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 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., 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 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