Born, in Salem, Mass., 4 July 1804. At school there. At Raymond, Maine, 1818–19. At Salem, 1819–21. Issued weekly paper, “The Spectator,” Aug. to Sept. 1820. To Bowdoin Coll., Brunswick, 1821; B.A., 1825. At Salem, engaged in literary pursuits, 1825–37. Contrib. to “The Token,” 1831–38; “New England Mag.,” 1834–35; “Knickerbocker,” 1837. Editor of “The American Mag. of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge,” 1836. Contrib. to the “Democratic Review,” 1838–46. Weigher and Gauger of Customs at Boston, 1839–41. Joined the “Arcadia” settlement at Brook Farm, April 1841. Married Sophia Amelia Peabody, July 9, 1842. Lived at the Old Manse, Concord, Mass., 1842–46. At Salem, as Surveyor of Customs, 1846–49. Removed to Lennox, Mass., 1850; to West Newton, near Boston, 1851; to Concord, 1852. American Consul at Liverpool, 1853–57; travelled on Continent, 1857–59; returned to America, 1860. Contrib. to “Atlantic Monthly,” 1860–64. Died, at Plymouth, N. H., 18 May, 1864. Buried at Concord. Works: “Fanshawe” (anon.), 1828; “Twice-Told Tales,” 1st series, 1837; 2nd series, 1842; “Grandfather’s Chair” (pt. i.), 1841; (“Famous Old People,” 1841, and “Liberty Tree,” 1842, extracted from preceding); “Biographical Stories for Children,” 1842; “Mosses from an Old Manse” (2 vols.), 1846; “The Scarlet Letter,” 1850; “The House of the Seven Gables,” 1851; “True Stories from History and Biography,” 1851; “The Wonder Book,” 1851; “The Snow Image, etc.,” 1851; “The Blithedale Romance,” 1852; “Life of Franklin Pierce,” 1852; “The Tanglewood Tales,” 1853; “A Rill from the Town Pump,” 1857; “The Marble Faun” (English edn. called “Transformation”), 1860; “Our Old Home,” 1863; “Pansie,” [1864]. Posthumous Works: “Tales” (2 vols.), 1866; “Passages from the American Note-books of Hawthorne,” 1868; “Passages from the English Note-books of Hawthorne,” 1870; “Passages from the French and Italian Note-books of Hawthorne,” 1871; “Septimus Felton,” 1872; “The Dolliver Romance,” 1876; “Tales of the White Hills,” 1877; “A Virtuoso’s Collection, etc.,” 1877; “Legends of New England,” 1877; “Legends of the Province House,” 1877; “Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret,” 1883; “Sketches and Studies,” 1883. He edited: H. Bridge’s “Journal of an African Cruiser,” 1865.

Personal

  I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place and to live and die as calm and tranquil as—a puddle of water. As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, then, seems to be “Hobson’s choice;” but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow-creatures. And it would weigh very heavily on my conscience, in the course of my practice, if I should chance to send any unlucky patient “ad inferum,” which being interpreted is, “to the realms below.” Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession! What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to the proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull. But authors are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. I am in the same predicament as the honest gentleman in “Espriella’s Letters,”

	“I am an Englishman, and naked I stand here,
	A-musing in my mind what garment I shall wear.”

	When nature was shaping him, clay was not granted
	For making so full-sized a man as she wanted,
	So, to fill out her model, a little she spared,
	From some finer-grained stuff for a woman prepared,
	And she could not have hit a more excellent plan
	For making him fully and perfectly man.

  And Hawthorne, too, I remember as one with whom I sauntered, in old heroic times, along the banks of the Scamander, amid the ruins of chariots and heroes. Tell him not to desert, even after the tenth year.

  The offices in Massachusetts have all gone most rigorously according to party service and party caste. Even Hawthorne, who never attended a political meeting or wrote a political article, has been ejected from his small retreat in the Salem custom house.

  During Hawthorne’s first year’s residence in Concord I had driven up with some friends to an æsthetic tea at Mr. Emerson’s. It was in the winter, and a great wood-fire blazed upon the hospitable hearth. There were various men and women of note assembled; and I, who listened attentively to all the fine things that was said, was for some time scarcely aware of a man who sat upon the edge of the circle, a little withdrawn, his head slightly thrown forward upon his breast, and his bright eyes clearly burning under his black brow. As I drifted down the stream of talk, this person, who sat silent as a shadow looked to me as Webster might have looked had he been a poet,—a kind of poetic Webster. He rose and walked to the window, and stood quietly there for a long time, watching the dead-white landscape. No appeal was made to him, nobody looked after him, the conversation flowed steadily on, as if everyone understood that his silence was to be respected. It was the same thing at table. In vain the silent man imbibed æsthetic tea. Whatever fancies it inspired did not flower at his lips. But there was a light in his eye which assured me that nothing was lost. So supreme was his silence, that it presently engrossed me, to the exclusion of everything else. There was very brilliant discourse, but this silence was much more poetic and fascinating. Fine things were said by the philosophers, but much finer things were implied by the dumbness of this gentleman with heavy brows and black hair. When he presently rose and went, Emerson, with the “slow, wise smile” that breaks over his face like day over the sky, said, “Hawthorne rides well his horse of the night.”

	Should you ask me, “Who is Hawthorne?
	Who this Hawthorne that you mention?”
	I should answer, I should tell you,
	“He’s a Yankee, who had written
	Many books you must have heard of;
	For he wrote ‘The Scarlet Letter’
	And ‘The House of Seven Gables,’
	Wrote, too, ‘Rappacini’s Daughter,’
	And a lot of other stories;—
	Some are long, and some are shorter;
	Some are good, and some are better.
	And this Hawthorne is a Consul,
	Sitting in a dismal office,—
	Dark and dirty, dingy office,
	Full of mates, and full of captains,
	Full of sailors and of niggers,—
	And he lords it over Yankees.”
	*        *        *        *        *
	Do you ask me, “Tell me further
	Of this Consul, of this Hawthorne?”
	I would say, “He is a sinner,—
	Reprobate and churchless sinner,—
	Never goes inside a chapel,
	Only sees outsides of chapels,
	Says his prayers without a chapel!
	I would say that he is lazy,
	Very lazy, good-for-nothing;
	Hardly ever goes to dinners,
	Never goes to balls or soirées;
	Thinks one friend worth twenty friendly;
	Cares for love, but not for liking;
	Hardly knows a dozen people.”

  The personal appearance and demeanor of these two gifted men, at the early period of which I speak, was also in striking contrast. Willis was slender, his hair sunny and silken, his cheek ruddy, his aspect cheerful and confident. He met society with a ready and welcome hand, and was received readily and with welcome. Hawthorne on the contrary, was of a rather sturdy form, his hair dark and bushy, his eye steel-gray, his brow thick, his mouth sarcastic, his complexion stony, his whole aspect cold, moody, distrustful. He stood aloof, and surveyed the world from shy and sheltered positions.

  I sent my letter at once; from all that I had heard of Mr. Hawthorne’s shyness, I thought it doubtful if he would call, and I was therefore very much pleased when his card was sent in this morning. Mr. Hawthorne was more chatty than I had expected, but not any more diffident. He remained about five minutes, during which time he took his hat from the table and put it back once a minute, brushing it each time. The engravings in the books are much like him. He is not handsome, but looks as the author of his books should look; a little strange and odd, as if not of this earth. He has large, bluish-gray eyes; his hair stands out on each side, so much so that one’s thoughts naturally turn to combs and hair-brushes and toilet ceremonies as one looks at him.

  Alas! it was no “author’s excuse” which was published in the Atlantic, but a most sad and serious truth. Mr. Hawthorne has really been very ill all winter, and not well, by any means, for a much longer time; not ill in bed, but miserable on a lounge or sofa, and quite unable to write a word, even a letter, and lately unable to read. I have felt the wildest anxiety about him, because he is a person who has been immaculately well all his life, and this illness has seemed to me an awful dream which could not be true. But he has wasted away very much, and the suns in his eyes are collapsed, and he has had no spirits, no appetite, and very little sleep. Richard was not himself, and his absolute repugnance to see a physician, or to have any scientific investigation of his indisposition, has weighed me down like a millstone. I have felt such a terrible oppression in thinking that all was not doing for his relief that might be done, that sometimes I have scarcely been able to endure it—at moments hardly able to fetch my breath in apprehension of the possible danger. But, thank Heaven, Mr. Ticknor has taken him out of this groove of existence, and intends to keep him away until he is better. He has been in New York at the Astor House since last Tuesday night, a week from to-day. I have had six letters, five from Mr. Ticknor, and one at last from my husband, written with a very tremulous hand, but with a cheerful spirit…. The state of our country has, doubtless, excessively depressed him. His busy imagination has woven all sorts of sad tissues. You know his indomitable, untamable spirit of independence and self-help. This makes the condition of an invalid peculiarly irksome to him. He is not a very manageable baby, because he has so long been a self-reliant man; but his innate sweetness serves him here, as in all things, and he is very patient and good.

  You will have seen, with profound sorrow the announcement of the death of the dearest and most cherished among our early friends…. He had been more or less infirm for more than a year. I had observed particularly within the last three or four months, evidences of diminished strength whenever we met. The journey, which was terminated by Mr. Ticknor’s sudden death at Philadelphia, was commenced at the urgent solicitation of friends, who thought change essential for him. Mr. Ticknor’s death would have been a great loss and serious shock to H. at any time, but the effect was undoubtedly aggravated by the suddenness of the event and H.’s enfeebled condition. About three weeks since I went to Concord (Mass.), and made arrangements to take a journey to the lakes, and thence up the Pemigewasset with my carriage, leaving time and details of the trip to be settled by circumstances en route…. We arrived at Plymouth about six o’clock. After taking a little tea and toast in his room, and sleeping for nearly an hour upon the sofa, he retired. A door opened from my room to his, and our beds were not more than five or six feet apart. I remained up an hour or two after he fell asleep. He was apparently less restless than the night before. The light was left burning in my room—the door open—and I could see him without moving from my bed. I went, however, between one and two o’clock to his bedside, and supposed him to be in a profound slumber. His eyes were closed, his position and face perfectly natural. His face was towards my bed. I awoke again between three and four o’clock, and was surprised—as he had generally been restless—to notice that his position was unchanged—exactly the same as it was two hours before. I went to his bedside, placed my hand upon his forehead and temple, and found that he was dead. He evidently had passed from natural sleep to sleep from which there is no waking, without suffering, and without the slightest movement.

  Late in the afternoon of the day before he left Boston on his last journey I called upon him at the hotel where he was staying. He had gone out but a moment before. Looking along the street, I saw a form at some distance in advance which could only be his,—but how changed from his former port and figure! There was no mistaking the long iron-gray locks, the carriage of the head, and the general look of the natural outlines and movement; but he seemed to have shrunken in all his dimensions, and faltered along with an uncertain, feeble step, as if every movement were an effort. I joined him, and we walked together half an hour, during which time I learned so much of his state of mind and body as could be got at without worrying him with suggestive questions,—my object being to form an opinion of his condition, as I had been requested to do, and to give him some hints that might be useful to him on his journey. His aspect, medically considered, was very unfavorable. There were persistent local symptoms, referred especially to the stomach,—“boring pain,” distension, difficult digestion, with great wasting of flesh and strength. He was very gentle, very willing to answer questions, very docile to such counsel as I offered him, but evidently had no hope of recovering his health. He spoke as if his work were done, and he should write no more. With all his obvious depression, there was no failing noticeable in his conversational powers. There was the same backwardness and hesitancy which in his best days it was hard for him to overcome, so that talking with him was almost like love-making, and his shy, beautiful soul had to be wooed from its bashful prudency like an unschooled maiden. The calm despondency with which he spoke about himself confirmed the unfavorable opinion suggested by his look and history.

	Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream
	Dimly my thought defines;
	I only see—a dream within a dream—
	The hill-top hearsed with pines.
	I only hear above his place of rest
	Their tender undertone,
	The infinite longings of a troubled breast,
	The voice so like his own.
	There in seclusion and remote from men
	The wizard hand lies cold,
	Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen,
	And left the tale half told.
	Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power,
	And the lost clew regain?
	The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower
	Unfinished must remain!

  Your father was lame a long time from an injury received while playing bat-and-ball. His foot pined away, and was considerably smaller than the other. He had every doctor that could be heard of; among the rest, your grandfather Peabody. But it was “Dr. Time” who at last cured him. I remember he used to lie upon the floor and read, and that he went upon two crutches. Everybody thought that, if he lived, he would be always lame. Mr. Joseph E. Worcester, the author of the “Dictionary,” who at one time taught a school, in Salem, to which your father went, was very kind to him; he came every evening to hear him repeat his lessons. It was during this long lameness that he acquired his habit of constant reading. Undoubtedly he would have wanted many of the qualities which distinguished him in after life, if his genius had not been thus shielded in childhood.

  This marked love of cases of conscience, this taciturn, scornful cast of mind; this habit of seeing sin everywhere, and hell always gaping open; this dusky gaze bent always upon a damned world, and a nature draped in mourning; these lonely conversations of the imagination with the conscience; this pitiless analysis resulting from a perpetual examination of one’s self, and from the tortures of a heart closed before men and open to God—all these elements of the Puritan character have passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or, to speak more justly, have filtered into him, through a long succession of generations.

  Hawthorne was of the darker temperament and tendencies. His sensitiveness and sadness were native, and he cultivated them apparently alike by solitude, the pursuits and studies in which he indulged, till he became almost fated to know gayer hours only by stealth. By disposition friendly, he seemed the victim of his temperament, as if he sought distance, if not his pen, to put himself in communication and possible sympathy with others, with his nearest friends even. His reserve and imprisonment were more distant and close, while the desire for conversation was livelier, than any one I have known. There was something of strangeness even in his cherished intimacies, as if he set himself afar from all and from himself with the rest. The most diffident of men, as coy as a maiden, he could only be won by some cunning artifice, his reserve was so habitual, his isolation so entire, the solitude so vast. How distant people were from him, the world they lived in, how he came to know so much about them, by what stratagem he got into his own house or left it, was a marvel. Fancy-fixed, he was not to be jostled from himself for a moment, his mood was so persistent. There he was in the twilight, there he stayed.

  No man had more of the feminine element than he. He was feminine in his quick perceptions, his fine insight, his sensibility to beauty, his delicate reserve, his purity of feeling. No man comprehended woman more perfectly; none has painted woman with a more exquisite and ethereal pencil. And his face was as mobile and rapid in its changes of expression as is the face of a young girl. His lip and cheek heralded the word before it was spoken. His eyes would darken visibly under the touch of a passing emotion, like the waters of a fountain ruffled by the breeze of summer.

  A most genial and original man, full of life, full of humour, in no respect shy. He agreed at once to pass a day with me. I gave him the option of a party or no party. He chose the latter alternative. A pleasanter day than the one in question is not in my “Golden” Book. I think I have never heard any one, save my honoured friend Carlyle, laugh so heartily as did Hawthorne. It is generally a nervous business to receive those to whom one has long looked up; but it was not the least so in his case. The impression I received was one of a man genial, and not over sensitive, even when we could make merry on the subject of national differences and susceptibilities.

  The rarest genius America has given to literature,—a man who lately sojourned in this busy world of ours, but during many years of his life

“Wandered lonely as a cloud,”—

a man who had, so to speak, a physical affinity with solitude…. His religion was deep and broad, but it was irksome for him to be fastened in by a pew-door, and I doubt if he heard often an English sermon. He very rarely described himself as inside a church, but he liked to wander among the graves in the churchyards and read the epitaphs on the moss-grown slabs. He liked better to meet and have a talk with the sexton than with the rector…. He was unlike any other author I have met, and there were qualities in his nature so sweet and commendable, that, through all his shy reserve, they sometimes asserted themselves in a marked and conspicuous manner. I have known rude people, who were jostling him in a crowd, give way at the sound of his low and almost irresolute voice, so potent was the gentle spell of command that seemed born of his genius.

  Hawthorne’s superb head was by all odds the finest in the room. He looked genial, and, mirabile dictu! appeared at his ease. To me, who had not seen him since he lived at Lenox, in Massachusetts, this transformation appeared marvelous. I sat down by his side, and he talked brilliantly for half an hour, without exhibiting any of the shyness which for years had made him a perfect recluse. It was said that he was still unapproachable in his Consulate at Liverpool, but he appeared completely humanized at Mrs. Hall’s.

  A simple stone, with the single word “Hawthorne” cut upon it, was placed above him. He had wished that there should be no monument. He liked Wordsworth’s grave at Grasmere, and had written: “It is pleasant to think and know that he did not care for a stately monument.” Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes, Emerson and Louis Agassiz, and his friends Pierce, and Hillard, with Ellery Channing, and other famous men, assembled on that peaceful morning to take their places in the funeral train…. The orchards were blossoming; the roadside-banks were blue with violets, and the lilies of the valley, which were Hawthorne’s favorites among the flowers, bad come forth in quiet companies to look their last on his face, so white and quiet too. So, while the batteries that had murdered him roared sullenly in the distant South, the rites of burial were fulfilled over the dead poet. Like a clear voice beside the grave, as we look back and listen, Longfellow’s simple penetrating chant returns upon the ear.

  The author’s college life was prophetic of the after years, when he so dwelt apart from the mass of men, and yet stirred so deeply the world’s sensibilities and delighted its fancy. His themes were written in the sustained, finished style that gives to his mature productions an inimitable charm. The late Professor Newman, his instructor in rhetoric, was so impressed with Hawthorne’s powers as a writer, that he, not infrequently, summoned the family circle to share in the enjoyment of reading his compositions. The recollection is very distinct of Hawthorne’s reluctant step and averted look, when he presented himself at the Professor’s study, and with girlish diffidence submitted a composition which no man in his class could equal.

  The beauty of his countenance was remarkable. Crayon portraits and photographs preserve the fine outline of his head and face, but fail to give his vivid coloring and varying expression. His eyes, fringed with dark lashes, gleamed like tremulous sapphires. Whenever their look encountered mine, they seemed to say: “This sensitive soul prays the world not to be rough or rude.”

  Colonel Higginson mentions Hawthorne’s gray eyes; while the present writer, who once studied them attentively, found them mottled gray and brown, and at that time indescribably soft and winning. That they were sometimes accipitral we can readily believe.

  That most lovable of writers was also—to those who knew him intimately—one of the most lovable of men. My acquaintance with him was slight; but it has left on my mind a vivid impression of his painful shyness in general society, and the retiring—nay, morbid delicacy—with which he shrank from notice, instead of courting, or rather commanding, it, as was the manner of his brother-novelist.

  She [Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne] believed in his inspiration; and her office was to promote, so far as in her lay, the favorableness of the conditions under which it should manifest itself. As food and repose nourish and refresh the body, so did she refresh and nourish her husband’s mind and heart. Her feminine intuition corresponded to his masculine insight; she felt the truth that he saw; and his recognition of this pure faculty in her, and his reverence for it, endowed his perception with that tender humanity in which otherwise it might have been deficient. Her lofty and assured ideals kept him to a belief in the reality and veracity of his own. In the warmth and light of such companionship as hers, he could not fall into the coldness and gloom of a selfish intellectual habit. She revived his confidence and courage by the touch of her gentle humor and cheerfulness; before her unshakable hopefulness and serenity, his constitutional tendency to ill-foreboding and discouragement vanished away. Nor was she of less value to him on the merely intellectual side. Her mental faculties were finely balanced and of great capacity; her taste was by nature highly refined, and was rendered exquisitely so by cultivation…. Mr. Hawthorne never was a teetotaler, any more than he was an abolitionist or a thug; but he was invariably temperate. During his lifetime he smoked something like half a dozen boxes of cigars, and drank as much wine and spirits as would naturally accompany that amount of tobacco. Months and sometimes years would pass without his either drinking or smoking at all; but when he would resume those practices, it was not to “make up for lost time,” his moderation was not influenced by his abstention. Though very tolerant of excesses in others, he never permitted them in himself; and his conduct in this respect was the result not more of moral prejudice than of temperamental aversion. He would have been sober if he had had no morality.

  May his memory be forever loved and honored, in the annals of this our country, for his goodness to Delia Bacon!

  There are few authors with whom the world is more intimate than the one supposed to have most shunned its intimacy. But Nathaniel Hawthorne, though his peculiar sensibility shrank from men, loved mankind, and described his earliest writings as “attempts to open an intercourse with the world.” In his works he has occasionally taken the world into his confidence in matters which most men of the world would veil—as in the opening chapter of “The Scarlet Letter.” Like his own Hilda, in “Transformation,” he was spiritually compelled to descend from his aërial hermitage, and unburden his heart in the world’s confessional.

  As the chairman of the Salem Lyceum, it was my privilege to entertain such men as R. W. Emerson, George W. Curtis and others. Thomas Starr King, when he lectured in Danvers, drove over to my house and spent the rest of the evening. Nathaniel Hawthorne I used to meet frequently on the street. I often saw Mrs. Hawthorne leading her children by the hand. Mr. Hawthorne, who was in Salem from 1846 to 1849, was remarkable for his shyness. His favorite companions were some Democratic politicians, who met weekly at the office of one of them, where he occupied himself in listening to their talk, but he avoided cultivated people. On one occasion a friend of mine asked us to meet him at dinner; twice he went to remind his guest of the engagement. The hour arrived, the dinner was kept waiting half an hour for Mr. Hawthorne to come. He said but little during the dinner, and immediately afterward got up and went away; his reluctance to meet people overcoming his sense of propriety.

  Hawthorne used to stay at Bixby’s. He was a moody man, who sat by the stove and spoke to no one.

  Hawthorne was a slender lad, having a massive head, with dark, brilliant, and most expressive eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a profusion of dark hair…. Hawthorne’s figure was somewhat singular, owing to his carrying his head a little on one side; but his walk was square and firm, and his manner self-respecting and reserved. A fashionable boy of the present day might have seen something to amuse him in the new student’s appearance; but had he indicated this he would have rued it, for Hawthorne’s clear appreciation of the social proprieties and his great physical courage would have made it as unsafe to treat him with discourtesy then as at any later time. Though quiet and most amiable, he had great pluck and determination.

  But I desire to speak of Nathaniel Hawthorne as I remember him about 1854, rather than presume to be his critic. In society he was one of the most painfully shy men I ever knew. I never had the privilege of an unbroken tête-à-tête with him, and am under the impression that with a single listener he must have been a very interesting talker; but in the small social circle in which I first met him—it was at the house of Mr. Bennoch to whom I have before alluded—it really seemed impossible to draw him out. We were only five or six intimate friends, sitting round the fire, and with a host remarkable for his geniality and tact; but Hawthorne fidgeted on the sofa, seemed really to have little to say, and almost resented the homage that was paid to him. Though I say this, my reverence for him and admiration of his genius remain unchanged, for the true man is in his works—there he reveals himself as the deep thinker, the true philosopher, the charitable sympathizer with his fellow-creatures—in short, the prose-poet.

