calling to her as he went that he had sat up all night to
read the story. Soon her husband came down and walked about the room
with a new light in his eyes.

Early in April the book was issued in an edition of 5,000 copies; this
was soon exhausted, and Hawthorne was well started on that career of
literary fame which led Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, a hundred years after
the birth of Hawthorne, to call him "the foremost literary artist of
America."

_The Scarlet Letter_, as Hawthorne himself tells us, is a story of
"human frailty and sorrow." It is the story of one who has brooded
long and faithfully upon the problem of evil. In it we read that man
is the master of his fate. The great difference between ancient and
modern literature is this: the old dramatists seem to believe that
somewhere there is a power above and beyond the control of man, a
blind, unreasoning force that seems to play with man as the football
of chance. Whatever may be done by man will prove unavailing if Fate
or Destiny has decreed otherwise. Out of such a philosophy of life
comes the story of OEdipus. The modern conception is that expressed by
Shakspere:

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Still later Henley in his one great poem has expressed the thought
with vigor,--

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul!

With unfaltering aim Hawthorne shows that each character works out its
own destiny. That man is helpless, the sport of gods, the football of
Fate, is disproved by the patient transformation in the character of
Hester.

Some one has well characterized _The Scarlet Letter_ as "a drama of
the spirit." It is a story such as only one who had brooded deeply on
the problem of evil could write. Hawthorne was a "solitary brooder
upon life." Every one who knew him testified to this impression. When
William Dean Howells, a young man from Ohio, knocked at the door of
the Wayside Cottage, a letter of introduction in his hand, and a
feeling of hero-worship in his heart, he was ushered into the presence
of the great romancer, who advanced "carrying his head with a heavy
forward droop" and with pondering pace. His look was "somber and
brooding--the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore
sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted and
forever evaded Hawthorne."