f his mother. Circumstances led to her being housed under his
roof; there she lingered long at death's door, and there at last she
died. He profoundly loved her; but deep-rooted, too, in both of them was
that strange, New England shyness, masking in visible ice the underlying
emotion. Not since his boyhood had their mutual affection found free,
natural expression; and now, in this final hour, that bondage of habit
caused the words of tenderness to stumble on their lips. The awful
majesty of approaching death, prompting them to "catch up the whole
of love and utter it" ere it be too late, wrought this involuntary
self-repression into silent agony.

She died; his own health was shaken to its foundations; his children
fell ill, his wife underwent acute suffering; and through all this, and
more, The Scarlet Letter must be written. No wonder that, when he came
to read the story in manuscript to his wife, his voice faltered and
broke; and she slipped to her knees and hid her face on her arms in the
chair. "I had been suffering," he commentated, long afterwards, "from
a great diversity and severity of emotion." Great works of art--things
with the veritable spirit of enduring life in them--are destined to be
born in sore travail and pain. Those who give them birth yield up their
own life to them.

It was at this period--say, about 1850--that my own personal
recollections, in a shadowy and incoherent way, begin. The shadows are
exclusively of time's making; they were not of the heart. All through
the trials of my parents I retained a jocund equanimity (save for some
trifling childish ailments) and esteemed this world a friendly and
agreeable place. The Scarlet Letter dashed my spirits not a whit; I
knew not of its existence, by personal evidence, till full a dozen years
later; and even the death of my grandmother left me light of heart, for
the passing of the spirit from the body can but awaken the transient
curiosity of a child of four. For the rest, my physical environment, in
itself amusing and interesting enough to me, had its chief importance
from the material it afforded on which to construct the imaginary
scenes and characters of my play. My sister Una and myself were forever
enacting something or somebody not ourselves: childish egoism oddly
decking itself in the non-ego. We believed in fairies, in magic, in
angels, in transformations; Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm, The Black
Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our