  Abutting upon the back yard of Hawthorne’s birthplace is the old Manning homestead of his maternal ancestors, the home of his own youth and middle age and the theatre of his struggles and triumph. It is known as number twelve Herbert Street, and is a tall, unsightly, erratic fabric of wood, with nothing pleasing or gracious in its aspect or environment. The ugly and commonplace character of his surroundings here during half his life must have been peculiarly depressing to such a sensitive temperament as Hawthorne’s, and doubtless accounts for his mental habits. That he had no joyous memories of this old house his letters and journals abundantly show. Its interior arrangement has been somewhat changed to accommodate the several families of laborers who have since inhabited it, and one front room seems to have been used as a shop; but it is not difficult to identify the haunted chamber which was Hawthorne’s bed-room and study. This little, dark, dreary apartment under the eaves, with its multipaned window looking down into the room where he was born, is to us one of the most interesting of all the Hawthorne shrines. Here the magician kept his solitary vigil during the long period of his literary probation, shunning his family, declining all human sympathy and fellowship, for some time going abroad only after nightfall; here he studied, pondered, wrote, revised, destroyed, day after day as the slow months went by; and here, after ten years of working and waiting for the world to know him, he triumphantly recorded, “In this dismal chamber FAME was won.” Here he wrote “Twice-Told Tales” and many others, which were published in various periodicals, and here, after his residence at the old Manse,—for it was to this Manning house that he “always came back, like the bad halfpenny,” as he said,—he completed the “Mosses.” This old dwelling is one of the several which have been fixed upon as being the original “House of the Seven Gables,” despite the novelist’s averment that the Pyncheon mansion was “of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air.”

  If Thoreau was a recluse, Hawthorne was an anchorite. He brought up his children in such purity and simplicity as is scarcely credible,—not altogether a wise plan. It was said that he did not even take a daily paper. In the following year Martin F. Conway, the first United States representative from Kansas, went to Concord to call on Emerson, and Emerson invited Hawthorne to dine with them. Judge Conway afterwards remarked that Mr. Hawthorne said very little during the dinner, and whenever he spoke he blushed. Imagine a man five times as sensitive as a young lady in her first season, with the will of a Titan, and a mind like a crown-glass mirror, and you have Nathaniel Hawthorne. While he was in a state of observation, the expression of his face reflected everything that was going on about him; in his reflective moods, it was like looking in at the window of a dark room, or perhaps a picture-gallery; and if any accident disturbed him his look was something like a cracked pane of glass. Moreover there was something unearthly or superterrestrial about him, as if he had been born and brought up in the planet Saturn. Wherever he went he seemed to carry twilight with him. He walked in perfect silence, looking furtively about for fear he might meet some one that he knew. His large frame and strong physique ought to have lasted him till the year 1900. There would seem to be something strange and mysterious about his death, as there was in his life. His head was massive, and his face handsome without being attractive. The brow was finely chiseled, and the eyes beneath it were dark, luminous and fathomless. I never saw him smile, except slightly with his eyes.

  It seemed to me a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not omit to come in his very best black coat to the dinner-table, where the extremely prosaic fare had no effect upon the distinction of the meal. He hated failure, dependence, and disorder, broken rules and weariness of discipline, as he hated cowardice. I cannot express how brave he seemed to me. The last time I saw him, he was leaving the house to take the journey for his health which led suddenly to the next world. My mother was to go to the station with him,—and she who, at the moment when it was said that he died, staggered and groaned, though so far from him, telling us that something seemed to be sapping all her strength; I could hardly bear to let my eyes rest upon her shrunken, suffering form on this day of farewell. My father certainly knew, what she vaguely felt, that he would never return. Like a snow image of an unbending but an old, old man, he stood for a moment gazing at me. My mother sobbed, as she walked beside him to the carriage. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

  His son Julian, though eighteen years old when his father died, read none of Hawthorne’s books until after that time, and then could not understand how such a man as the father he had known was their author.

  I had the honor of meeting with the distinguished author for the first time…. The time was April of 1853; a journey southward had brought me to Willard’s Hotel in Washington. Hawthorne was a fellow-lodger, in company with his cheery publisher William D. Ticknor…. Mr. Hawthorne was then nearing fifty—strong, erect, broad-shouldered, alert—his abundant hair touched with gray, his features all cast in Greek mould and his fine eyes full of searchingness, and yet of kindliness; his voice deep, with a weighty resounding quality, as if bearing echoes of things unspoken; no arrogance, no assurance even, but rather there hung about his manner and his speech a cloud of self-distrust, of mal-aise, as if he were on the defensive in respect of his own quietudes, and determined to rest there. Withal, it was a winning shyness; and when—somewhat later—his jolly friend Ticknor tapped him on the shoulder, and told him how some lad wanted to be presented, there was something painful in the abashed manner with which the famous author waited a school-boy’s homage—cringing under such contact with conventional usage, as a school-girl might.

  The news of Mrs. Hawthorne’s death reminded me of a happy evening spent beneath the roof of that most gracious and lovable woman, at a time when for me to visit Hawthorne’s house was to make a pilgrimage to a shrine…. After her children had left us for the night, we sat and talked together; or rather I questioned and she answered, telling me of her husband’s home life and also of his intercourse with strangers; saying, what touched but did not surprise me, that men who had committed great crimes or whose memories held tragic secrets would sometimes write to him or would even come great distances to see him, and unburden their souls. This was after the publication of the “Scarlet Letter,” which made them regard him as the father-confessor for all hidden sins…. She said that it was not her husband’s custom to sit with her while he wrote, or to tell her about any literary work till it was finished, but that then he was always impatient to read it to her. In writing the “Wonder-Book,” to be sure, he liked to read his day’s work to the children in the evening, by way of test.

  The door was opened to my ring by a tall, handsome boy whom I suppose to have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many pictures of it. But Hawthorne’s look was different from that of any picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne…. In the face that confronted me there was nothing of keen alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth. Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have instantly felt him to be a personage…. My memory of him is without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life. In my heart I paid him the glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything, for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not the impression of having left in my debt.

  Proud was the day for Berkshire which added the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the roll of those who have caused the lustre of their achievement to shine resplendently upon the country they honored, and proud will be the day when the hallowed site of the red house by the lake where Hawthorne wrought some of his mightiest creations shall be appropriately marked with some memorial to this master workman.

Fanshawe, 1828

  “Fanshawe” is a work which derives its interest wholly from the author’s later masterpieces. It has the slightest possible plot, and the characters are imperfectly presented, the descriptions are commonplace to the verge of tameness, yet one who reads the story carefully will easily detect the weak and timid presence of all Hawthorne’s peculiar powers.

  “Fanshawe” was published in 1828 by Marsh and Capen, at Boston, without the author’s name but at his expense, one hundred dollars being the sum paid; it failed, and Hawthorne looked on it with so much subsequent displeasure that he called in all the copies he could find and destroyed them, and thus nearly succeeded in sinking the book in oblivion, but the few copies which survived secured its republication after his death. The novel is brief, with a melodramatic plot, well-marked scenes, and strongly contrasted character; the style flows on pleasantly; but the book is without distinction…. In fact, notwithstanding what Hawthorne had taken from his own observation and feelings, this provincial sketch, for it is no more, is a Scott story, done with a young man’s clever mastery of the manner, but weak internally in plot, character, and dramatic reality. It is as destitute of any brilliant markings of his genius as his undergraduate life itself had been, and is important only as showing the serious care with which he undertook the task of authorship.

Twice-Told Tales, 1837–42–52

  It is a singular fact that, of the few American writers by profession, one of the very best is a gentleman whose name has never yet been made public, though his writings are extensively and favorably known. We refer to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., of Salem, the author of the “Gentle Boy,” the “Gray Champion,” etc., etc., all productions of high merit, which have appeared in the annuals and magazines of the last three or four years. Liberally educated, but bred to no profession, he has devoted himself exclusively to literary pursuits, with an ardor and success which will, ere long, give him a high place among the scholars of this country. His style is classical and pure; his imagination exceedingly delicate and fanciful, and through all his writings there runs a vein of sweetest poetry. Perhaps we have no writer so deeply imbued with the early literature of America; or who can so well portray the times and manners of the Puritans.

  When a new star rises in the heavens, people gaze after it for a season with the naked eye, and with such telescopes as they may find. In the stream of thought, which flows so peacefully deep and clear, through the pages of this book, we see the bright reflection of a spiritual star, after which men will be fain to gaze “with the naked eye and with the spy-glasses of criticism.” This star is but newly risen; and ere long the observations of numerous star-gazers, perched up on arm-chairs and editors’ tables, will inform the world of its magnitude and its place in the heaven of poetry, whether it be in the paw of the Great Bear, or on the forehead of Pegasus, or on the strings of the Lyre, or in the wing of the Eagle. Our own observations are as follows. To this little work we would say, “Live ever, sweet, sweet book.” It comes from the hand of a man of genius. Everything about it has the freshness of morning and of May. These flowers and green leaves of poetry have not the dust of the highway upon them. They have been gathered fresh from the secret places of a peaceful and gentle heart. There flow deep waters, silent, calm, and cool; and the green trees look into them, and “God’s blue heaven.” The book, though in prose, is written nevertheless by a poet. He looks upon all things in the spirit of love, and with lively sympathies; for to him external form is but the representation of internal being, all things having a life, an end and aim.

  Of Mr. Hawthorne’s “Tales” we would say, emphatically, that they belong to the highest region of Art—an Art subservient to genius of a very lofty order.

  From the press of Munroe & Co., Boston, in the year 1837, appeared “Twice-Told Tales.” Though not widely successful in their day and generation, they had the effect of making me known in my own immediate vicinity; insomuch that, however reluctantly, I was compelled to come out of my owl’s nest and lionize in a small way. Thus I was gradually drawn somewhat into the world, and became pretty much like other people. My long seclusion had not made me melancholy or misanthropic, nor wholly unfitted for the bustle of life; and perhaps it was the kind of discipline which my idiosyncrasy demanded, and chance and my own instincts, operating together, had caused me to do what was fittest.

  First, then, on this special shelf stand Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales.” It is difficult to explain why I like these short sketches and essays, written in the author’s early youth, better than his later, more finished, and better-known novels and romances. The world sets greater store by “The Scarlet Letter” and “Transformation” than by this little book—and, in such matters of liking against the judgment of the world, there is no appeal. I think the reason of my liking consists in this—that the novels were written for the world, while the tales seem written for the author; in these he is actor and audience in one. Consequently, one gets nearer him, just as one gets nearer an artist in his first sketch than in his finished picture.

  His bitterness is without abatement, and his bad opinion of man is without compensation…. His little tales have the air of confessions which the soul makes to itself, they are so many little slaps which the author applies to our face.

  There is a propriety in Hawthorne’s fantasy to which Poe could not attain. Hawthorne’s effects are moral where Poe’s are merely physical. The situation and its logical development and the effects to be got out of it are all Poe thinks of. In Hawthorne the situation, however strange and weird, is only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual struggle. Ethical consequences are always worrying Hawthorne’s soul; but Poe did not know that there were any ethics.

Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846

  Hawthorne walked with me yesterday afternoon, and not until after our return did I read his “Celestial Railroad,” which has a serene strength which we cannot afford not to praise, in this low life.

  In description, narration, allegory, humor, reason, fancy, subtlety, inventiveness, they exceed the best productions of Addison; but they want Addison’s sensuous contentment, and sweet and kindly spirit.

  Such concentration of frightful truth do these most graceful and exquisitely-wrought creations contain, that the intensity becomes almost poisonous.

  The truth of these sketches is their prime quality, for Hawthorne wrote them with the familiar affection and home-attachment of one who had fleeted the golden time of his youth amid these scenes of common day, and prolonged it far into manhood, and should never quite lose its glow of mere existence, its kindliness for humble things, its generous leisure for the perishable beauty of nature dotted here and there with human life.

The Scarlet Letter, 1850

  We are glad that “The Scarlet Letter” is, after all, little more than an experiment and need not be regarded as a step necessarily fatal. It is an attempt to rise from the composition of petty tales, to the historical novel; and we use the expression an attempt, with no disparaging significance, for it is confessedly a trial of strength only just beyond some former efforts, and was designed as part of a series. It may properly be called a novel, because it has all the ground-work, and might have been very easily elaborated into the details, usually included in the term; and we call it historical, because its scene-painting is in a great degree true to a period of our Colonial history, which ought to be more fully delineated. We wish Mr. Hawthorne would devote the powers which he only partly discloses in this book, to a large and truthful portraiture of that period, with the patriotic purpose of making us better acquainted with the stern old worthies, and all the dramatis personæ of those times, with their yet surviving habits, recollections, and yearnings, derived from maternal England.

