when the beauty of Nature led mind and heart onward and upward into Ideal Beauty, into an awareness of Omnipotence and Eternity, the forms of Nature being revealed then as the hieroglyphics of God, [557] and testifying to one grand and beautiful Idea. In moments of such awareness, it seemed the highest wisdom to do nothing, but only to keep still, and be reverently happy and receptive of the great Omnipresence. Such a dichotomy as Hawthorne found in Nature he saw in Man, too. Though the perplexity here was greater and more often disturbing, it was not beyond a serene contemplation and resolution. The contradiction seemed to him, beyond peradven- ture, to reside in the very heart of man. In every human heart. Hawthorne wrote in his early journal, there is evil, latent though it may be. However clean a man s hand, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity. So it had seemed to Hawthorne in “Fancy’s Show Box.” But when he wrote thus, he r was expressing only half his view. The human heart- might, he imagined among his journal entries, be allegorized as a cavern, a short distance inside which is a terrible gloom, a place like Hell itself; but in the very depths of the heart is the eternal beauty, and this is so because there is in man something divine. In his concept of the nature of man, Hawthorne had departed far from his Puritan ancestors and their dogma of total depravity, '^he gloom which was the dying hour of Young Goodman Brown had been dramatized in revulsion, as had been the speech of the dying Father Ephraim in “The Shaker Bridal,” who saw no hope for the sinful human race save in its extinction. These men, in Hawthorne’s view, were but fanatics, as was Catherine in “The Gentle Boy,” the mother who sought to sunder all human ties in her quest for Heaven. For Hawthorne, in spite of the Rappaccinis, the Ethan Brands, and the Judge Pyncheons, it was a kindly race of men, with its Ernests, its Phoebes, and its Grandsir Dollivers to show the possibilities of human character—of true dignity and worth. Man, indeed, needs to purify his heart, and this is not an automatic process, or even an easy one, as Plato’s charioteer, in another way, with his white horse and his black horse, had discovered long before Christianity. But in the development of his^ affections, as Hawthorne saw the question, man can attain some¬ thing of inestimable preciousness. Beyond man’s own efforts, too, lie Divine compassion and forgiveness. Happily, the tvorld has been so ordered that even out of evil a providential good may come, the unwanted adversity capable of strengthening man’s [ 55 ^] character and instructing him for another state of being. Hence, ' though man may never greatly alter a world of mingled good and evil, he need not despair. Hawthorne’s view, in short, was one of firm faith in man’s spiritual destiny, and it is the expression of this faith that perhaps mainly provides the substance and the affirmation of his art. In his concepts of God, nature, and man, Hawthorne was^ eminently an idealist. He was an idealist, too, in his concept of ) art, his affinities being clearly with Emerson and with Coleridge, through both of whom, and probably especially the latter, he seemingly acquired his acquaintance with Platonic and Neo- Platonic thought, if the native bent of his mind required any external stimuli to give it shape. Coleridge, at any rate, he ap¬ parently read in toto, and with Emerson he had a speaking as well as a reading acquaintance. In Sophia, furthermore, herself a devotee of art, he found an enthusiastic Emersonian and Cole- ridgean. Besides, Platonic idealism was in the very air. P^ The history of Hawthorne’s theory of art is one of widening and deepening intents. As a youth at college and in the years immediately following graduation from Bowdoin, his aim had been simply to represent in the drama of fiction the former life of his native land—something akin to what young Longfellow was aspiring to do, as well as many another youthful writer, and what Goodrich was encouraging in The Token—to participate in the creation of an American literature. Only gradually, as in “The Threefold Destiny’’ and in “Legends of the Province House,” there emerged the peculiar blend of the Past with the Marvelous which was to constitute the major aspect of his concept of Ro¬ mance, a concept attaining mature expression in the prefaces to The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. If there were, in his writings, occasional de¬ viations from these central ideas, these ideas nevertheless pro¬ vided the core of his theory. But all the while that Hawthorne was formulating the con¬ cept of the Romance which he regarded as his special province. he was shaping in his thoughts and expressing in his fiction cer¬ tain principles of art much wider and deeper than those implied in his concept of the Romance as such. In “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” and especially in “The Artist of the-Beautiful,” he had already state d the essence of his idealism—th at not by following ;^rules or onl y by copying natu re does the true artist work, but by some magic of inspiration and by seeking to embody the beauty of his vision of the Ideal. Already present in the short stories, to o, are the beginnings of his theorizing upon the character of the ^ artist. Furtlaermore, when he was writing The House of the Seven Gables, he was aware that he was e mploying a m pirnnnf*^^' of minute details such as the old Dutch painters loved. In The BlithedaTe Romance he became explicit in his thought that the art ist sh ould aim at representing nature perfectly, yet with an in- des crihah le_charm, to take'a^^the grossness of realit y, and th us to help the life of man to appear rich and noble, as wSl as'to give immortality to the passing moment, as Keats wrote in his"^ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”' ' But. it wa s_,tmLy only when Hawthorne was in Italy, living among many artists and innumerable works of art, that his theo- rec eived its fullest and most explicit form. The prin¬ ciples which he expressed in his journals then, he had, of course, harbored in his mind for years, and for years given form in his own_vmtings. Tjue art, he now rec ogn ized with finality, always' contams an element'^df mystery, because, like man himself, it represents a juncture of the physical with the_Divine. Inevitably, I then, it must represent a joinin g of taste with the moral and the r eligious se nse. It should endeavor to show the unity in the di- versjty,^„to^ interpret life—to charm and elevate man through beauty and noble aim. these matters, of course, Hawthorne saw not as a philos¬ opher or critic, abstractly and coolly, but as an artist or lover- concretely and in ecstasy. They were perhaps never clearer to him, or contemplated with more pleasure, than they were one June morning in Florence when he had gone to the Uffizi gallery on one of his many visits to the “Venus de’ Medici.” Once again her charm was fresh and new. She was a miracle. The sculptor who shaped