strive to make a style out of the use of odd words, or of
familiar words in odd places. Almost always he looked for "a kind of
spiritual medium, seen through which" his romances, like the Old Manse in
which he dwelt, "had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material
world."

The spiritual medium which he liked, he was partly born into, and partly
he created it. The child of a race which came from England, robust and
Puritanic, he had in his veins the blood of judges--of those judges who
burned witches and persecuted Quakers. His fancy is as much influenced
by the old fanciful traditions of Providence, of Witchcraft, of haunting
Indian magic, as Scott's is influenced by legends of foray and feud, by
ballad, and song, and old wives' tales, and records of conspiracies, fire-
raisings, tragic love-adventures, and border wars. Like Scott, Hawthorne
lived in phantasy--in phantasy which returned to the romantic past,
wherein his ancestors had been notable men. It is a commonplace, but an
inevitable commonplace, to add that he was filled with the idea of
Heredity, with the belief that we are all only new combinations of our
fathers that were before us. This has been made into a kind of pseudo-
scientific doctrine by M. Zola, in the long series of his Rougon-Macquart
novels. Hawthorne treated it with a more delicate and a serener art in
"The House of the Seven Gables."

It is curious to mark Hawthorne's attempts to break away from
himself--from the man that heredity, and circumstance, and the divine
gift of genius had made him. He naturally "haunts the mouldering lodges
of the past"; but when he came to England (where such lodges are
abundant), he was ill-pleased and cross-grained. He knew that a long
past, with mysteries, dark places, malisons, curses, historic wrongs, was
the proper atmosphere of his art. But a kind of conscientious desire to
be something other than himself--something more ordinary and popular--make
him thank Heaven that his chosen atmosphere was rare in his native land.
He grumbled at it, when he was in the midst of it; he grumbled in
England; and how he grumbled in Rome! He permitted the American Eagle to
make her nest in his bosom, "with the customary infirmity of temper that
characterises this unhappy fowl," as he says in his essay "The Custom
House." "The general truculency of her attitude" seems to "threaten
mischief to the inoffensive community" of Europe, and especially of
England an