  The frivolous costume and brisk action of the story of fashionable life are easily depicted by the practised sketcher, but a work like “The Scarlet Letter” comes slowly upon the canvas, where passions are commingled and overlaid with the masterly elaboration with which the grandest effects are produced in pictorial composition and coloring. It is a distinction of such works that while they are acceptable to the many, they also surprise and delight the few who appreciate the nicest arrangement and the most high and careful finish. “The Scarlet Letter” will challenge consideration in the name of Art, in the best audience which in any age receives Cervantes, Le Sage, or Scott.

  These excellent writers have been long before the public; but a new star has lately sprung into light in the Western horizon, who in a totally different manner—and nothing is more remarkable among all these American novelists than their utter difference from each other—will hardly fail to cast a bright illumination over both hemispheres. It is hardly two years since Mr. Hawthorne until then known only by one or two of those little volumes which the sagacious hold as promise of future excellence, put forth that singular book, “The Scarlet Letter,” àpropos to which, Dr. Holmes, who so well knows the value of words, uses this significant expression:

	I snatch the book, along whose burning leaves
	His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves.

And it is the very word. We do snatch the book; and, until we have got to the end, very few of us, I apprehend, have sufficient strength of will to lay it down…. Detestable as the husband is and with all the passionate truth that Mr. Hawthorne has thrown into the long agony of the seducer, we never, in our pity for the sufferer, lose our abhorrence of the sin.

  It is admirably written. Not having any great sympathy with a custom-house—nor, indeed, with Salem, except that it seems to be Hawthorne’s birth-place—all my attention was concentrated on the style, which seems to me excellent.

  With all the care in point of style and authenticity which mark his lighter sketches, this genuine and unique romance may be considered as an artistic exposition of Puritanism as modified by New England colonial life. In truth to costume, local manners, and scenic features, the “Scarlet Letter” is as reliable as the best of Scott’s novels; in the anatomy of human passion and consciousness it resembles the most effective of Balzac’s illustrations of Parisian or provincial life; while in developing bravely and justly the sentimental of the life it depicts, it is as true to humanity as Dickens.

  It presents more vividly than any history the gloomy picturesqueness of early New England life. There is no stain in our literature so characteristic or more real than that which Hawthorne has successfully attempted in several of his earlier sketches, and of which “The Scarlet Letter” is the great triumph. It became immediately popular, and directly placed the writer of stories for a small circle among the world’s masters of romance.

  Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions, when I read the last scene of “The Scarlet Letter” to my wife just after writing it,—tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion, while writing it, for many months. I think I have never overcome my own adamant in any other instance.

  There is something extraordinarily fascinating in this book; we read on even while we shrink from it. The mystery of the poor woman, Hester Prynne,—she who wears the badge of disgrace,—stands prominent in every page; in strange contrast with her elfin child, little Pearl. We hang over that remarkable scene between the faithless priest and the guilty woman in the deep shadow of the primeval forest,—while the mysterious child plays near at hand by the brookside, with a deeply-riveted interest. Then, that picture of the wronged husband, silently pursuing his revenge,—how terrible it is! Yet, harrowing though the subject be, there is nothing prurient or feverish about it. The whole story is told with a simple power. The work is pure, severe, and truthful; and it holds every reader in thrall until the end of the dark story is reached.

  It may be said that it “captivated” nobody, but took everybody captive. Its power could neither be denied nor resisted. There were growls of disapprobation from novel-readers, that Hester Prynne and the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale were subjected to cruel punishments unknown to the jurisprudence of fiction,—that the author was an inquisitor who put his victims on the rack,—and that neither amusement nor delight resulted from seeing the contortions and hearing the groans of these martyrs of sin; but the fact was no less plain that Hawthorne had for once compelled the most superficial lovers of romance to submit themselves to the magic of his genius.

  I believe and am sure that “The Scarlet Letter” will endure as long as the language in which it is written; and should that language become dead, the wonderful work will be translated. Mr. S. C. Hall says I am to tell you that your works will live when marble crumbles into dust. I can well understand that even genius stands breathless in silence, watching events; still, master you must send us forth some fresh enchantment ere long, though you have done so much. Forgive my freedom, dear Mr. Hawthorne, and imagine me the reader you speak of in the preface to “Transformation.”

  We behold in it the greatest embodiment of remorse ever achieved. Terrible in its gloom, the spirit of the reader asks again and again for some relief. Even the writer of it had experienced the same feeling, but found it impossible to relieve the shadow of the story with so much light as he would gladly have thrown in.

  “The Scarlet Letter” is, on the English side of the water, perhaps the best known. It is so terrible in its pictures of diseased human nature as to produce most questionable delight. The reader’s interest never flags for a moment. There is nothing of episode or digression. The author is always telling his one story with a concentration of energy which, as we can understand, must have made it impossible for him to deviate. The reader will certainly go on with it to the end very quickly, entranced, excited, shuddering, and at times almost wretched.

  It is densely dark, with a single spot of vivid color in it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy of English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the author’s masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue to be, for other generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame…. The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element—of a certain superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged, of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move.

  In the concluding chapter of this, the most profound, the boldest, the most riveting analytical romance of our tongue, in our century—followed, I think, at an interval by “Wuthering Heights,” and by “Silas Marner”—the author goes farther, and trenches on the ground of George Sand’s “Lelia” and Goethe’s “Elective Affinities.”

  As a mere story, it is not altogether cheerful reading; a nameless feeling of melancholy, an indefinable foreboding, a consciousness of supernatural influence, seems to follow us—we cannot explain why—from the very beginning. But we would search long ere we should find a story constructed with more artistic skill, with purer graces of style, more refined in sentiment, superior in characterization and delicate psychological insight. It is the book for the student, the thinker, the artist; but to the superficial novel reader whose reading is merely for amusement it will be a disappointment.

  It will rank as one of those great creations of pure art that hover on the borderland between the natural and the supernatural, like the Caliban or Ariel, or Coleridge’s Geraldine.

  Most perfect and finished as works of Art are the novels of the late Nathaniel Hawthorne, most finished of all “The Scarlet Letter,” an effusion of terrible and stupefying gloom, but wonderfully finely wrought. If Victor Hugo had been fettered by an art as rigid as that of Hawthorne, and had restricted his canvas accordingly, he would have escaped all those mad splashes of the brush which disfigure his best painting. Confined to the compass of the “Scarlet Letter,” “Les Travailleurs de la Mer” would have been double its present value.

  “The Scarlet Letter” is beyond doubt the foremost story yet written on this continent, and the fact that it holds the third place in this long list is both suggestive and encouraging. “The Marble Faun” follows close upon its greater companion; for, however fascinating the later book in its subtle psychologic insight and however beautiful its art, it remains true that the earlier story surpasses it in closeness of construction and in depth and intensity of human interest. That a book of such quality finds so wide a reading shows that the finest art does not fail to charm when it allies itself with the deepest life.

  “The Scarlet Letter,” a work of far grander aim and profounder intensity of genius than any other of Hawthorne’s romances—a work, indeed, which, if not the most artistic outcome of his powers, is supremely beautiful, daring, and original in conception, and finished in workmanship. The little group of figures—a group worthy to have been portrayed by the powerful and discerning art of Rembrandt—in whom the interest of the story centres, are conceived with consummate vigour, delicacy, and imaginative suggestiveness.

  A bit of New England history is brought before us with a dramatic impressiveness that has rarely, if ever, been rivalled; and the power, the mystery, the deathless judicial zeal which are inseparable attributes of the human conscience, imprint themselves upon our senses in lines that affright and agonise like fire.

  No reader can have felt imaginatively the passionate spiritual struggles of Arthur Dimmesdale without being thereafter more sensitive to good influences and less tolerant of self-deception and concealed sin.

  The novel of the “Scarlet Letter” is one of the links in the development of the novel from a means of portraying single phases of emotion to a vehicle of highest expressional power. It was written by a psychological student of the problems which harass the human soul…. It is a tragedy—a tragedy sombre, intense, unrelieved. It is almost a fatalistic tragedy; almost as stern as if it had been written by Æschylus. It is not a love story; it is not a story of youth; it is not a story of contemporaneous life; it is not a story of eager hope…. The “Scarlet Letter” is not alone an interpretation of personality. It is the first suggestion and forerunner of the Novel of Purpose and of the Novel of Problem. It is the convincing proof of the greatness of the art of Hawthorne that the “Scarlet Letter” is thus at once a presentation and a prophecy.

  Consider for a moment “The Scarlet Letter;” the pathos of the subject, and the tragic scenes portrayed. All the world agrees that here is a masterpiece of mortal terror and remorse; we are lost in the admiration of the author’s insight into the suffering human heart; yet has any one ever shed a tear over that inimitable romance? I think not. The book does not move us to tears; it awakens no sense of shuddering awe such as follows the perusal of the great tragedies of literature; it is not emotional, in the ordinary acceptance of the word, yet shallow or cold it certainly is not…. Why, then, we ask, should we have tears ready for “The Newcomes,” and none for “The Scarlet Letter,” although the pathos of the latter tale can so stir the depths of our nature as it did the author’s? What curious trait in his writing, what strange attitude of the man toward the moral struggles and agony of human nature is this that sets him apart from other novelists?

  From the first there is no affectation of shadowy uncertainty in the setting of the great tragedy of “The Scarlet Letter.” As nearly as can be, the scenes of the several events are ascertained, and are identified with places in actual Boston. With a like inward sense of strong reality in his material, and perhaps compelled to its expression by that force in the concept, each detail of the drama, in motive, action, and character, is substantiated, so that from first to last it is visible, audible, tangible. From Hester Prynne in her prison—before she goes out to stand with her unlawful child in her arms and the scarlet letter on her breast before the Puritan magistracy and ministry and people, and be charged by the child’s own father, as her pastor, to give him up to like ignominy—to Hester Prynne, kneeling over her dying paramour, on the scaffold, and mutely helping him to own his sin before all that terrible little world, there is the same strong truth beating with equal pulse from the core of the central reality, and clothing all its manifestations in the forms of credible, of indisputable personality. In its kind the romance remains sole, and it is hard to see how it shall be surpassed, or even companioned.

  “The Scarlet Letter” is a great and unique romance, standing apart by itself in fiction; there is nothing else quite like it. Of all Hawthorne’s works it is most identified with his genius in popular regard, and it has the peculiar power that is apt to invest the first work of an author in which his originality finds complete artistic expression. It is seldom that one can observe so plainly the different elements that are primary in a writer’s endowment coalesce in the fully developed work of genius; yet in this romance there is nothing either in method or perception which is not to be found in the earlier tales; what distinguishes it is the union of art and intuition as they had grown up in Hawthorne’s practice and had developed a power to penetrate more deeply into life.

  The appearance of the “Scarlet Letter” is probably, then, the largest event thus far in American literature. Here, for the first time, a life, or a group of intertwined lives, is revealed, with entrancing skill, in an environment and with an atmosphere all the artist’s own, yet impressing us as ideally true to human nature.

The House of the Seven Gables, 1851

  “The House of the Seven Gables” was finished yesterday. Mr. Hawthorne read me the close last evening. There is unspeakable grace and beauty in the conclusion, throwing back upon the sterner tragedy of the commencement an ethereal light, and a dear home-loveliness and satisfaction. How you will enjoy the book,—its depth of wisdom, its high tone, the flowers of Paradise scattered over all the dark places, the sweet wall-flower scent of Phœbe’s character, the wonderful pathos and charm of old Uncle Venner. I only wish you could have heard the Poet sing his own song, as I did; but yet the book needs no adventitious aid,—it makes its own music, for I read it all over again to myself yesterday, except the last three chapters.