that beautiful and intellectual face, giving her a spiritual existence, must have wrought religiously, and have felt something [560] far beyond his own skill working through his hands. One might look upon her with new delight from infancy to old age. As for himself, Hawthorne was the more ready, because of her, to believe in the high destines of the human race. There she stood— forever to gladden the world. In a review of Hawthorne’s life and writings, nothing is more prominent than a quiet, deeply joyful affirmation. To recognize the hand of Providence in th e affairs of man, to see the unity in the diversit y of the world, to perceive in the forms of Nature a majestic and beautiful Idea, to feel that all these wonderful things are for the instruction and enjoyment of man, and to be assured that beyond is still a higher fruition in man’s immor¬ tality—these wer^he basic tenets of Hawthorne’s belief as a man, a belief, too, permeating all his writings and giving them an abiding substance and worth. The life of Nathaniel Hawthorne can perhaps be most fittingly epitomized in the impressions of two of his best friends. To Frank¬ lin Pierce, at the hotel in Plymouth, in the early morning hour, as he leaned over the lifeless form of his friend, it had seemed that Hawthorne’s face had never appeared more g rand and serene. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the Concord village church, look¬ ing for the last time at the friend who lay in his blossom-covered coffin, it had seemed that Hawthorne’s was a powerful head— noble and s eren e in its aspect. Statesman and poet, man of affairs and man of letters, had each seen, in those memorable moments, the essence of Hawthorne’s character and accomplishment as a man. The artist, too, had attained a corresponding grandeur and repos e. It is no wonder, then, that he left to the world such a heritage of beauty and noble thought. W - • * •'r. --i'Z - ^ ...'i.f-i '/V.-^ -.1’^? I i! or : --M t/)r 4 < '• -‘W: ^ '^4 i’!. .'‘I?-. Wip ''i jmM^r t ''>'*.) W i'. bit^'f-'sltj 1 /,■;■■ . pi' •' _t|/: r 'i I-'. w tii' J**''^.Ai/^. ti»' *w,. IjfLC S. (tet . 1 * „ '.fi- v*»^^iuF «)vU/ r -}ja (j^i^^/'ti'im . '>iiV ri^^gjp^' '•' ' ""i: Pr'• •"..'I •* tKrv Fj'-tf li -- j m ■I 1. i Bibliographical Essay Chapter One. Shadows of Antiquity The early matter in this chapter is in part drawn from Haw- horne’s “Main Street,” in The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Haw- horne (Old Manse Edition), Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1900. (This is the text used throughout and hereafter designated Writings.) Occasional references are made to “Young Goodman Brown” ind to The House of the Seven Gables and The American Notebooks. \ few items regarding the witchcraft delusion were drawn from the VIS Records of the First Church of Salem. For the matter relating to ;he intellectual history of Salem, as well as to the history of the Hathorne family, I am mainly indebted to the excellent Diary of Dr. William Bentley, published by the Essex Institute, Salem, 1905-1914, hough in part I have also drawn upon my own “Captain Nathaniel Hawthorne, ” Essex Institute Historical Collections, October, 1953, vhich itself was based upon a multitude of manuscripts in the Essex Institute. Some biographical details were drawn from the Richard Vlanning MS business records in the possession of the Essex Institute md from Julian Hawthorne’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Boston, 1885, hereafter designated simply “Julian.” Chapter Two. Habits of Solitude The major secondary sources here are “Captain Nathaniel Haw- Borne” and Julian as previously cited; Randall Stewart’s “Recol¬ ections of Hawthorne by His Sister Elizabeth,” American Literature', fanuary, 1945; newspaper clippings compiled by Henry M. Brooks, Essex Institute; History of Cumberland County, Maine, Philadelphia, 1880; Samuel T. Pickard (ed.), Hawthorne’s First Diary, Boston, 1897;'-'^ :he Richard Manning business records; Elizabeth Hathorne’s “The Boyhood of Hawthorne,” Wide Awake, November, 1891; and E. L. [ 563 ] Chandler (ed.), “Hawthorne’s Spectator,” New England Ouarterlv April, 1931. s, ^ y. Chapter Three. At a Country College Many of the details of description of Bowdoin College and student life there are from Cleaveland and Packard’s History of Bowdoin College, 1882, and Louis Hatch’s The History of Bowdoin College Portland, Me., 1927. “The Laws of Bowdoin” are quoted by Roy Franklin Nichols in Franklin Pierce, Young Hickory of the Granite Hills, Philadelphia, 1931. Details of Hawthorne’s participation in college life are from Manning Hawthorne’s “Nathaniel Hawthorne at College,” New England Quarterly, June, 1940; from the manuscript minutes of the Bowdoin faculty meetings; from Julian Hawthorne as cited; from George Parsons Lathrop’s Study of Hawthorne, Boston, 1876; and from Horatio Bridge’s Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne, New York, 1893. The views of Hawthorne’s college mates are from Cleaveland and Packard; George Thomas Packard’s “Bow¬ doin College,” Scribner’s Monthly, May, 1876; Charles Lewis Slatter- ly s Brunswick and Bowdoin College,” New England Magazine , De¬ cember, 1891; from the J. S. C. Abbott Scrapbook of newspaper clip¬ pings in the Bowdoin College Library; and from George Lowell Aus¬ tin’s Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1883. Harriet S. Tapley in her Salem Imprints, 1768-1825; A History of the First Fifty Years of Printing in Salem, Essex Institute, 1927, offers information on Ferdinand Andrews, as does an obituary notice of Andrews in the Salem Advertiser of May 18, 1883. Longfellow’s commencement oration is quoted in Lawrance Thompson’s Young Longfellow, New York, 1938. Chapter Four. Depths of Obscurity The danger of idleness in New England Hawthorne records in “Passages from a Relinquished Work,” Writings, V, which I assume to be largely autobiographical. The reference to Fanshawe is from Ran¬ dall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne, New Haven, 1948. Manning Haw¬ thorne, in “Hawthorne and ‘The Man of God,’ ” Colophon, Winter, 1937, records Hawthorne’s visit to Yale. S. G. Goodrich recounts his relations with Hawthorne in his Recollections of a Lifetime, New York, 1857. Other sources for this chapter are Lathrop; Julian; E. B. Hunger- ford, Hawthorne Gossips about Salem,” New England Quarterly, September, 1933; Moncure D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, [ 564 ] New York, 1890; and Nelson F. Adkins, “The Early Projected Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Papers of the Biographical Society of America, XXXIX, 2nd Quarter, 1945. Hawthorne’s work as editor is discussed in Arlin Turner’s Haw¬ thorne as Editor, Baton Rouge, 1941, and in Manning Hawthorne’s “Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hawthorne, Editors,” Colophon, No. Ill, September, 1939. Hawthorne’s early plan to reform society through a literature for children is recorded in Mary Peabody’s MS letter to Horace Mann, March 3, 1838 (Massachusetts Historical