t old dwelling called the Manse, and as all his work partakes of
the personal flavor of his own life, so his existence here is recorded
in a delightful series of essays called _Mosses from an Old Manse_. Here
we have a description of the old house itself and of the author's family
life, of the kitchen-garden and apple orchards, of the meadows and
woods, and of his friendship with that lover of nature, Henry Thoreau,
whose writings form a valuable contribution to American literature. The
_Mosses from an Old Manse_ must ever be famous as the history of the
quiet hours of the greatest American man of letters. They are full of
Hawthorne's own personality, and reveal more than any other of his
books, the depth and purity of his poetic and rarely gifted nature.

In 1853 Hawthorne was appointed American Consul at Liverpool by his old
friend and school-mate Franklin Pierce, then President of the United
States. He remained abroad seven years, spending the last four on the
continent. The results of this experience are found in the celebrated
_Marble Faun_, published in Europe under the title _Transformation_. It
was written in Rome, and it is interesting to know that the story was
partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa near Florence which he
occupied with his family. This old villa possessed a moss-covered tower,
"haunted," as Hawthorne said in a letter to a friend, "by owls and by
the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century,
previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of
Florence." He also states in the same letter that he meant to put the
old castle bodily in a romance that was then in his head, and he carried
out this threat by making the villa the old family castle of Donatello.

After Hawthorne returned to America he began two other novels, one
founded upon the old legend of the elixir of life. This story was
probably suggested to him by Thoreau, who spoke of the house in which
Hawthorne lived at Concord, after leaving the old Manse, as having been
the abode, a century or two before, of a man who believed that he should
never die. This subject was a charming one for Hawthorne's peculiar
genius, but the story, with another--the _Dolliver Romance_--was never
completed, the death of Hawthorne in 1864 leaving the work unfinished.

[Illustration: THE CAMERA CLUB]

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