  The “House of the Seven Gables” in my opinion, is better than “The Scarlet Letter;” but I should not wonder if I had refined upon the principal character a little too much for popular appreciation; nor if the romance of the book should be found somewhat at odds with the humble and familiar scenery in which I invest it. But I feel that portions of it are as good as anything I can hope to write, and the publisher speaks encouragingly of its success.

  I think we have no romancer but yourself, nor have had any for this long time. I had become so set in this feeling, that but for your last two stories I should have given up hoping, and believed that all we were to look for in the way of spontaneous growth were such languid, lifeless, sexless creations as in the view of certain people constitute the chief triumphs of a sister art as manifested among us. But there is rich blood in Hester, and the flavor of the sweet-fern and the bayberry are not truer to the soil than the native sweetness of our little Phœbe! The Yankee mind has for the most part budded and flowered in pots of English earth, but you have fairly raised yours as a seedling in the natural soil.

  I have been so delighted with “The House of the Seven Gables” that I cannot help sitting down to tell you so. I thought I could not forgive you if you wrote anything better than “The Scarlet Letter;” but I cannot help believing it a great triumph that you should have been able to deepen and widen the impression made by such a book as that. It seems to me that the “House” is the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made. It is with the highest art that you have typified (in the revived likeness of Judge Pyncheon to his ancestor the Colonel) that intimate relationship between the Present and the Past in the way of ancestry and descent, which historians so carefully overlook.

  The contents of this book do not belie its clustering romantic title. With great enjoyment we spent almost an hour in each separate gable. This book is like a fine old chamber, abundantly but still judiciously furnished with precisely that sort of furniture best fitted to furnish it. There are rich hangings, whereon are braided scenes from tragedies. There is old china with rare devices, set about on the carved beaufet; there are long and indolent lounges to throw yourself upon; there is an admirable sideboard, plentifully stored with good viands; there is a smell of old wine in the pantry; and finally, in one corner, there is a dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps, entitled “Hawthorne: A Problem.”

  It is not less original, not less striking, not less powerful, than the “Scarlet Letter.” We doubt indeed whether he has elsewhere surpassed either of the three strongly-contrasted characters of the book…. The “House of Seven Gables” is the purest piece of imagination in our prose literature.

  Accept my most cordial thanks for the little volume you have had the kindness to send me. I prize it as the right hand of fellowship extended to me by one whose friendship I am proud and happy to make, and whose writings I have regarded with admiration as among the very best that have ever issued from the American press.

  The scenery, tone, and personages of the story are imbued with a local authenticity which is not for an instant impaired by the imaginative charm of romance. We seem to breathe, as we read, the air, and be surrounded by familiar objects, of a New England town…. We may add that the same pure, even, unexaggerated, and perspicuous style of diction that we have recognised in his previous writings is maintained in this.

  No one should read the “House of Seven Gables” for the sake of the story, or neglect to read it because of such faults as I have described. It is for the humor, the satire, and what I may perhaps call the philosophy which permeates it, that its pages should be turned. Its pages may be turned on any day and under any circumstances. To “The Scarlet Letter” you have got to adhere till you have done with it; but you take this volume by bits, here and there, now and again, just as you like it. There is a description of a few poultry, melancholy unproductive birds, running over four or five pages, and written as no one but Hawthorne could have written it. There are a dozen pages or more in which the author pretends to ask why the busy Judge does not move from his chair,—the Judge the while having dree’d his doom and died as he sat. There is a ghastly spirit of drollery about this which would put the reader into full communion with Hawthorne if he had not read a page before, and did not intend to read a page after. To those who can make literary food of such passages as these, “The House of the Seven Gables” may be recommended. To others it will be caviare.

  The fun has gone out of “Vanity Fair,” and the “House of the Seven Gables” is a hotel with seven hundred beds.

  In “The House of Seven Gables” the problem of heredity is dealt with. The predisposition to mysterious and fatal disease, the passionate championship of a wrong cause, and the curse cleaving to ill-gotten possessions may be handed on to succeeding generations, just as obviously as ancestral lineaments; and the entail of the curse can be cut off only by the reconciliation of those who have inherited, as disastrous heirlooms, the grudges and grievances of their forefathers.

  If there are probably no four books of any author among which, for a favorite, readers hesitate longer than between Hawthorne’s four longest stories, there are at any rate many for whom this remains distinctly his largest and fullest production. Suffused as it is with a pleasant autumnal haze, it yet brushes more closely than its companions the surface of American life, comes a trifle nearer to being a novel of manners. The manners it shows us indeed are all interfused with the author’s special tone, seen in a slanting afternoon light; but detail and illustration are sufficiently copious; and I am tempted for my own part to pronounce the book, taking subject and treatment together, and in spite of the position as a more concentrated classic enjoyed by “The Scarlet Letter,” the closest approach we are likely to have to the great work of fiction, so often called for, that is to do us nationally most honor and most good…. “The House of the Seven Gables,” I may add, contains in the rich portrait of Judge Pyncheon a character more solidly suggested than—with the possible exception of the Zenobia of “The Blithedale Romance”—any other figure in the author’s list.

  If not his best book (as the author thought it in his serener moods), it is certainly next best. If Dante had ever told a story of the crime and mysteries which saturated some old country house upon the Euganean hills, I think it would have had much of the color, and much of the high, fierce lights which blaze about the gables of the Pyncheons! Yet it is all his own;—change as his theme may, the author is redolent everywhere of his own clean and complete self-hood; he is not like the rare Stevenson of our day, on whose close-thumbed pages we encounter—now, Defoe with his delicious particularity and naïveté—now, find him egotizing, as does Montaigne, or lapsing into such placid humors as embalm the periods of Lamb; or, yet again, catching in smart grip the trumpet of some old glorified Romancer, and summoning his knights (who are more than toy-knights) to file down once more from their old mediæval heights upon the dusty plains of to-day. No such golden memorial-trail enwraps the books of the Master of Puritan Romance; but, always the severe, unshaken, individual note was uppermost.

  There is, of course, a choice in Hawthorne’s romances, and I myself prefer “The Blithedale Romance” and “The Scarlet Letter” to “The Marble Faun,” and “The House of the Seven Gables.” The last, indeed, I have found as nearly tiresome as I could find anything of Hawthorne’s. I do not think it is censuring it unjustly to say that it seems the expansion of a short story motive to the dimensions of a novel; and the slight narrative in which the concept is nursed with whimsical pathos to the limp end, appears sometimes to falter, and alarms the sympathetic reader at other times with the fear of an absolute lapse. The characters all lack the vitality which the author gives the people of his other books…. Hawthorne could not help giving form to his work, but as nearly as any work of his could be so “The House of the Seven Gables” is straggling. There is at any rate no great womanly presence to pull it powerfully together, and hold it in the beautiful unity characteristic of “The Blithedale Romance” and “The Scarlet Letter.”

The Blithedale Romance, 1852

  It is enough for me that you have put another rose into your chaplet, and I will not ask whether it outblooms or outswells its sister flowers. Zenobia is a splendid creature, and I wish there were more such rich and ripe women about. I wish, too, you could have wound up your story without killing her, or that at least you had given her a drier and handsomer death. Priscilla is an exquisite sketch. I don’t know whether you have quite explained Hollingsworth’s power over two such diverse natures. Your views about reform and reformers and spiritual rappings are such as I heartily approve. Reformers need the enchantment of distance. Your sketches of things visible, detached observations, and style generally, are exquisite as ever. May you live a thousand years, and write a book every year!

  “The Blithedale Romance” is a work of no ordinary power, and indicative of all its author’s mental affluence. In character-painting, he has overtaken his highest previous skill in Hollingsworth, and exceeded it in Zenobia. Then, of lesser personages, who could fail to recognise, in Silas Foster, the agricultural foreman of the farm, a marvellously accurate type of the New England yeoman of the generation just now passing the meridian of manhood? The descriptions of the kitchen, the table, the style of dress, the manner of labor, and the Sunday habits of the Blithedale community, attractive as they are in themselves, are doubly so, as being beyond a question the portions in which observation and experience, rather than fancy, furnished the material for the narrative.

  I should be ashamed to tell you how often I have read “The Marble Faun,” or “The Blithedale Romance.” The latter is, I think, of all your pieces the one I like best.

  Contrary, perhaps, to the general verdict we are almost impelled to the conclusion that the most perfect work left by Hawthorne is the “Blithedale Romance.”… As regards composition alone, it may be pronounced a perfect work. The masterpiece of Oliver Goldsmith is brought to mind whilst reading it, though the two novels differ in most respects as widely as possible. In each, however, there is a charming style, whose easy flow has never been excelled, while in Hawthorne’s story there is a poetic beauty which is not to be found in the “Vicar of Wakefield.” The drawing of character is also very satisfactory. The dramatis personæ are few in number, but all are realized with extraordinary vividness.

  The special characteristic of “The Blithedale Romance” seems to me to be its appearance of unlabored ease, and a consequent breeziness of effect distinguishing its atmosphere from that of any of the other romances. The style is admirably finished, and yet there is no part of the book that gives the same impression of almost unnecessary polish which occasionally intervenes between one’s admiration and the “Seven Gables.” On this score, “Blithedale” is certainly the most consummate of the four completed romances.

  The book, indeed, is a mixture of elements, and it leaves in the memory an impression analogous to that of an April day—an alternation of brightness and shadow, of broken sun-patches and sprinkling clouds.

Marble Faun, or Transformation, 1860

  I’ve finished the book, and am, I think, more angry at your tantalizing cruelty than either “Athenæum” or “Saturday Review.” I want to know a hundred things you do not tell me,—who Miriam was, what was the crime in which she was concerned and of which all Europe knew, what was in the packet, what became of Hilda, whether Miriam married Donatello, whether Donatello got his head cut off, etc. Of course you’ll say I ought to guess; well, if I do guess, it is but a guess, and I want to know. Yesterday I wrote a review of you in the “Examiner,” and in spite of my natural indignation, I hope you will not altogether dislike what I have said. In other respects I admire “Monte Beni” more than I can tell you; and I suppose no one now will visit Rome without a copy of it in his hand. Nowhere are descriptions to be found so beautiful, so true, and so pathetic. And there are little bits of you in the book which are best of all,—half moralizing, half thinking aloud. There is a bit about women sewing which Harriet raves about. There are bits about Catholicism and love and sin, which are marvellously thought and gloriously written.

  Smith and Elder certainly do take strange liberties with the titles of books. I wanted to call it “The Marble Faun,” but they insisted upon “Transformation,” which will lead the reader to anticipate a sort of pantomime. They wrote some days ago that the edition was nearly all sold, and that they were going to print another; to which I mean to append a few pages, in the shape of a conversation between Kenyon, Hilda, and the author, throwing some further light on matters which seem to have been left too much in the dark. For my own part, however, I should prefer the book as it now stands.

  The style of the book is perfect of its kind, and, if Hawthorne had written nothing else, would entitle him to rank among the great masters of English composition…. Hawthorne not only writes English, but the sweetest, simplest, and clearest English that ever has been made the vehicle of equal depth, variety, and subtility of thought and emotion. His mind is reflected in his style, as a face is reflected in a mirror; and the latter does not give back its image with less appearance of effort than the former. His excellence consists not so much in using common words as in making common words express uncommon things.

  The minuteness and the closeness of his analysis of the secret workings of the human heart with guilt for a companion, and withal the extreme delicacy with which the subject is handled, is something marvellous, and has perhaps never been equalled by any writer.