Society). The commentary on the sketches and tales is of course based on the writings themselves, together with supplementary matter from Haw¬ thorne’s American Notebooks, which were edited by Mrs. Hawthorne in 1868 (Writings, XVIII) and by Professor Randall Stewart in 1932 (Yale University Press). Since Mrs. Hawthorne included matter not available to Professor Stewart, both texts are necessary to the scholar. Professor Stewart’s text is esp>ecially helpful for its inclusion of names omitted (quite understandably) by Mrs. Hawthorne. Chapter Five. Inheritors of Eternity Although no record remains of the date of composition of most of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches, the date of their publication is indicated in Vols. I, III, IV, XVI, and XVII, of the Writings. The secondary sources for the Boston Custom House exj>erience are Julian; Russel B. Nye, George Bancroft, Brahmin Rebel, New York, 1944; J. C. Derby, Fifty Years among Authors, New York, 1884; George Edwin Jepson, “Hawthorne in the Boston Custom House,” Bookman, August, 1904; Boston Courier, March 8, April 26, 29, 1841; and the Concord, Massachusetts, Freeman, August 5, 1842. Haw¬ thorne’s letter to Bancroft, January 8, 1841, is in the Massachusetts Historical Society Library. The relations with Longfellow and other friends are treated in H. W. Longfellow Dana, The Craigie House, Cambridge Historical Society, 1939; Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Long¬ fellow, Boston, 1891; Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Boston, 1877; M. A. DeWolfe Howe, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, New York, 1908; W. D. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, New York, 1901; Longfellow’s Harvard Library chargings, 1840-41, provided by Prof. Carl L. Johnson, University of Oregon; Ralph L. Rusk (ed.), The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York, 1939; and Julian. My primary sources for Hawthorne’s love story were his own American Notebooks; Rose H. Lathrop’s Memories of Hawthorne, [ 565 ] Boston, 1897: and Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Chicago 1907. Secondary sources relating to the Brook Farm period are Mar^ Caroline Crawford, Romantic Days in Old Boston, Boston, 1910 Everett Edward Hale, James Freeman Clarke, Boston, 1891; Octaviu: Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley, Boston, 1882; George Parson; Latlirop (ed.). The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Boston 1883; Katherine Burton, Paradise Planters, New York, 1939; Elizabetli Peabody, “Plan of the West Roxbury Community,” The Dial, January 1842; and Manning Hawthorne, “Hawthorne and Utopian Socialism,’ New England Quarterly, December, 1939. Chapter Six. O Beautiful World! The early pages of this chapter are based mainly on Love Letters, Rusk, and Mary Caroline Crawford. The Concord descriptions are from the American Notebooks and from Memories. The complimentary ap¬ pointment as hogreeve is recorded in the MS Concord Town Records, March 4, 1844. Hawthorne’s Notebooks are of course the best source for his life at the Old Manse. Other sources include Julian; Memories; Mary Wilder Tileston (ed.), Caleb and Mary Wilder Foote: Remembrances and Letters, Boston, 1918; and R. W. Emerson, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Boston, 1852. Lindsay Swift, Brook Farm, New York, 1900, contains a sketch of George Bradford. The details regarding Longfellow are from Samuel Longfellow. The story of Lowell and the Pioneer is told in the MS master’s thesis of Quentin Johnson (University of Oregon, 1956), “The Letters of James Russell Lowell to Robert Carter.” Emerson’s relations with Hawthorne are mainly recorded in his Letters and in his Journals (Boston, 1909-1914); those of Thoreau and Hawthorne are indicated in R. W. Emerson (ed.), Henry D. Thoreau, Letters to Various Persons, Boston, 1865, and in F. B. Sanborn (ed.), “The Emerson-Thoreau Correspondence,” Atlantic Monthly, May, 1892. Hawthorne’s commen¬ tary on Emerson is recorded in his Notebooks, in the introductory chapter of Mosses from an Old Manse, as well as in an MS letter to his sister Louise, November 28, 1842 (Essex Institute). Sophia’s comments are from Memories. The reference to Curtis is from G. W. Cooke (ed.). Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis to John S. Dwight, New York, 1898. Haw¬ thorne’s remark about parenthood is from a letter to Hillard quoted in Conway. Robert F. Metzdorf discusses “Hawthorne’s Suit Against Ripley and Dana” in American Literature, May, 1940. Ironically, the MS Tax Record of the Town of Concord for 1844 and 1845 indicates that [5dd] Hawthorne was paying taxes on “money at interest,” presumably money invested in Brook Farm. In addition to the usual poll tax of $1.50 (which Thoreau refused to pay), Hawthorne also apparently paid the tax on the house, garden, and orchard of the Doctor Ripley estate. The hope of political appointment is stated in Bridge’s Personal Recollections. Chapter Seven. A Tale of Sorrow Bridge, Julian, Samuel Longfellow, Rusk, Memories, and the American Notebooks supply many of the factual details of this chapter. Hawthorne’s relation to the Salem Lyceum is mentioned in the Salem Observer of April 28, 1849; in Historical Sketch of the Salem Lyceum, Salem, 1879; and in my own “Thoreau As Lecturer,” New England Quarterly, December, 1946. Channing’s strictures on Emerson are from the former’s MS letter to Emerson, February 7, 1850. The visit to Hawthorne is recorded in MS notes of F. B. Sanborn, August 28, 1901, in the Concord Public Li¬ brary. Hawthorne’s review of Evangeline appeared in the Salem Advertiser of November 13, 1847. It was transcribed, together with other of Haw¬ thorne’s reviews, by Randall Stewart in “Hawthorne’s Contributions to the Salem Advertiser,” American Literature, January, 1934. The account of Hawthorne’s employment as surveyor at the Salem Custom House, as well as the ejection from that position, is based upon my own “The Writing of The Scarlet Letter,” New England Quarterly, September, 1954, wherein the original sources are indicated in detail. To Mr. Harold I. Lessem, Superintendent of the Salem Maritime Na¬ tional Historic Site, I am indebted for the date of Hawthorne’s de¬ parture from the Custom House. The letter to Hillard expressing thanks for aid received is from Writings, XVII. The local Whig reaction to Hawthorne’s preface to The Scarlet Letter (“The Custom House”) is revealed in the Salem Register of March 21 and 25, 1850. Its editor, John Chapman, had been a lead¬ ing figure in Hawthorne’s removal. Chapman shows how bitter was some local feeling against Hawthorne. On the other hand, Eben. N. Walton, publisher of the Salem Advertiser, had “withdrawn from public view . . . sickened and disgusted” because he did not wish to share in “driving out from our midst ... a man of such graceful genius and (except in Salem) of such universally appreciated talent, as Nathaniel Hawthorne” (August 1, 1849). Julian’s statement that The Scarlet Letter was begun the