sight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is
Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his canvas with figures.
In the _Blithedale Romance_ and the _Marble Faun_ there is the same
_parti carre_ or group of four characters. In the _House of the Seven
Gables_ there are five. The last mentioned of these, published in
1852, was of a more subdued intensity than the _Scarlet Letter_, but
equally original and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. The
_Blithedale Romance_, published in the same year, though not strikingly
inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional patterns in its
plot and in the sensational nature of its ending. The suicide of the
heroine by drowning, and the terrible scene of the recovery of her
body, were suggested to the author by an experience of his own on
Concord River, the account of which, in his own words, may be read in
Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852
Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the "Wayside" property, which
he retained until his death. But in the following year his old college
friend Pierce, now become President, appointed him Consul to Liverpool,
and he went abroad for seven years. The most valuable fruit of his
foreign residence was the {469} romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860; 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 Shakspere's Caliban, or Fouque's
Undine, and yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. _Our
Old Home_, a book of charming papers on England, was published in 1863.
Manifold experience of life and contact with men, affording scope for
his always keen observation, had added range, fullness, warmth to the
imaginative subtlety which had manifested itself even in his earliest
tales. Two admirable books for children, the _Wonder Book_ and
_Tanglewood Tales_, in which the classical mythologies were retold;
should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's writings, as well
as the _American_, _English_, and _Italian Note Books_, the first of
which contains the seed thoughts of some of his finished works,
together with hundreds of hints for plots, episodes, descriptions,
etc.,