NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE had not been one of the best story-tellers of modern times, he might have been the greatest American essayist. As it is, he has left only a few idyls to suggest what he might have done as an essayist, if he had loved to express his thoughts directly as well as he does to involve them in allegory. In the subtlety with which he conceals a deep allegorical meaning under what is seemingly a story told for its own sake, he often approaches the “Odyssey” itself, and perhaps among Moderns he is only approached by De la Motte Fouqué. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, July 4th, 1804. At Bowdoin College, where he was graduated in 1825, he had John S. C. Abbott and Longfellow for classmates. And in 1837, when his “Twice-Told Tales” appeared, Longfellow noticed them favorably in the North American Review. It was not until 1839, however, that Hawthorne’s genius was officially recognized by his appointment as “weigher and gauger” in the Federal customs service,—a position he owed to the good offices of the historian Bancroft, then collector of customs at Boston. From 1846 to 1850 Hawthorne was himself “surveyor of the port” of Salem, and during this period he found leisure to write “The Scarlet Letter,” an immortal work which if it be thus the result of the favoritism of President Polk for a fellow-Democrat, is the one result of his administration for which posterity will thank him more than for all the rest. In accounting for it, it is worth remembering that one of Hawthorne’s own ancestors was a Puritan magistrate, a witch-finder and a persecutor of Quakers. After taking up his residence in the “Manse” at Concord, Hawthorne enjoyed the friendship of Emerson and Thoreau, to whom, in nearly everything, he was as unlike as possible. He died—or perhaps we should say, his avatar ended—May 19th, 1864. His was a mind which took hold on the supernatural as part of its own essence. Among the story-tellers of all ages, no higher or sweeter soul has come on earth to give human nature assurance of its divine possibilities. It is the consciousness of such divinity which sounds in the minor chords of Hawthorne’s harmonies. His feeling for eternal things saddened him with the things of time, but his sadness is a manifestation of his highest hope,—a part of that pain which the genius of Edmund Burke has recognized as inevitably incident to consciousness of the sublime.