very day when Hawthorne told Sophia of his discharge, and that the book was half finished when Madame Hathorne fell ill, is not supported by the [ 567 ] facts. Hawthorne precariously remained in office until the end of th( third week in July, too agitated to write, and his mother died or July 31st. When he resumed writing, it w^ “The Great Stone Face’ which Sophia named as occupying his effort (Julian, p. 354). Tha he wrote “The Snow-Image’’ at this time and prior to writing Thi Scarlet Letter is indicated by his own statement (VI, 62) and b> Fields’s remark that when Hawthorne, in the late months of 1849 showed him what manuscript he had, only the first chapters of th( book were completed. The Custom House chapter seems to hav( been wholly written, however, save for such minor changes (nevei completely effected) as may have been necessary when it was de cided to lengthen Hester’s story and to make it a separate book. The story of the rewriting of The Scarlet Letter is from James T Fields, Yesterdays ivith Authors, Boston, 1871. Interestingly, the Palladium, Worcester, Massachusetts, had sensec that the publicity regarding Hawthorne’s ejection was to the author’ advantage. Even before the publication of The Scarlet Letter, it hat proposed (June 27, 1849) that now would be a good time to publisl an edition of Hawthorne’s works. Chapter Eight. A Wider Scope Samuel Longfellow, Memories, Love Letters, Julian, Lathrop Bridge, and Fields continue to be sources. The American Notebook are the basis of much of the descriptive matter, though I am also in debted to R. DeWitt Mallary, Lenox and the Berkshire Highlands New York, 1902, as well as to Theodore F. Wolfe, Literary Shrines Philadelphia, 1896. The description of Hawthorne at Lenox is basec upon James C. Austin, Fields of the Atlantic Monthly, San Marino 1953. Melville and Hawthorne are discussed by Luther Stearnes Mans field, “Glimpses of Melville’s Life in Pittsfield,” American Literature March, 1937; Willard Thorpe, Herman Melville (American Writer Series), New York, 1938; Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, a Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891, New York, 1951; Randall Stewart The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, New York, 1941 and Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Circle, New York, 1903 Tuckerman’s essay was reprinted, with Hawthorne’s letter, ir Littell’s Living Age, June 11, 1864. I consider this essay one of th( most perceptive yet written on Hawthorne. Old houses in Salem are discussed by Fred A. Gannon, Philip Eng lish, Salem, 1941; Gilbert L. Streeter, “Some Historic Streets and Houses of Salem,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, July, 1900; and by Sidney Perley, History of Salem, Massachusetts, Salem, 1924 1928. Dr. Bentley’s description of the English mansion is from his [ 568 ] Diary and from his funeral sermon for Susanna Hathorne Ingersoll, Essex Institute Historical Collections, XI, 228-234. I suspect that Hawthorne, in “Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure,” bor¬ rowed the trunk mentioned by Dr. Bentley, as he did the tearing down of the old mansion. The land claims of the Hathornes in Maine receive comment in Visitors’ Guide to Salem, Salem, 1937. “Uncle” Trench at Bowdoin is mentioned in Cleaveland and Packard. The harsh criticisms of The Scarlet Letter had appeared in The Church Review, III, 489-511; Brownson’s Quarterly Review, VII, 528- 532; and The Christian Examiner, quoted in the Salem Advertiser, May 12, 1851. Chapter Nine. Highway of Human Affairs The early pages of this chapter are based on Julian, Samuel Long¬ fellow, Rusk, Memories, and Lathrop. For the matter relating to the Pierce biography, the main sources are the biography itself {Writings, XVII), Nichols, and Caroline Ticknor. Matters pertaining to Hawthorne and Pierce at the Brunswick reunion and afterward are treated in Cleaveland and Packard; Hatch; General Catalogue of Bowdoin College and the Medical School of Maine, 1794-1912, Brunswick, 1912; Love Letters and American Note¬ books. Hawthorne’s proposed writing after The Blithedale Romance is treated in Margaret M. Lothrop, The Wayside, New York, 1940; S. E. Morison, “Melville’s ‘Agatha’ Letter to Hawthorne,” New England Quarterly, April, 1929; and in Leyda and Julian. The details of the political appointment to Liverp>ool are based on Bridge, Lathrop, Writings (XVII), the Lowell (Massachusetts) Daily Journal and Courier, September 16 and 22, 1852, December 8, 1852, and April 1, 1853; the Salem Register, March 28, 1853; Leyda; Love Letters; and Caroline Ticknor. Matters pertaining to the departure for Europe are from Julian, Fields, Samuel Longfellow, Rusk, American Notebooks, and Memories. Chapter Ten. His Forefathers’ Home Hawthorne’s notebooks were never so detailed as they were during his sojourn in England and on the Continent. Published by Mrs. Hawthorne in 1870 as Notes of Travel and in part edited in a scholarly [ 569 ] manner by Randall Stewart as The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, these notebooks are the primary source for this chapter. Supplementary matters are to be found in Our Old Home (1863), which Hawthorne based on his English notebooks; in Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Notes in England and Italy, New York, 1878; in Love Letters; Memories; Conway; Samuel Longfellow; Caroline Ticknor; Bridge; and Julian. The kind of reality attained in the mirrorings in his imagination, the subject which Hawthorne reflected upon during his visits to the homes of his favorite authors, is treated similarly by Goethe in his reflections upon a cherished early love affair. See Paul Carus, Goethe, Chicago, 1915, pp. 92-94. One of Hawthorne’s early acts in his relative affluence in his posi¬ tion as consul was to return (with interest) the money which Hillard and others had provided after Hawthorne’s ejection from the Salem Custom House {Writings, XVII, 436-437). Hawthorne’s initial remarks concerning the damaged Elgin Marbles are likely to suggest Mark Twain’s similar remarks in Innocents Abroad. Apparently, however, Hawthorne’s education went further than Twain’s. Chapter Eleven. Deepened by Experience Much of the substance of this chapter is based on Notes of Travel. Mrs. Hawthorne’s Notes were helpful in tracing the development of Hawthorne’s interest in fauns and in Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci. Caroline Ticknor, Fields, and Memories are again sources, primarily for Hawthorne’s comment on his writing. Julian provides a few details. Hiram Powers’ statue of Webster, admired by Hawthorne, is in the capitol in Boston. Louisa Lander’s bust of Hawthorne is in the Concord Public Library. The common impression that Hawthorne had a prudish attitude toward the nude is best denied by his highly laudatory remarks on the “Venus de’ Medici.’’ Hawthorne’s conviction that the artist is lifted into power by a strength beyond his own skill of course suggests Emerson’s poem, “The Problem,’’ which Hawthorne often paraphrased. Both Emerson and Thoreau are suggested by Hawthorne’s remark that only the elabora¬ tion of the work of art is the artist’s own. See Fred Lorch, “Thoreau and the Organic Principle in Poetry,’’ Publication of the Modem Language Association, March, 1938. Representative of contemporary commentary on The Marble Faun is the review in the Atlantic Monthly of May, 1860. Bertha Faust, in [ 570 ] Hawthorne’s Contemporaneous Reputation, Philadelphia, 1939, pro¬ vides excerpts from numerous reviews of Hawthorne’s works. Henry James’s facetious remark on The Marble Faun is from Hawthorne, New York, 1887. Of course James should have known better than to say in that volume that Hawthorne’s knowledge of art was that of the ordinary tourist. The history of the concept of “the fortunate fall,’’ as it is treated by Milton and others, is discussed by A. O. Lovejoy in English Literary History, IV (1937) ,161-179. The most unfavorable reviews of The Scarlet Letter have already been mentioned in the notes on Chapter VIII. An especially virulent commentary appeared in the Salem Register of March 21, 1850. It should help explain Hawthorne’s handling of his thesis in The Marble Faun, wherein that thesis was much more explicit than it had been when used in The Scarlet Letter. Chapter Twelve. Scattered Fantasies The early details in this chapter regarding Hawthorne’s growing concern about the Civil War are mainly based on Caroline Ticknor, Julian, Bridge, Margaret Lothrop, Randall Stewart, “The Hawthornes at Wayside, 1860-1864,’’ More Books, September 1944, and Hawthorne’s own “Chiefly about War Matters’’ {Writings, XVII). Hawthorne’s illness, death, and funeral are mentioned separately or collectively by M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess, Boston, 1922; Randall Stewart, “Hawthorne’s Last Illness and Death,” More Books, October, 1944; Memories; Caroline Ticknor; Julian; Love Letters; Samuel Longfellow; Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Haw¬ thorne,” Atlantic, July, 1864; Emerson’s Journals; Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser, May 25, 1864; Sidney Webster, Franklin Pierce and His Administration, New York, 1892; H. W. Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, Boston, 1893; Fields; Odell Shepard, The Journals of Amos Bronson Alcott, Boston, 1938. The relations between Hawthorne and Fields and Hawthorne’s comments on his last writing are discussed by Fields, Howe, and Austin. The relations with his other friends are treated by Fields; Bridge; Walter Harding and Carl Bode (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, New York, 1958; Shepard; Howe; Emerson, Journals; Margaret Lothrop; J. E. Cabot, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston, 1887; Flowells; Hawthorne, “Chiefly about War Matters”; Samuel Longfellow; and Webster. A few details regarding Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret are based on Ed¬ ward Hutchins Davidson’s Hawthorne’s Last Phase, New Haven, 1949. [ 571 ] Index Adams, John, 363 Addison, Joseph, 28, 45, 144, 411 Advertiser, Salem, 140, 242, 251, 258, 266-267, 273, 328 A^ssiz, Louis, 247, 529 Ainsworth, Mrs. Peter, 440, 442, 547 Albany, N. Y., 12 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 10, 44, 145, 209, 211-212, 246, 247, 330, 360-362, 379, 529-534, 536, 538, 548 Alcott, Louisa, 27, 522 Allen, President William, 58, 60, 62-64, 71, 89, 369, 542 Allen, William, 176, 383 Allingham, William, 422 Allston, Washington, 144, 163, 556 American Magazine of Useful and En¬ tertaining Knowledge, 103, 161, 240, 283 American Monthly Magazine, 130 Andrea del Sarto, 493 Andrews, Ferdinand, 82, 93 Andrews, Captain John, 12 Androscoggin River, 51, 59, 75, 111, 271 Apthorp, Leonard, 80, 85 Areopagitica, 4 Arezzo, Italy, 485 Aristotle, 447, 505 Arnold, Matthew, 294, 447 Athenaean Society, 57, 65-67, 369 Athenaeum, Boston, 283 Athenaeum, Salem, 9 Atherton, Sen. Charles G., 242 Atlantic Monthly, 470, 525-526, 539. 544, 546, 552 Austen, Jane, 390-391 Bacon, Delia, 440 Bacon, Sir Francis, 440 Bancroft, George, 110, 131-132, 135-136, 138, 158-159, 231, 243, 339 Bennoch, Francis, 426, 438, 476, 536, 549 Bentley, Rev. Dr. William, 10-13, 15, 19, [ 572 ] 23, 36, 115, 257, 273, 344, 348, 456, 553 Berkshires, 153, 297-298, 300-301, 304-305, 307, 309-310, 312-313, 321, 333-334, 428, 435, 524 Beverly, Mass., 14 Bewick Company, 103, 105, 108, 510 Blagden, Isa, 467, 553 Blair’s Rhetoric, 52 Blithedale Romance, 143, , 177 -178, 184, 208, 229, 235, , 239, 284, , 340, , 354 -355, 359, 366, 372 -373, 381- 383, 385, 387- 389, 391-394, 415, 423. 442, 510, 530, 535, 557, 559 -560 Boccaccio, 450 Boston , 13-14, 16-17, 21, 44, 69, 80 , 95, 103-1 104, 109, 114, 131, 133- 137, 139, 144-1 145, 148, 150, 152, 163, 168, 170, 176-177, 191, 197, 199, 210- 211, 213, 217, 222, 226-227, 240 1-241, 244 -245, 248-250, 252, 254, 257, 263, 271, 273, 279, 281, 283, 298, 313, 332. 337, 343, 350, 359-361, 364, 368 -369, 380 -381, 385, 388, 432, 442, 446, 468, 507, 516, 518, 525-527, 534, 537, 540 Boston Advertiser, 275 Boston Atlas, 266 Boston Herald, 376 Boston Post, 265 Boston Times, 364 Boston Transcript, 280 Boswell, James, 413 Bourbon (Reunion), 8 Bowditch, Nathaniel, 9 Bowdoin Cadets, 57-58, 66, 365, 542 Bowdoin College, 51-54, 59-61, 65-68, 71, 80, 85-86, 90, 92. 95. 104, 108, 132-134, 203, 210, 217, 347, 366, 369, 374, 433, 541-542, 553, 559 Boy’s Wonder-Horn, 138 Bradford, George, 203-204, 212, 348, 427, 538 Bradley, Rev. Caleb, 33 Bremer, Freclrika, 311, 462-464 Bridge, Horatio, 64, 67, 75, 78, 81, 93, 95, 98, 108-114, 129. 131-135. 137-138, 141, 176, 203, 217, 226, 228, 230-232, 240- 242, 271, 279, 281-283, 309-310, 330, 332-333. 335, 339, 366, 368, 370, 372- 373, 376, 379, 422, 428, 432, 434, 468, 520, 524, 527, 529, 539, 541-543, 550 Bright, Henry, 425-426, 476, 501, 536 British Museum, 420, 442-444, 447 Bronte, Charlotte, 314 Brook Farm, 35. 137, 147, 168-170, 172, 174-176, 178, 181, 187, 190, 202-203, 211-213, 217, 224, 228-231, 235, 240, 260, 276-277, 283, 287, 335, 348, 354, 380-387, 391-394, 401, 409, 457, 460, 506, 522-523, 534, 538 Brown, John, 520, 534-535, 545 Browne, Benjamin F., 242, 245, 273, 309 Browning, Elizabeth B., 423, 462, 465-467 Browning, Robert, 423, 462, 465, 467, 550, 553 Brownson, Orestes, 145 Brunswick, Maine, 41, 50-52, 55, 59-60, 63, 69, 77, 111, 369, 501 Bryant, William Cullen, 32, 265, 297, 318, 466, 468-469 Buchanan, President James, 432 Bull, Ephraim, 363 Bunyan, John, 27-28, 162, 214, 235 Burchmore, Captain Stephen, 259 Burchmore, Zachariah, 309, 376, 538 Burley, Susan, 150, 163, 246 Burns, Robert, 417-419, 438 Burrows, Rev. George, 5 Butler, Joseph, 53 Butler, Samuel, 10 Byron, Lord, 28, 46, 53, 57, 59, 64, 150, 390, 415-416, 450, 467, 483, 501-503 Cabot, James Elliott, 310 Calef, Robert, 11 Cambridge, Mass., 133, 135, 360, 468 Cambridge University, 53, 72 Canova, Antonio, 489 Cape of Good Hope, 25 Carlyle, Thomas, 144-145, 158, 169, 401, 422 Carter, Robert, 204-205, 226, 374 Cellini, Benvenuto, 444, 486 Central wharf, 21, 27 Cervantes, 283 Channing, Ellery, 201, 206-207, 210-211, 213, 232, 248-249, 309-311, 330, 339, 360, 363-364, 379, 384, 530-534, 538 Channing, Dr. William Ellery, 145, 147, 210 Channing, W. H., 460 Charter Street burying ground, 18, 87, 244, 509, 549, 553 Chaucer, 10 Cheney, Seth, 534 Chester Cathedral, 460 Chesterfield, Earl of, 10 Choate, Rufus, 263-264 Church of England, 6, 460 Churches, Salem, 6, 8-17, 28, 115 Cilley, Jonathan, 66-67, 78-79, 84, 110, 113, 130-132, 181, 346-347, 370 Cimabue, Giovanni, 504 Clarke, Rev. lames Freeman, 145, 191, 528 Clemens, S. L., 32, 259 Clough, Arthur, 364, 379 Coleman, Ann, 4, 16 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 32, 87, 144, 234, 285, 299, 413, 559 Conant, Roger, 3 Concord, Mass., 6. 