  Everything that you have ever written, I believe, I have read many times, and I am particularly vain of having admired “Sights from a Steeple,” when I first read it in the Boston Token, several hundred years ago, when we were both younger than we are now; of having detected and cherished, at a later day, an old Apple-Dealer, whom, I believe, you have unhandsomely thrust out of your presence, now that you are grown so great. But the “Romance of Monte Beni” has the additional charm for me that it is the first book of yours that I have read since I had the privilege of making your personal acquaintance. My memory goes back at once to those walks (alas, not too frequent) we used to take along the Tiber, or in the Campagna;… and it is delightful to get hold of the book now, and know that it is impossible for you any longer, after waving your wand as you occasionally did then, indicating where the treasure was hidden, to sink it again beyond plummet’s sound…. With regard to the story, which has been somewhat criticised, I can only say that to me it is quite satisfactory. I like those shadowy, weird, fantastic, Hawthornesque shapes flitting through the golden gloom, which is the atmosphere of the book. I like the misty way in which the story is indicated rather than revealed; the outlines are quite definite enough from the beginning to the end to those who have imagination enough to follow you in your airy flights; and to those who complain, I suppose that nothing less than an illustrated edition, with a large gallows on the last page, with Donatello in the most pensile of attitudes,—his ears revealed through a white night-cap,—would be satisfactory.

  We are not to accept this book as a story; in that respect it is grievously deficient. The characters are utterly untrue to nature and to fact; they speak, all and always, the sentiments of the author; their words also are his; there is no one of them for which the world has furnished a model.

  One of the most perfect works of art in literature, whose marvellous spell begins with the very opening words.

  His “Marble Faun,” whether consciously or not, illustrates that invasion of the æsthetic by the moral which has confused art by dividing its allegiance, and dethroned the old dynasty without as yet firmly establishing the new in an acknowledged legitimacy.

  To Perugia, as well as to Rome, Hawthorne has given a new interest; and it is not until the tourist who journeys northward from Rome has crossed over Monte Beni—on the road from Florence to Bologna—that he passes beyond a region which owes one of its chiefest charms to the rare genius of the author of the “Marble Faun.”

  The most characteristic instance of Hawthorne’s power in studying combinations of emotions that are, as it were, at once abhorrent to nature and true to life.

  No more pathetic story could well be conceived, and no plainer moral indicated, than we find here.

  There are few books put so often into the hands of English and American visitors to Rome as Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun,” or as it is more generally known here, “Transformation,” from the cheap and widely circulated Tauchnitz edition, which has followed the English style. Pilgrimages are made to what is now generally known as Hilda’s Tower; and when young ladies go to the Capuchin church to see the picture of Guido, they almost dread to find a dead monk laid out and bleeding from the nostrils. The book gives a strong impression of local colour.

  I cannot recall a writer more successful in this union of ornamental detail and organic structure. It is like the pediment end of the Doric order, whose beauty is not applied but wrought in. Whenever this is true, a style, whether in literature or architecture, painting or sculpture, gains immensely in dignity and unity. I do not say that it is not true of “The Marble Faun,” nor that its local color is less natural than that of Hawthorne’s New England novels; but that mingled with what is strictly necessary to the scenic effect is a great deal of information which belongs to the guide-book rather than the work of art. Hawthorne’s analysis of a painting or interpretation of a statue is often vital to the story, and has a value apart from its relation to it; but there is much of description and history which belongs rather to a work like Irving’s “Alhambra” than to a romance.

  Hawthorne’s genius is expressed equally in other works, but it is in “Transformation” that his inner history is told,—and therein all the evolutionary years of New England, whereof he was the characteristic flower. Having come so far the book reaches far: it has the phenomenal success of becoming at once the tourist’s guide and the scholar’s interpreter.

  One vital mistake has been made by many. They have taken “The Marble Faun” as a guide to Rome; almost as a picture of Italy. It gives neither Rome nor Italy. Read it by the light of those Note-Books and you will see that Hawthorne never fully appreciated Italy; therefore he could not portray that country “which most have considered the second in the world, thus really proving it the first.” A man who could place Powers’s Eve above the Venus di Milo, because its skin is smooth and its members sound; a man who gazed, again and again, upon the Venus di Medici,—which is no goddess, but a dainty Greek girl claiming love as her lawful right,—yet seldom visited the Medici Chapel whose giant forms writhe in a powerless passion as they give eternity limited by earth, could not really love Florence for her best, much less Rome for her grandest.

  “Transformation” is the most unsatisfactory although in some parts the most richly descriptive of the longer stories.

  The longest of his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as Shakespeare’s Caliban or Fouqué’s Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human.

  In “The Marble Faun” his pure and tranquil grace of style is at its best. The economy of incident is not so strict as in the statuesque simplicity of the “Scarlet Letter” groupings, nor is the dramatic intensity so keen; but there is Hawthorne’s own rich subdued, autumnal coloring, with the first soft shadows deepening into sable.

  As for the plot, we may be wrong, ideally in demanding anything more than the ethereal or spiritual solution,—the completion of Donatello’s education, but there is much truth in the complaint, that all imaginative literature heretofore, as Hawthorne’s own stories, and even hints in the course of these scenes themselves, had led us to expect some final explanation as to Donatello’s deed and his punishment, which would satisfy—I will not say our curiosity, for we know he is a creature of Hawthorne’s, after all, but—our sense of artistic justice and finish. The reluctant final chapter of the second edition, we may all well agree with Hawthorne himself, is worthless. It only shows that in regard to these questions as to Miriam’s earlier history as well, he had himself nothing to offer us.

  It has but four characters, and a single sin. Two of the characters, Hilda and Kenyon, are Bostonian: Miriam is portrayed from a Jewess whom Hawthorne had met in London; and if Donatello has any distinct prototype it is that curious New England Saint Francis who lived near to nature’s heart—Henry David Thoreau. A visit to Whitby—to the abbey of St. Hilda, suggested the name of the spotless heroine who represents as well as may be the New England Puritanism. Kenyon, the artist, stands for Reason. Donatello is the innocent child of nature, a type of the early Greek. And thus the characters, as always in Hawthorne’s romances, fade into symbols.

Septimus Felton, 1872

  There still remain little roughnesses, which the author’s delicate revision would have swept away; as the enumeration of “beautiful flowers” under the head of “tender greenness” in the very third line of the story;—the ungrammatical “and which,” at the bottom of the first page; the seeming to include Rose Garfield among her own progenitors, on the second; the awkward occurrence of “now” and “then,” “before” and “floor,” in ungraceful proximity on the third page;—and just below, the abrupt “so it was” and “passed through Cambridge” (college);—these trifles and such as these have interest because they prove, what I for one never doubted, that Hawthorne’s pages owed something of their delicious smoothness to the use of the file.

  It is plain to any reader that “Septimus Felton,” as it stands, with its roughness, its gaps, its mere allusiveness and slightness of treatment, gives us a very partial measure of Hawthorne’s full intention; and it is equally easy to believe that this intention was much finer than anything we find in the book. Even if we possessed the novel in its complete form, however, I incline to think that we should regard it as very much the weakest of Hawthorne’s productions.

  In the unfinished story of “Septimus,” we have an example of one of Hawthorne’s stories in the making, and it seems to indicate how entirely Hawthorne always framed his work on facts. The Note-books show how precise an observer he was, and whatever he presented to the world was constructed on these observations. The author says of “Septimus,” “our story is an internal one, dealing as little as possible with outward events, and taking hold of these only where it cannot be helped, in order, by means of them, to delineate the history of a mind.” Yet it actually is, as it stands, far more full of action and incident than any of its predecessors. Here and there the narrative is broken; something was to have been filled in—something ghostly or speculative, perhaps. If Hawthorne had lived to complete this book, it is easy to believe the frame-work would have been so wrought upon that, in its final shape, the story would have ranked among the most weird of his romances.

Note-Books

  It is hard to conceive the existence of so much pettiness in a man so great and real; of such a resolution to brood over fancied slights and strange formalities, yet, withal, to generalize so widely on such narrow premises; of such vulgarity in one who had written for the public so exquisitely. It is difficult to accept such a writer’s criticisms on “the steaks and sirloins” of English ladies. I still remember Hester Prynne and Pearl, in the “Scarlet Letter,” and Phœbe and Hepzibah, in the “House of the Seven Gables,” and ask myself how far the case in point proves the adage that there is nothing so essentially nasty as refinement. The tone of these English journals is as small and peevish as if their writer had been thwarted and overlooked, instead of waited on by hearty offers of service, which in most cases were declined almost as persistently as if they had been so many affronts. A more puzzling case of inconsistency and duality has never come before me.

  We owe to Hawthorne’s consular life two books, “Our Old Home” and “The English Note-Books.” They are alike, but with a difference. They resemble each other as an English flower-garden—in which the walks are swept and the lawn is mowed every day, where not a leaf is allowed to moulder where it falls, where every flower seems to glow with richer hues as if conscious of its privileges and anxious to make a grateful return for the care bestowed upon it—resembles an English park, where, though the shaping and restraining hand of Art is everywhere seen, Nature is yet allowed a certain range and scope. In both the style is exquisite,—the happiest combination possible of grace, harmony, flexibility, and strength; but in the former work there is more of elaboration, in the latter more of ease. Hawthorne’s English is absolutely unique; very careful and exact, but never studied; with the best word always in the best place; pellucid as crystal; full of delicate and varied music; with gleams of poetry, and touches of that peculiar humor of his, which is half smile and half sigh. His style can only be matched by that of the best writers in France…. His style is not stiff, not pedantic; it is free from mannerism, caricature, and rhetoric; it has a sap and flavour of its own; it is a peculiar combination of ease and finish. The magic of style is like the magic of manner: it is felt by all, but it can be analyzed and defined by few.

  The finish and deliberation of the style in these fragmentary chronicles, fitly known under the name of Note-Books, are very likely to mislead any one who does not constantly recall the fact that they were written currente calamo, and merely as superficial memoranda, beneath which lay the author’s deeper meditation, always reserved in essence until he was ready to precipitate it in the plastic forms of fiction. Speaking of “Our Old Home,” which—charming though it be to the reader—was drawn almost wholly from the surface deposit of his “English Note-Books,” Hawthorne said: “It is neither a good nor a weighty book.” And this, indirectly, shows that he did not regard the journals as concentrating the profounder substance of his genius.

  A very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding to them in the whole body of literature…. I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written—what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle…. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty.

  To his death also we owe a book,—six volumes of crude miscellaneous notes—the publication of which must have made that exquisite writer and fastidious critic turn in his otherwise quiet grave.

General

  The most pleasing writer of fanciful prose, except Irving, in the country.

  Another characteristic of this writer is the exceeding beauty of his style. It is as clear as running waters are. Indeed he uses words merely as stepping-stones, upon which, with a free and youthful bound, his spirit crosses and recrosses the bright and rushing stream of thought.

  And here, though we cannot do him justice, let us remember the name of Nathaniel Hawthorne, deserving a place second to none in that band of humorists whose beautiful depth of cheerful feeling is the very poetry of mirth. In ease, grace, delicate sharpness of satire,—in a felicity of touch which often surpasses the felicity of Addison, in a subtlety of insight which often reaches further than the subtlety of Steele,—the humor of Hawthorne presents traits so fine as to be almost too excellent for popularity, as, to every one who has attempted their criticism, they are too refined for statement.

  He has the purest style, the finest taste, the most available scholarship, the most delicate humor, the most touching pathos, the most radiant imagination, the most consummate ingenuity; and with these varied good qualities he has done well as a mystic. But is there any one of these qualities which should prevent his doing doubly as well in a career of honest, upright, sensible, prehensible, and comprehensible things? Let him mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of the Dial, and throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of the North American Review.

  I am altogether entranced with Hawthorne; though I find few to enter into my ecstasies.

  Can you possibly get a Daguerreotype of Hawthorne to be engraved for the International? I want to do Hawthorne (who is, as I have printed it a dozen times, decidedly the greatest living literary man in this country, greatest, in romance, now writing the English language). I want to do Hawthorne’s life for the occasion of a reviewal of the “Seven Gables.”

