pirits. 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 colour of furniture in a
Tudor mansion-house--which has winked to long-extinguished fires, which
has been toned by the usage of departed generations. In many of the
"Twice-Told Tales" this peculiar personality is charmingly exhibited. He
writes of the street or the sea-shore, his eye takes in every object,
however trifling, and on these he hangs comments, melancholy and
humourous. He does not require to go far for a subject; he will stare on
the puddle in the street of a New England village, and immediately it
becomes a Mediterranean Sea with empires lying on its muddy shores. If
the sermon be written out fully in your heart, almost any text will be
suitable--if you have to find your sermon _in_ your text, you may search
the Testament, New and Old, and be as poor at the close of Revelation as
when you started at the first book of Genesis. Several of the papers
which I like best are monologues, fanciful, humourous, or melancholy; and
of these, my chief favourites are "Sunday at Home," "Night Sketches,"
"Footprints on the Seashore," and "The Seven Vagabonds." This last seems
to me almost the most exquisite thing which has flowed from its author's
pen--a perfect little drama, the place, a showman's waggon, the time, the
falling of a summer shower, full of subtle suggestions which, if
followed, will lead the reader away out of the story altogether; and
illuminated by a grave, wistful kind of humour, which plays in turns upon
the author's companions and upon the author himself. Of all Mr.
Hawthorne's gifts, this gift of humour--which would light up the skull
and cross-bones of a village churchyard, which would be silent at a
dinner-table--is to me the most delightful.

Then this writer has a strangely weird power. He loves ruins like the
ivy, he skims the twilight like the bat, he makes himself a familiar of
the phantoms of the heart and brain. He is fascinated by the jarred
brain and the ruined heart. Other men collect china, books, pictures,
jewels; this writer collects singular human experiences, ancient wrongs
and agonies, murders done on unfrequented roads, crimes that seem to have
no motive, and all the dreary mysteries of the world of will. To his
chamb