79, 145, 165, 190-192, 199-201, 205-207, 211-212, 214-217, 227, 230-232. 236, 240-241, 245-247, 249, 268, 280, 285, 298, 310-311, 321, 332, 350, 352, 360, 364, 369, 373, 378-379, 425, 434-436, 451, 472, 482, 499, 516, 524, 528, 530, 533-534, 536, 540, 545- 546, 561 Concord, N. H., 527, 540 Concord River, 275,'287, 304, 363, 382, 384, .557 Connecticut, 94, 99, 116, 123, 153, 284 Conolly, H. L., 19, 94, 139-140, 202, 242, 268, 344, 373 Cook, Robinson, 37 Cotton, Rev. John, 4 Cowley, Abraham, 10 Cromwell, Oliver, 8 Crooked River, 38 Crowninshield, Clifford, 346 Curtis, George William, 217, 311, 331, 372 Curwin, Judge Jonathan, 17-18, 345 Custom House, Boston, 20, 131-132, 135, 138, 158, 161-164, 170, 173-174, 181, 187, 229-230, 232, 264, 339, 377, 379, 386, 449 Custom House, Salem, 12, 51, 241-245, 250, 256, 258-261, 266-267, 273-274, 277, 280, 286, 293, 301, 311, 328, 334, 339, 341, 345-346, 354, 356-357, 375, 380, 427, 429, 439, 506, 510, 514, 533, 537- 538, 544, 557 Dante, 323, 450, 468 Deane, Gorham, 86, 91 Defoe. Daniel. 10, 411 Democratic Review, 130, 216, 226, 231, 265-266, 273, 311, 427 De Quincey, Thomas, 413, 424 Derby, Elias Hasket, 12 Derby wharf, 27, 256, 257 Detroit, 99 Dickens, Charles, 422, 439 Dike, John, 77, 309 Dingley, Jacob, 37, 38 Dingley Brook, 30, 31, 34 Disraeli, Benjamin, 133 [ 573 ] Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, 148 149 547, 548, 550-552 Dolliver Romance, The, 54, 87 97 125 227, 287, 468, 525, 547, 551, 552 ’ Dryden, John, 10 Durham Cathedral, 460 Duyckinck, Evert, 317-321 Dwight, J. S., 529 East India Marine Society, 25 Ecclesiastes, 326 Edinburgh, 397, 398, 409, 410 Edinburgh Castle, 410 Edwards, Jonathan, 297 Elgin Marbles, 443, 447 Eliot, John, 172 Elwes, Gervase, 396, 441 Emerson, Charles, 145 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 10, 27, 46, 74, 77, 87, 91, 99, 142, 144-147, 158, 163, 165,’ 168, 177, 186, 191-193, 197, 200-204, 206, 207, 209-216, 219, 227, 232-234, 237, 238, 246-250, 274, 275, 284, 285, 288, 293-296, 304, 309, 310, 321, 330, 331, 339, 348, 350, 352, 356, 360, 363, 364, 366, 376, 379, 388, 389, 401, 427, 460, 461, 483, 487, 493, 505, 511, 515, 522, 527-531, 533-538, 555, 557, 559, 561 Emerson, William, 168 Endicott, John, 4, 278 England, 14, 16, 246, 247, 313, 314, 344, 379, 396, 397, 400-404, 406, 409, 410, 419-421, 424, 425, 428, 433-435, 439, 440, 442, 444, 447-449, 452, 456, 460, 461, 464-467, 476, 478-480, 484, 485, 489, 494, 499, 503, 516, 524, 525, 538, 542, 547-549 English, Philip, 17, 19, 139, 343-345 Erie Canal, 99 Essex Historical Society, 9, 546 Etty, William, 445, 489 Euripides, 391 Evangeline, 44, 139-141, 202, 537 Evening Post, New York, 265 Everett, Ebenezer, 60 Fairfield, Sen. John, 242-244 Famous Old People, 140 ]Fanshawe, 82-84, 86-88, 93-97, 102, 117, 125, 147, 149, 182, 286, 351, 389, 416, ' 509, 550 Farley, Frank, 202, 203 Felton, C. C., 135 Fenelon, Francois, 10, 54, 144, 204 Fessenden, Thomas Green, 104, 105, 130 181 Fessenden, William Pitt, 37 Field, Mr. & Mrs. Dudley, 311, 317, 318 Fielding, Henry, 10 Fields, James T., 34, 82, 279, 280, 311, 316-318, 332, 337, 338, 379, 380, 523, [574 ] 525, 526, 529, 534, 539-543, 546, 550, 552 Fire Island, N. Y., 384 Florence, Italy, 450-454, 457-459, 465, 467-469, 471, 474, 475, 479, 481, 483, 485, 487, 490-492, 494, 498, 502, 505, 508, 516, 517, 553, 560 Forrester, Captain John, 12 Forrester, Rachel, 20, 21, 246, 286, 345 Forrester, Simon, 20, 27 France, 450, 452 Franklin, Benjamin, 10, 158, 555 Frost, Barzillai, 460 Frost, Robert, 122, 367 Fuller, Margaret, 145, 171, 177, 191, 197, 200, 201, 206, 212, 213, 236, 383, 384, 388, 389, 423, 507 Furness Abbey, 405, 406 Gainsborough, Thomas, 470 Galileo, 450, 475, 482 Gallow’s Hill, 16, 84, 85 Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth, 422 Gerando, Baron Joseph Marie de, 144 Gibson, John, 462 Giotto, 504 Glyn, Isabella, 423 Godwin, William, 41 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 10, 144, 158 167, 234, 256, 294, 391, 511, 515 Goldsmith, Oliver, 10, 411, 437 Good, Mrs. Sarah, 5 Goodrich, Samuel G., 83, 94-98, 102, 103, 105-110, 130, 184, 188, 225, 278, 340, 510, 559 Grandfather's Chair, 97, 106, 170, 181, 186-189, 340, 413, 553 Greene, Professor G. W., 529 Greenough, Horatio, 364 Griswold, Rufus W., 44 -Guido, 472, 495, 496, 498 Hale, IVilliam, 68 Hancock, John, 7 Harpers Ferry, 521 Harvard, 10, 33, 52, 90, 134, 135, 203, 210, 249, 432 Hathorne, Daniel, 26 Hathorne, Captain Daniel, 20, 21 Hathorne, Ebenezer, 19, 20, 138, 139, 248, 286, 347, 348, 416 Hathorne, Elizabeth, 26, 27, 35, 39, 40, 44, 60, 77, 82, 83, 95 , 99, 103, 105, 148, 151, 175, 309, 332, 483 Hathorne, Elizabeth Manning, 21, 26, 30, 36, 46, 50, 62-64, 91, 254, 347 Hathorne, John, 16, 21 Hathorne, Judge John, 16-19, 149, 345 Hathorne, John Tousel, 18, 19, 345, 346 Hathorne, Maria Louise, 26, 34, 40, 44, 71, 83, 95, 100, 148, 172, 175, 191, 199, 246, 309, 332, 368, 557 Hathorne, Mary Tousel, 18, 345 Hathorne, Captain Nathaniel, 21, 25, 26 Hathorne, Rachel, 26, 27 Hathorne, Major William, 16, 139, 246, 396, 441 Hawthorne, Julian, 245, 254, 276, 300, 305-308, 314, 320, 322, 330, 362, 363, 425, 436, 437, 439, 454. 476, 519, 524, 529, 537, 547, 548 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: birth 26, moves to Maine 29, prepares for college 35, enters Bowdoin 60, publishes Fan- shawe 86, first item in The Token 97, publishes Twice-Told Tales 109, measurer in Boston Custom House 131, meets Sophia Peabody 141, joins Brook Farm 170, marriage and re¬ moval to Old Manse 190, prepares for publication of Mosses from an Old Manse 241, appointed Surveyor at Salem Custom House 244, dismissed from Salem Custom House 270, writes The Scarlet Letter 270, removes to Lenox 297, writes The House of the Seven Gables and A Wonder-Book 332, moves to West Newton and writes The Blithedale Romance 353^ pur¬ chases “Wayside” 361, appointed Con¬ sul to Liverpool 376, residence in England 396, residence in Italy 449, publishes The Marble Faun 499, re¬ turns to America 516, death 528 Hawthorne, Rose, 298, 305, 307, 308, 332, 362, 436, 529, 545 Hawthorne, Sophia; See Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne. Una, 219, 227, 231, 240, 242, 245, 246, 254-256, 276, 300, 304-308, 319, 322, 330, 361-363. 