  To Hawthorne, if we judge him in his best mood, may justly be ascribed the merit of reflective powers habitually active, connected with a style that is taking, apparently unstudied, and generally perspicuous and expressive. He has been compared with Irving; but though in some respects he is not injured by the experiment he must be considered, in others, as decidedly inferior. Irving is the better artist, and that not only in the choice of words, but in the arrangement of details, the production of effect, and the breadth and completeness of design; but had Hawthorne the taste and discrimination, and something more of the instinctive delicacy of Irving, we are not sure that the latter would long be left lonely in his preëminence.

  You write as if you wrote for Germany. The equality before the law—the moral law as well as the juridicial—is the great wish of the women of my country; and you have illustrated this point with the skill of an artist, and a deep knowledge of man’s secret motives and feelings. We know “The House of the Seven Gables,” which is a lesson to family pride,—a frailty which must lie deep in human natures, since you have been able to trace it even in a free country. What it is with us, with our old aristocracy,—penniless beggars with long names,—you scarcely can imagine. Nevertheless, such a picture as you have drawn is a useful lesson, and will do good here if known in the right quarter. This is unfortunately not now the case, and it is the fault of the translators. Your passages are long, you do not write a racy style to carry on the reader, and in bad language it is impossible to get on with it. Instead of curtailing, they have spun out the matter, and have made two volumes of one; and the consequence is that the second remains unread. We must prevent this for the future. Those who read English are enchanted with it; but their number is not large, and ladies are almost alone proficient in foreign languages, and at the the same time ladies have no position in Germany. Believe me that I truly appreciate your great talent, and sincerely wish that you might come to a sort of fusion and longed-for Literature of the World.

  Hawthorne is a grand favorite of mine, and I shall be sorry if he do not go on surpassing himself.

  Imagine such an anatomizer of the human heart as Balzac, transported to a provincial town of New England, and giving to its houses, streets, and history the analytical power of his genius, and we realize the triumph of Hawthorne. Bravely adopting familiar materials, he has thrown over them the light and shadow of his thoughtful mind, eliciting a deep significance and a prolific beauty; if we may use the expression, he is ideally true to the real. His invention is felicitous, his tone magnetic; his sphere borders on the supernatural, and yet a chaste expression and a refined sentiment underlie his most earnest utterance; he is more suggestive than dramatic. The early history of New England has found no such genial and vivid illustration as his pages afford. At all points his genius touches the interests of human life, now overflowing with a love of external nature as gentle as that of Thomson, now intent upon the quaint or characteristic in life with a humor as zestful as that of Lamb, now developing the horrible or pathetic with something of John Webster’s dramatic terror, and again buoyant with a fantasy as aerial as Shelley’s conceptions. And in each instance, the staple of charming invention is adorned with the purest graces of style.

  If I were to meet you face to face, I should not say a word to you about the great pleasure we have derived from your works; but on paper may I not do so without offence? Of course you know the delight you have given to thousands. But you do not know how exquisite to our taste is all your minute detail,—your working out a character by Pre-Raphaelian touches, as it were,—if you understand my phrase; your delicate touch upon touch, which produces such a finished whole,—so different from the slap-dash style of writing so common nowadays. Yes, I assure you that independently of the intrinsic interest with which we read your books at first, we now refer again and again to them as exquisite works of art, the elaborate finish and detail of which are never exhausted. When I say we, I mean myself and my husband—now an antipode—and my daughter.

  Hawthorne is remarkable for the delicacy of his psychological insight, his power of intense characterization, and for his mastery of the spiritual and the supernatural. His genius is most at home when delineating the darker passages of life, and the emotions of guilt and pain. He does not feel the necessity of time or space to realize his spells, and the early history of New England and its stern people have found no more vivid illustration than his pages afford. The style of Hawthorne is the pure colorless medium of his thought; the plain current of his language is always equable, full and unvarying, whether in the company of playful children, among the ancestral associations of family or history, or in grappling with the mysteries and terrors of the supernatural world.

  He is quiet, fanciful, quaint, and his humour is shaded by a meditativeness of spirit. Although a Yankee, he partakes of none of the characteristics of a Yankee. His thinking and his style have an antique air. His roots strike down through the visible mould of the present, and draw sustenance from the generations under ground. The ghosts that haunt that chamber of his mind are the ghosts of dead men and women. He has a strong smack of the Puritan; he wears around him, in the New England town, something of the darkness and mystery of the aboriginal forest. He is a shy, silent, sensitive, much ruminating man, with no special overflow of animal spirits. He loves solitude, and the things which age has made reverent. There is nothing modern about him. Emerson’s writing has a cold, cheerless glitter, like the new furniture in a warehouse, which will come of use by and by; Hawthorne’s, the rich, subdued color of furniture in a Tudor mansion house which has winked to long-extinguished fires, which has been toned by the usage of departed generations.

  Hawthorne was a genius. As a master of prose, he will come in the first class of all who have written the English language. He had not the grand style, but who has had a delicacy of touch superior to his?

  The death of Nathaniel Hawthorne is a national event. In original creative genius no name in our literature is superior to his; and while everybody was asking whether it were impossible to write an American novel, he wrote romances that were hardly possible elsewhere, because they were so purely American. There was never, certainly, an author more utterly independent than Hawthorne of the circumstances that surrounded him. In his style, even, which, for a rich, idiomatic raciness, is unsurpassed, there was no touch of any of the schools of his time. It was as clear and simple as Thackeray’s and as felicitous; but there was a flush of color in it, sometimes, of which Thackeray has no trace.

  The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare.

  A writer of singular purity and simplicity. His writings are principally denoted by their fine poetical imagery, originality of thought and expression. His pleasant fancies are philosophical, and his keen reflections not too metaphysical.

  The devotee of Hawthorne is unrelenting in certain moody prejudices, epicurean in his taste and aspirations, and dreamy and uncertain in his theory of this life and the next.

  Hawthorne has been called a mystic, which he was not,—and a psychological dreamer, which he was in very slight degree. He was really the ghost of New England,—I do not mean the “spirit,” nor the “phantom,” but the ghost in the older sense in which that term is used, the thin, rarified essence which is to be found somewhere behind the physical organization: embodied, indeed, and not by any means in a shadowy or diminutive earthly tabernacle, but yet only half embodied in it, endowed with a certain painful sense of the gulf between his nature and its organization, always recognising the gulf, always trying to bridge it over, and always more or less unsuccessful in the attempt. His writings are not exactly spiritual writings, for there is no dominating spirit in them. They are ghostly writings. Hawthorne was, to my mind, a sort of sign to New England of the divorce that has been going on there (and not less perhaps in old England) between its people’s spiritual and earthly nature, and of the difficulty which they will soon feel, if they are to be absorbed more and more in that shrewd, hard earthly sense which is one of their most striking characteristics, in even communicating with their former self.

  Hawthorne seems to me the most of a Man of Genius America has produced in the way of Imagination: yet I have never found an Appetite for his Books.

  On the whole, Hawthorne must be esteemed the foremost writer of prose among Americans; and it would not be easy to select a name from the crowded annals of English literature that is more closely and honorably associated with the marriage of fine thoughts to fine language, which constitutes the charm of prose. As a romancist, he stands alone and unapproached. His psychological insight was simply marvelous, and gave a distinguishing and inimitable character to all his writings.

  As a writer of short stories which are not mere episodes, but which have all the elements of a complete romance, condensed and therefore intensified, Hawthorne has no equal. He produced dozens of such, and he wrote the cleanest and most effective English of any American who has ever put pen to paper.

  No modern writer has the same skill in so using the marvellous as to interest without unduly exciting our incredulity. He makes, indeed, no positive demands on our credulity. The strange influences which are suggested rather than obtruded upon us are kept in the background, so as not to invite, nor indeed to render possible, the application of scientific tests…. In fact Hawthorne was able to tread in that magic circle only by an exquisite refinement of taste, and by a delicate sense of humour, which is the best preservative against all extravagance. Both qualities combine in that tender delineation of character which is, after all, one of his greatest charms. His Puritan blood shows itself in sympathy, not with the stern side of the ancestral creed, but with the feebler characters upon whom it weighed as an oppressive terror. He resembles in some degree, poor Clifford Pyncheon, whose love of the beautiful makes him suffer under the stronger will of his relatives and the prim stiffness of their home. He exhibits the suffering of such a character all the more effectively because, with his kindly compassion there is mixed a delicate flavour of irony. The more tragic scenes affect us, perhaps, with less sense of power; the playful, though melancholy, fancy seems to be less at home when the more powerful emotions are to be excited; and yet once, at least, he draws one of those pictures which engrave themselves instantaneously on the memory.

  It is impossible, as we have seen, to fix an absolute ratio between these writers. Irving has a more human quality than Poe, but Poe is beyond dispute the more original of the two. Each, again, has something which Hawthorne does not possess. But, if we must attempt at all to reduce so intricate a problem to exact terms, the mutual position of the three may be stated in the equation, Poe plus Irving plus an unknown quantity equals Hawthorne.

	What sybil to him bore
	The secret oracles that move and haunt?
	At night’s dread noon he scanned the enchanted glass,
	Ay, and himself the warlock’s mantle wore,
	Nor to the thronging phantoms said Avaunt,
	But waved his rod and bade them rise and pass.
	*        *        *        *        *
	But he whose quickened eye
	Saw through New England’s life her inmost spirit,—
	Her heart, and all the stays on which it leant,—
	Returns not, since he laid the pencil by
	Whose mystic touch none other shall inherit!

  The subtle analysis of spiritual moods, which made him at home in the darkest recesses of the human heart, long reflection upon the motives and moods and processes in minds conscious of crimes, sure intuition of the laws that govern them, a profound, perhaps melancholy, thoughtfulness upon the problems of good and evil, guilt and sorrow, life and death—these are but new growths in later times of those dark-veined leaves that grew of old upon the Puritan stalk…. In psychological insight he is unrivalled among the men of our time.

  Holds the first place in the ranks of American writers of fiction. He is most fascinating, possessing delicacy of taste and finish of style, combined with an insight into the human mind most remarkable. He wrote many stories illustrating character, the subjects being taken from New England life at different periods.

  Hawthorne appalls—entices.

  One of the most characteristic of Hawthorne’s literary methods is his habitual use of guarded under-statements and veiled hints. It is not a sign of weakness, but of conscious strength, when he surrounds each delineation with a sort of penumbra, takes you into his counsels, offers hypotheses, as, “May it not have been?” or, “Shall we not rather say?” and sometimes, like a conjurer, urges particularly upon you the card he does not intend you to accept. He seems not quite to know whether Arthur Dimmesdale really had a fiery scar on his breast, or what finally became of Miriam and her lover. He will gladly share with you any information he possesses, and, indeed, has several valuable hints to offer; but that is all. The result is that you place yourself by his side to look with him at his characters and gradually share with him the conviction that they must be real. Then, when he has you thus in possession, he calls your attention to the profound ethics involved in the tale, and yet does it so gently that you never think of the moral as being obtrusive.

  The writings of Hawthorne are marked by subtle imagination, curious power of analysis, and exquisite purity of diction. He studied exceptional developments of character, and was fond of exploring secret crypts of emotion. His shorter stories are remarkable for originality and suggestiveness, and his larger ones are as absolute creations as “Hamlet” or “Undine.” Lacking the accomplishment of verse, he was in the highest sense a poet. His work is pervaded by a manly personality, and by an almost feminine delicacy and gentleness. He inherited the gravity of his Puritan ancestors without their superstition, and learned in his solitary meditations a knowledge of the night side of life which would have filled them with suspicion. A profound anatomist of the heart, he was singularly free from morbidness, and in his darkest speculations concerning evil was robustly right-minded. He worshipped conscience with his intellectual as well as his moral nature; it is supreme in all he wrote. Besides these mental traits, he possessed the literary quality of style—a grace, a charm, a perfection of language which no other American writer ever possessed in the same degree, and which places him among the great masters of English prose.

