and imperishable beauty.

In the days of which he wrote a Puritan town or village was exactly like
a large family bound together by mutual interests, in which the acts of
each life were regarded as affecting the whole community. In this novel
Hawthorne imprisoned forever the spirit of colonial New England, with
all its struggles, hopes, and fears; and the conscience-driven Puritan,
who lived in the new generation only in public records and church
histories, was lifted into the realm of art.

In Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of Indian
fights, village pillories, town meetings, witch-burnings, and church
councils, was already a memory. He had drifted into the past with his
steeple-crowned hat and his matchlock. He had left the pleasant New
England farm-lands with their pastures and meadows, hills and valleys
and wild-pine groves, and lurked like a ghost among the old church-yards
and court-houses where his deeds were recorded.

Hawthorne brought him back to life, rehabilitated him in his old
garments, set him in the midst of his fellow-elders in the church, and
gave him a perfect carnival of trials and worries for conscience' sake.
He made the old Puritan live anew, and never again can his memory become
dim. It is embalmed for all time by the cunning art of this master-hand.

This first romance, published under the title _The Scarlet Letter_,
revealed both to Hawthorne himself and the world outside the
transcendent power of his genius.

Hawthorne, when the work was first finished, was in a desperate frame of
mind, because of the little popularity his other books had acquired, and
told his publisher, who saw the first germ of the work, that he did not
know whether the story was very good or very bad. The publisher,
however, perceived at once the unusual quality of the work, prevailed
upon Hawthorne to finish it immediately, and brought it out one year
from that time, and the public, which had become familiar with Hawthorne
as a writer of short stories, now saw that it had been entertaining a
genius unawares.

Hawthorne's next work, _The House of the Seven Gables_, is a story of
the New England of his own day. Through its pages flit the contrasting
figures that one might find there and nowhere else. The old spinster of
ancient family who is obliged in her latter years to open a toy and
ginger-bread shop, and who never forgets the time when the house with
seven gables was a mansion whose hospit