423, 436, 438, 439, 454, 474, 475, 477, 499, 505, 522, 525, 529, 543, 548, 550 Haydon, Benjamin, R., 442-444 Hedge, Frederick, 145, 212 Herbert, George, 469 Heywood, Mr. & Mrs. J. P., 440 Hillard, George, 135, 136, 164, 170, 188, 204, 228, 249, 264, 265, 271, 272, 275, 287, 288, 309, 330, 529 Hoar, Judge Ebenezer, 529, 534 Hoar, Elizabeth, 145, 191, 200, 211, 214, 468 Hodges, Hannah, 348 Hogarth, William, 444 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 297, 310, 316, 318, 509, 522, 525, 529, 536, 538 Holyoke, Dr. Edward A., 9, 11 Homer. 124, 517 Hosmer, Edmund, 363 Hosmer, Harriet, 462 House of the Seven Gables, The, 19-20, 29, 40, 78, 86-89, 101, 127, 134, 137, 139, 147, 153, 178, 182-184, 229, 235, 246, 248, 251, 256, 273, 288, 308-310, 312, 314, 316, 324-325, 332, 335-338, 340-341, 343-346, 348, 350-357, 366- 368, 380, 382, 392-393, 416, 420, 446, 479, 509-510, 513-515, 530, 544, 546, 549-550, 559-560 Howard, John D., 242 Howes, Frederick, 246 Hume, David, 54, 65, 285 Hunt, Leigh, 423, 444, 467 Hunt, William Morris, 534 India, 7, 26 Ingersoll, Susanna Hathorne, 18, 347 Ingersoll, Susy, 19, 139, 202, 286, 344- 346 Ingram, Herbert, 423 Ireland, Alexander, 401 Irving, Washington, 34, 80-81, 278, 299 Isles of Shoals, 369-370, 372, 374 Italy, 150, 423, 426, 437, 447. 449-452, 455-456, 459, 461-462, 464, 475, 480, 482-484, 489, 494, 501, 503, 505, 509, 517, 560 Jackson, Andrew, 264, 429 Jamblicus, 10 James, G. P. R., 314-315, 317 James, Henry, 501 Jameson, Mrs. Anna, 462, 464-465, 489 Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 10-11, 13-14, 158 Jerrold, Ingles, 423 Johnson, Jerome, 250 Johnson, Samuel, 28, 411, 413, 440 Jones, Sir William, 10 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 54, 86-87, 284 Keats, John, 27, 560 Keepsake, 440 Kellogg, Gardiner, 72-73 Kemble, Fanny, 298, 313, 333 Keyes, John S., 534 Knickerbocker Magazine, 158 Lamb, Charles, 188 Lander, Louisa, 462, 506 Landor, Walter Savage, 212 Lane, Charles, 209, 212 Lathrop, George Parsons, 82 Lenox, Mass., 153, 277, 281, 298-300, 305- 306, 309-313, 315-319, 320-321, 326, 331, 333, 335-337, 339, 341, 354, 358-359, 380, 434, 461-462, 468, 479, 484, 510, 516, 524, 557 Leutze, Emanuel, 521 Lichfield Cathedral, 408, 413 Lincoln, Abraham, 367, 520, 546 Lind, Jenny, 423 Lindsey, Richard, 242 Literary World, 318-319, 322, 329 Liverpool, 29, 344, 367, 376, 378, 380, 397-398, 404, 409, 421. 425, 427-429, 432-433, 435, 437-438, 440-441, 538, 542 Locke, John, 10, 53 London, 386, 397, 410-411, 424-426, 430, 433, 438, 443, 451, 471 [ 575 ] Longfellow, Henry W., 44, 58, 68, 71, 78- 80, 85, 88, 90-91, 127, 133-141, 147, 157-159, 202, 204-205, 216, 237, 243, 249-251, 258, 268, 273-275, 293, 297- 299, 309-310, 313, 315, 328, 330-332, 339-340, 345, 360, 364, 370, 373, 375, 379, 401, 420, 423, 425, 428, 432, 434, 468, 516, 525-526, 529, 536, 538, 541, 559 Longfellow, Samuel, 379 Longfellow, Stephen, 71, 370 Longinus, 505 Long wharf, 160 Lowell, James Russell, 204-206, 226, 238, 271, 288, 309, 311-312, 364, 379, 529, 536, 538 Lyceum, Concord, 209 Lyceum, Salem, 247-248 Lyons Cathedral, 486 McClellan, General George B., 520 McIntyre, Samuel, 8, 12, 23, 243 Macaulay, Thomas B., 423 Mackay, Dr. Charles, 423 Maine, 12, 16, 19, 21, 30, 32-33, 36-37, 41, 48, 50, 56, 69, 90, 109, 111, 113, 141, 330, 401, 524-525, 541, 557 Mann, Horace, 149, 247, 252, 269, 335, 359 Manning, Mary, 40-41, 46, 75, 81 Manning, Richard, 29-31, 36, 38-40, 93 Manning, Richard, Sr., 21, 26, 29, 74, 93 Manning, Robert, 28, 35-36, 40-42, 59-60, 63, 69-70, 72, 77, 100, 104, 227, 284 Manning, Samuel, 94, 99-100, 136 Manning, William, 35, 60 -^Marble Faun, The, 88, 184, 186, 295, 340, 424, 430, 438, 448, 458-459, 462, 469-470, 474, 476, 481, 483, 496, 498, 500-501, 503-505, 508-515, 517, 530, 535, 537, 544, 559 Marblehead, Mass., 14, 519 Marine Society, 20 Mark Twain; See Clemens, S. L. Martha’s Vineyard, 99 Martineau, Harriet, 423 Martineau, James, 422 Mary and Eliza, 25 Mason, Alfred, 64-65 , 370 Vlather, Cotton, 4, 11, 87 Vlather, Nathaniel, 87, 149 Mather, Richard, 238 Mathews, Cornelius, 317-319 Maule, Thomas, 273 Mead, Parson, 55-56, 69, 369 Mellen, Frederic, 68, 370 Melville, Herman, 273, 297, 300, 317-331, 355, 373, 376, 415, 425, 427-428 Merchant of Venice, The, 75 Meredith, William, 264-267 Mexico, 20, 365 [ 576 ] Michelangelo, 444, 454, 473, 484, 487-489, 492, 515 Miller, Colonel, 309, 376 Miller, General, 277-278 Milnes, Monckton, 423, 465 Milton, John, 4, 10, 28-29, 33, 116, 144, 199, 214, 272, 355-356, 485, 505, 511, 515, 521 Miscellanies, 546 Moli&re, 10 Montaigne, 10 Moore, Thomas, 10 More Wonders of the Invisible World 11 Morton, Thomas, 11 Mosses from an Old Manse, 40, 48, 86-87, 94, 119-120, 124-126, 134, 182, 202, 225, 232-241, 247, 251, 256, 265, 268, 270, 272-274, 277, 284, 286-287, 315, 319, 322-324, 335, 341-342, 349, 351, 354, 359, 381, 383-384, 420, 439, 442, 469, 479, 504, 514, 523, 531, 540, 550- 551, 558, 560 Motley, John Lothrop, 469 Mullet, George, 242 Murillo, 444-445 New Brunswick, 159 Newcomb, Charles, 212-213 New England, 4, 7, 9, 13, 15, 51, 55, 68, 93, 115, 136-137, 150, 170, 183-185, 265, 286, 290, 292-293, 311, 359, 409, 434, 456, 468, 478, 528 New England Farmer, 104 New England Magazine, 102 New Hampshire, 30, 99-100, 110, 119, 242, 284, 321, 369, 530 Newman, Professor, 60, 65, 79, 92 New York, 17, 104, 148, 213, 231, 257, 265, 271, 319, 326, 377, 400, 523, 525, 539 Niagara, 99 North American Review, 127 Norton, Charles Eliot, 379, 529 Nova Scotia, 139, 257 Old Manse, 190-241, 248-249, 251, 253, 260, 268, 272, 277, 279, 288, 294, 298, 300-301, 311, 348, 351-352, 359-362, 364, 366, 381, 384, 427, 434, 460-461, 468, 480, 522, 526, 528-531, 540, 544, 556 Old South Church, 17 Oliver, Benjamin Lynde, 9, 35, 59-60, 76, 553 Ossian, 10 O’Sullivan, John, 130, 209, 216-217, 226, 231, 241, 265, 280, 311, 317, 377, 427, 435, 437 Our Old Home, 47, 202, 425, 525, 535, 539, 542, 547, 552 Packard, Professor Alpheus S., 369 Paine, Tom, 7, 10, 158 Paley, William, 53-54 Parker, Theodore, 247, 310, 364, 385, 392, 534 Pascal, Blaise, 54 Patmore, Coventry, 424 Peabody, Elizabeth, 110, 142, 144-150, 171, 199, 211, 274, 298, 308, 387 Peabody, Mrs. George, 2^ Peabody, Mary, 142, 149-151, 374, 385 Peabody, Dr. Nathaniel, 142, 145, 380, 549, 552 Peabody, Sophia, 88-89, 101-102, 126, 141- Raymond, Maine, 29, 32-37, 40-41, 45- 46, 50, 59-63, 67, 72, 74, 80, 90-91, 148, 203, 218, 222, 403 Read, Thomas Buchanan, 462, 495 Reade, Charles, 423 Register, Salem, 270 Reid, Sampson, 145 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 10 Reubens, Peter Paul, 493 Richardson, Samuel, 10 Ripley, George, 145, 168, 170-171, 174, 176, 212, 228 153, 157-158, 163, 165, 167, 170-176, 188, 190-191, 197-198, 200-233, 237, 240-255, 258, 268, 271-273, 276-277, 280, 282, 294, 300, 305-314, 319-320, 322, 331-342, 348, 350-352, 354, 363, 366, 370, 378-379, 383-390, 413- 417, 423-427, 431-439, 442, 447, 450, 453-454, 459, 461-463, 465, 467, 474- 476, 479, 483, 491, 495-500, 506, 509- 510, 522-531, 536, 539-540, 544-546, 549, 552, 559 Ripley, Rev. Dr. Samuel, 191, 197, 460 Roberts, David, 217, 244, 309 Rock Ferry, 399, 421, 435, 438 Rogers, Richard S., 268 361-.