  Hawthorne was melancholy, laborious, reflective—one of the greatest of modern novelists. His works are so richly adorned with all the vivid ornaments of fancy that they seem poems truly epic; he wrote them with intense feeling, lost in his own fine visions. When he had finished the Scarlet Letter, and read it to his wife, he was racked by an intense excitement, he relates, and at its close burst into tears. Writing, to him, was no holiday recreation, but a violent labor that stirred the very sources of his life. We may imagine Homer weeping as he described the sorrows of Priam; it was thus that Hawthorne felt with his own characters. His disposition was too sad to resemble altogether that of the manly Greek poet; he might have stood almost for Milton’s Il Penseroso. He was fond of the dark, mysterious, gloomy, he was a conservative who seemed to care little for the future; he studied spiritualism, and examined the old and forgotten; he is never very cheerful.

  I would advise no man, unless his faith in the greatness and purity of Hawthorne is established beyond the possibility of disturbance, to investigate too closely into the muck-heaps of local prejudice which even to this day are found to exist among certain cliques and coteries of his native town. [Salem] Persons of intelligence and respectability are met who actually regard their illustrious townsman with feelings of strong personal aversion. I have endeavored honestly and patiently to look into this strange matter for the purpose of discovering, if I could, the cause of an animosity so pronounced that were I to repeat here the sentiments of rancor and bitterness toward Hawthorne which I have heard spoken, the record would be read with astonishment and incredulity. I rejoice to say, however, that these people are in a very small minority, and that to most Hawthorne is a bright, particular star, dwelling aloft beyond the reach of detraction.

  In every higher qualification of the artist, he easily excels. His style is masterly in ease, grace, clearness,—the winning, absorbing, entrancing quality. His skill in hinting in ideal and spiritual elements is the most perfect in our day. His mastery of light and shade—the power of deepening gloom by sunshine and intensifying sunshine by means of darkness—is of the finest order, at once the gift of original perception and the result of most assiduous practice. Probably few writers ever made so many successes that were failures, or so many failures that were successes; that is, few ever did so much that was to others artistically perfect in order that they might do something artistically perfect to themselves.

  His fictions, in conception and performance, are always and essentially romances. Yet have they a character of fundamental trueness to spiritual laws, of harmony with time, place, and circumstance,—of realism existing in an ideal atmosphere, or invested with a halo of a poetic medium. We have not the worn out paraphernalia of abbeys, castles, courts, gentry, aristocracy, and sovereigns; but we have types, mental conditions,—beyond the sphere of habitual existence, indeed, yet belonging profoundly to spirit and to man. No civilization has produced a romantic genius at all comparable in power to his. Other writers have been more learned, more dramatic, more versatile, more comprehensive. His stories are generally deficient in converging unity. His personages seldom reveal themselves; but, as in the “Marble Faun,” we are told what they are, in page upon page of description, keen, minute, finished,—marvellous workmanship. No one ever depended so little upon plot or incident. Facts are subordinated to the influences with which they are charged. He is not a portrait painter who sets forth a complete individuality. His forte is not in adventure, not in movement; but in the depicture of the rare and the occult, in the operation and results of involved and conflicting motives, feelings, and tendencies. He is here a solitary original in English letters. It may be questioned whether the “Scarlet Letter,” as an example of imaginative writing, has its parallel in any literature.

  A correspondent asks me if I do not like the work of Mr. Howells. Of course one cannot choose but like his writing. But one cannot also avoid comparing his work with that of his countryman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who added to the charm of style the interest of a romantic and exciting story.

  Hawthorne had no “authorities,” and we are fain to be content with the belief that he was not able to solve his own riddles…. The greatest genius America has yet produced.

  There is a propriety in Hawthorne’s fantasy to which Poe could not attain. Hawthorne’s effects are moral, where Poe’s are merely physical. The situation and its logical development, and the effects to be got out of it, are all Poe thinks of. In Hawthorne the situation, however strange and weird, is only the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual struggle. Ethical consequences are always worrying Hawthorne’s soul: but Poe did not know that there were any ethics…. As to which of the two was the greater, discussion is idle; but that Hawthorne was the finer genius, few would deny…. In all his most daring fantasies Hawthorne is natural; and, though he may project his vision far beyond the boundaries of fact, nowhere does he violate the laws of nature. He had at all times a wholesome simplicity, and he never showed any trace of the morbid taint which characterises nearly all Poe’s work. Hawthorne, one may venture to say, had the broad sanity of genius, while we should understand any one who might declare that Poe had mental disease raised to the n^th.

  Dramatist or no dramatist, there can be no question that Hawthorne was a consummate artist. His characters may often be wanting in opaqueness and solidity, but nothing can interfere with the extraordinary felicity and power of his scenes. The personages do not always stand out with distinctness, but the management of the incidents, the grouping of the accessories, the natural background of colour and tone and scenery, and all the “staging,” so to speak, of the piece are alike admirable. Further than this, the insight into emotion and the perception of the contrasts of passion, though they often appear arbitrary and unnatural, strike the imagination with rare force and mastery.

	He stood apart—but as a mountain stands
	In isolate repose above the plane,
	Robed in no pride of aspect, no disdain,
	Though clothed with power to steep the sunniest lands
	In mystic shadow. At the mood’s demands,
	Himself he clouded, till no eye could gain
	The vanished peak, no more, with sense astrain,
	Than trace a footprint on the surf-washed sands.
	Yet hidden within that rare, sequestered height,
	Imperially lonely, what a world
	Of splendor lay! What pathless realms untrod!
	What rush and wreck of passion! What delight
	Of woodland sweets! What weird wind, phantom-whirled!
	And over all, the immaculate sky of God!

  He was a great writer—the greatest writer in prose fiction whom America has produced.

  The people are gaining upon Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works. A century hence, when the most popular authors of to-day are forgotten, he will probably be more widely read than ever.

  Hawthorne’s was a long and lonely vigil before the world found him out. When it did find him, it discovered no novice, but a ripe artist…. Hawthorne was imagination in the flesh. Imagination and fancy load his most fragile theme; and to strip them away would be to leave a skeleton one would hardly deem it possible to so build on and vivify as to make it a thing of beauty.

  But far greater in genius than the idealist Emerson was the mystic and recluse, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His actual life was of the simplest. He was born in quaint Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804; he graduated from Bowdoin College, held in the course of his career two political offices, shunned publicity and wrote novels which met at the time with no remarkable sale. But from this simple career came the weirdest, most imaginative and most profound tales in American, if not in all Anglo-Saxon literature.

  To men of our time, beyond doubt, his work seems generally not fantastic but imaginative, and surely not meretricious but in its own way beautiful. Nor is this the whole story: almost alone among our writers, we may say, Hawthorne has a lasting native significance. For this there are surely two good reasons. In the first place, he is almost the solitary American artist who has phrased his meaning in words of which the beauty seems sure to grow with the years. In the second place, what marks him as most impregnably American is this: when we look close to see what his meaning really was, we find it a thing that in the old days, at last finally dead and gone, had been the great motive power of his race. What Hawthorne really voices is that strange, morbid, haunting sense of other things that we see or hear, which underlay the intense idealism of the emigrant Puritans, and which remains perhaps the most inalienable emotional heritage of their children. It is Hawthorne, in brief, who finally phrases the meaning of such a life as Theophilus Eaton lived and Cotton Mather recorded.

  His best work deals with abnormal life in New England, and is written in a style of quaint simplicity, truthfulness, and beauty akin to that of Charles Lamb.

  Hawthorne is, perhaps, the most truly creative of American novelists, and some passages in the “Scarlet Letter,” and other of his fiction, belong to the higher planes of art.

  He is psychologic rather than moral, an observer and analyzer of moral problems, and coldly critical, not sympathetic in his treatment of them.

  New England, in Hawthorne’s work, achieved perfection in romance; but the romance is always an allegory; and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself.

  In truth, for many persons his great, his most touching sign will have been his aloofness wherever he is. He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an æsthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. It was a faculty that gave him much more a terrible sense of human abysses than a desire rashly to sound them and rise to the surface with his report. On the surface—the surface of the soul and the edge of the tragedy—he preferred to remain. He lingered to weave his web, in the thin exterior air. This is a partial expression of his characteristic habit of dipping, of diving just for sport, into the moral world without being in the least a moralist. He had none of the heat nor of the dogmatism of that character; none of the impertinence, as we feel he would almost have held it, of any intermeddling. He never intermeddled; he was divertedly and discreetly contemplative, pausing oftenest wherever, amid prosaic aspects, there seemed most of an appeal to a sense for subtleties. But of all cynics he was the brightest and kindest, and the subtleties he spun are mere silken threads for stringing polished beads. His collection of moral mysteries is the cabinet of a dilettante.

  Of the moderns, Hawthorne possesses in a remarkable degree the power of impressing unity on his creations. His hand is firm. He never wavers in style, standpoint, aim, or subject by a hair’s-breadth. His plots are simple, his motives more so; in fact, no people ever were dominated by so few impulses as are the characters in Hawthorne’s romances. There is something Greek in their simplicity, although they are as unlike a Greek conception of humanity as are Caliban or Ariel. But they never waver. Such as the author conceived them in the first chapter, they remain to the end. There is no growth or development of character. This gives his tales an atmosphere which is never blown away by any nineteenth-century wind, and a unity which insures them a place in the literature which endures. There is a certain sameness about his style which might become monotonous in spite of its wonderful charm, and a limited experience of life which might become uninteresting, and an impress of a poverty-stricken and repellant external world which might become disheartening, but the unity is so thoroughly artistic that the pleasure received far outweighs the annoyance which is caused by the depressing and fatalistic atmosphere which envelopes some of his romances.

  Hawthorne’s work you may read from end to end without the temptation to transfer so much as a line to the commonplace book. The road has taken you through many interesting scenes, and past many a beautiful landscape; you may have felt much and learned much; you might be glad to turn back straightway and travel the course over again; but you will have picked up no coin or jewel to put away in a cabinet. This characteristic of Hawthorne is the more noteworthy because of the moral quality of his work. A mere story-teller may naturally keep his narrative on the go, as we say,—that is one of the chief secrets of his art; but Hawthorne was not a mere story-teller. He was a moralist,—Emerson himself hardly more so; yet he has never a moral sentence. The fact is, he did not make sentences; he made books. The story, not the sentence, nor even the paragraph or the chapter, was the unit. The general truth—the moral—informed the work. Not only was it not affixed as a label; it was not given anywhere a direct and separable verbal expression. If the story does not convey it to you, you will never get it. Hawthorne, in short, was what, for lack of a better word, we may call a literary artist…. His work is all of a piece, woven in his own loom. As nobody quotes him, so he quotes nobody. Inverted commas are as scarce on his pages as November violets are in the Concord meadows. You will find them, but you will have to search for them.

  The story of Hawthorne is only half told when we say he refined Gothic art and fashioned it to high ethical purposes. As in the case of Poe, one of his great charms is his workmanship in structure and style. In the technique of the short tale, Poe was at least his equal; in the longer tale, where Poe left many loose ends, Hawthorne succeeded twice—in “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of the Seven Gables.” Poe modelled his style on Defoe and De Quincey, now suggesting the one and now the other. Hawthorne by laborious practice acquired a more individual style; the good taste of Addison and Irving are visible in it, and the brooding and dreamy fancy of Tieck, disguised however in the fusion.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne has been well called “The ghost of New England.” In him all that is weird and romantic in the superstitions of Puritanism flowers into the finest art. He is familiar with every mood of the austere Puritan life.

  To one who reads Hawthorne carefully, his work seems to fall together like the movements of a great symphony built upon one imposing theme.