which he never found time to work out. Hawthorne's style, in his
first sketches and stories a little stilted and "bookish," gradually
acquired an exquisite perfection, and is as well worth study as that of
any prose classic in the English tongue.

Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt {470} much in a world of
ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the tree on the bank or its
image in the stream were the more real. But this had little in common
with the philosophical idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced
Emerson, and he held kindly intercourse--albeit a silent man and easily
bored--with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Margaret Fuller.
But his sharp eyes saw whatever was whimsical or weak in the apostles
of the new faith. He had little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and
among so many Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a
campaign life of his friend Pierce.

The village of Concord has perhaps done more for American literature
than the city of New York. Certainly there are few places where
associations, both patriotic and poetic, cluster so thickly. At one
side of the grounds of the Old Manse--which has the river at its
back--runs down a shaded lane to the Concord monument and the figure of
the Minute Man and the successor of "the rude bridge that arched the
flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little
Walden--"God's drop." The men who made Concord famous are asleep in
Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory prevails to draw seekers after
truth to the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, which meets every
year, to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," next-door to
the "Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge Hawthorne wore a path,
as he paced up and down beneath the hemlocks.

{471}

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. The American Scholar. Literary
Ethics. The Transcendentalist. The Over-soul. Address before the
Cambridge Divinity School. English Traits. Representative Men. Poems.

2. Henry David Thoreau. Excursions. Walden. A Week on the Concord
and Merrimac Rivers. Cape Cod. The Maine Woods.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mosses from an Old Manse. The Scarlet Letter.
The House of the Seven Gables. The Blithedale Romance. The Marble
Faun. Our Old Home.

4. Transcendentalism in New England. By O. B. Frothingham. New York:
G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875.

[1] The Indian name of Concord River.

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CHAPTER V.

THE C