-JR,ome, 438, 450-464, 468-469, 475-480, 483-489, 494-496, 499, 501-502, 504- 505, 507-508, 515, 517, 543 Rousseau, 10, 54, 87, 125, 285 Ruskin, John, 446 Russwurm, John Brown, 67, 203 Ruysdael, 444 Peter, Hugh, 8, 19 Peter Parley, 94, 105-109 Petrarch, 450 Peucinian Society, 57, 369 Philadelphia, 80, 377, 525, 539, 545 Philippines, 7-8 Philosophical Society, 9 Pierce, Franklin, 47, 58, 64-67, 71, 75, 78, 110, 217, 231, 241-243, 309, 364-379, 393, 428, 475-476, 527-529, 535-536, 540- 543, 552, 561 Pike, William, 244, 309, 332-333, 376, 538 Pillsbury, Captain, 143 Pittsfield, Mass., 153, 157, 316-320, 322, 326, 415, 428 Plato, 10, 144, 214, 234, 238, 447, 505, 555, 558 Plotinus, 214 Plymouth, N. H., 528, 561 Poe, Edgar Allan, 64, 84, 226, 554 Polk, James, 230, 232, 242, 244 ^ Pope, Alexander, 10, 20, 28, 144, 411, 517 Salem, 3, 5-20, 23-29, 34, 40, 41, 44, 48, 51, 59-60, 63, 69, 74, 80, 82, 84-85, 87, 94-95, 99-104, 115, 127, 135, 137, 139, 144-145, 148, 150, 163, 166, 175, 185, 188, 200, 202, 217, 227, 230, 240-249, 256-257. 262-263, 270, 273-275, 278, 281, 284-285, 293, 300, 307, 309, 312, 332- 333, 336, 343-344, 346, 381, 383, 388, 411, 434, 439, 451, 456, 477, 482, 506. 519, 524, 546, 548-549, 552 Salem Gazette, 264, 268 Salem Neck, 17, 248, 343, 344 Salem Register, 270 Sawtelle, Cullen, 68, 90 Scarlet Letter, The, 10, 34, 38, 40, 47, 86-87, 89, 104, 127. 146, 183-186, 188, 238, 248, 251, 256, 273-274. 279-280, : 2g?-’5!96,'300, 311-316, 318, 322, 335-338, W, 353, 357, 368, 380-38J. 387, 392, 415-416, 432, 462. 610-514, 531 Schiller, 10, 145 Scott, Sir Walter, 41, 86, 212, 416-417, 438, 541, 544 Portland, Maine, 12, 30, 69, 80, 370 Portsmouth, N. H., 332, 370 Powers, Hiram, 471-475, 487-488, 493 536 Sebago Lake, 30-34, 37, 41, 104 Sedgwick, Catherine Maria, 297-298, 313 Sedgwick, Mr. & Mrs. Charles, 313-314, 317 Praxiteles, 497-498, 507 Prescott, Mrs. George, 217 Priestly, Joseph, 53, 108, 460 Prince, Rev. John, 8, 9 Proctor, B. W., 422 Provincial Tales, 98, 101 Pulpit Rock, 38 Quakers, 4, 5, 16, 22-23, 54, 260. 382, 456 Rabelais, 10 Raphael, 488, 491-493, 504 Sedgfwick, Henry, 317-318 Seven Tales of My Native Land, 82-83, 86, 93, 95-96, 98 Sewell, Judge Samuel, 17 Shakers, 99-100, 121, 212. 321 Shakespeare, William, 10, 28, 38, 88, 123, 144, 199, 218-219, 313, 323, 357, 395, 412-413, 423 Shelley, Percy B., 467 Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 246 Siena, 457, 469, 483, 485-486 Silsbee, Nathaniel, Jr., 267 [ 577 ] Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, 136, 192-193, 201-202, 212, 216, 218, 260, 316, 363, 529, 533 Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales, 48, 67, 81, 87, 89, 119-120, 121, 124, 156-157, 167, 180-182, 186, 214, 216, 225, 247, 274-276, 281, 284-286, 290, 295, 309, 321, 325, 335, 344, 348- 349, 357, 361, 366, 381, 386, 442, 542, 550 Socrates, 123, 144, 234, 403, 515 Sophocles, 288 Southern Literary Messenger, 338, 469 Southey, Robert, 10, 93, 151, 413-414 Spectator, 28, 45-49, 60, 69-70, 75-76, 81, 95, 102, 277 Spenser, Edmund, 27-28, 135, 144 Spinoza, 10 Squaw Sachem, 3 Steele, Richard, 28, 45 Sterne, Laurence, 10 Steubenville, Ohio, 100 Stewart, Dugald, 10, 53 Stockbridge, Mass., 153, 297, 299, 311, 311, 314, 317-318 Stoddard, R. H., 376 Story, William W., 423, 469-471, 485 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 406-408, 411, 444- 445, 460, 484 St. Peter’s Basilica, 451-452, 459, 463, 476, 484-485, 502 Story Teller, The, 102, 106 Stratford-on-Avon, 411, 417 Streets, Salem, 5, 7, 10, 12, 17, 19-21 26-28, 35, 45, 51, 92, 115, 127, 135, 139, 148-151, 163-164. 188, 200, 202, 240, 243, 245-248, 252, 254-260, 271, 273, 276, 343-346, 477, 506, 548, 552 Stroudwater, Maine, 33, 37, 141, 506 Sturgis, Caroline, 388 Sumner, Charles, 135-136, 243, 247, 309- 310, 330, 364, 376, 379, 468 Surinam, South America, 21 Swampscott, Mass., 99, 101-102, 142, 506 Symmes, William, 37, 68, 203 Tales and Sketches, 124-125, 149, 440, 514, 550, 553 Tanglewood Tales, 377 Tappan, Mr. & Mrs. William, 298-299, 312-313, 333 Taylor, General Zachary, 261-269, 285. 429 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 234, 247, 293, 422, 424 Thackeray, William M., 422, 527, 546 Thaxter, Levi & Celia, 370 Thessalonians, 5 Thomas, Judge B. F., 529 Thomas Pond, 30-31, 34, 37 Thompson, C. G., 10, 309, 462, 465, 507, 517 Thomson, James, 28 [ 575 ] Thoreau, Henry David, 10, 46, 208-213 232, 238, 247-248, 274, 293, 304, 310! 319, 330, 339, 360-364, 393-394, 403 461, 530-534, 538-539, 550 Ticknor, George, 264, 283 Ticknor, William D., 375-380, 431, 441 518, 520-521, 524-525, 538-539, 541, 545-546 Ticknor and Fields, 279, 335, 360, 439, 516, 518, 538 Ticonderoga, 99 Titian, 444, 488-490 Token, The, 83, 94, 96-98, 130-131, 188, 225, 278, 469, 559 Topsham, Maine, 51, 55 Trelawny, Edward, 467 Trench, “Uncle,” 347-348 Trollope, Anthony, 534 Tuckerman, Henry T., 338-339, 469 Tupper, M. F., 423 Turner, Joseph M., 444, 446 Twice-Told Tales, 7, 40, 78, 86, 90, 97-98, 101, 104, 109-111, 114-124, 127-134, 139, 141, 146-150, 166, 178-186, 190, 211-212 226, 228, 236, 239, 242, 265, 268, 285- 287, 293, 315, 321-324, 335, 339-342, 345, 351-352, 367, 381-382, 385, 392, 396, 415, 420, 427, 437. 442, 456, 503, 508, 510, 515, 528, 537, 542, 549-550, 556-559 Tyler, John, 230 Union wharf, 27, 257 Universal History, 106, 108, 188, 230, 340 Upham, Charles W., 227, 262-270, 275, 346-347 Upham, Thomas C., 85 U. S. Literary Gazette, 80 Velazquez, 444 “Venus de’ Medici,” 473, 487, 490-493, 560 Veronese, Paolo, 488 Very, Jones, 144 Voltaire, Francois, 10, 125, 285 Walden Pond, 193, 204, 209-212, 216, 260, 275, 361, 517. 530 Walton, Izaak, 10 Ward, Sam & Anna, 200-202, 298, 313, 364 Wardsworth’s, Tavern, 52, 69, 370 Washington, D. C., 231, 242, 265-268, 335, 377-378, 431, 519-521, 524, 529, 538, 542, 545-546 “Wayside,” 87, 361-364, 374, 376, 417, 434-436, 516-517, 530-531, 534, 536, 539-540, 544-545 , 550 AVebster, Daniel, 247, 265, 275, 312, 363, 472 West, Benjamin, 470 Westminster Abbey, 406-407, 425, 460 West Newton, Mass., 252, 307-308, 334, 359-360, 381 Whipple, E. P., 315-317, 338, 529 White, Enoch, 37 White, Joseph, 100, 346 Whitman, Walt, 48 White wharf, 15, 19 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 275 Wigglesworth, Michael, 6 Wiley and Putnam, 241, 247, 273 Williams, Roger, 4, 8, 23 Willis, N. P., 96-97, 110 Winthrop, John, 8, 16 Wonder-Booh, A, 106, 138, 309, 332, 335, 340, 364, 372-374, 484 Woodbury, Levi, 132 Woods, President Leonard, 369 Worcester, Joseph E., 28 Wordsworth, William, 32-33, 46, 48, 72, 118, 122, 144, 234, 299, 413-415, 438, 443, 510, 515 Wright, Henry, 212 Xenophon, 144, 238 Yale University, 94 York Cathedral, 408, 460, 484 Young, Edward, 10 Zimmerman, J. G., 46 E) ' •: % ■ -' ti ..^^H *'J','!r <^if'v-isr'.;rt^»:.iL% a’wi ■ 'n‘ *f >Hvwi* :^,->' ,{,„7 vW-'i iKfWr .fJrXri.^*^ ^ ' '•!^>.'i(»'t^'' hW ndnt .i j I > Mif••VI iti- . r? >rfllHl44. jl'^ ,{,^7 t -,.,-T-’ -NW^V/'i'-i-*#. » DUKE FACULTY CHARGE Perkins Circulation DUE DATE JUN 3 01992 Guaranteed use for two weeks only