desipere in loco--A rollicking world of
happy fools--Endless sunshine of some sort--Greenwich Fair
was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past, never
drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and
strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of
dressing themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat
wife--Apparent license under courteous restraint--He laughed
and pelted and was pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I
saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly shadow gliding
close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is
like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay--
"War nie sein Brod mit thranen ass."

THE Roman carnival opened about a month after our arrival in Rome. The
weather was bad nearly all the time, and my father's point of view was
correspondingly unsympathetic. The contrast between his mood now and a
year later, when he was not only stimulated by his daughter's recovery
from illness, but, also, was looking at everything rather as the
romancer than as the man, is worth bringing out. My father likewise
describes the carnival in the romance; there we see it in a third
phase--as art. But the passages in the note-books are written from the
realistic stand-point. In her transcriptions of the journals for the
press my mother was always careful to omit from the former everything
that had been "used" in the book; the principle, no doubt, was sound,
but it might be edifying for once, in a way, to do just the opposite, in
order to mark, if we choose to take the trouble, what kind of changes or
modifications Hawthorne the romancer would make in the work of my father
the observer of nature. Take your Marble Faun and turn to two of the
latter chapters and compare them with the corresponding pages in my
excerpts from the journals in the Biography. In the latter you will
find him always in a critical and carping humor; seeing everything
with abundant keenness, but recognizing nothing worth while in it.
The bouquets, he noticed, for example, were often picked up out of the
street and used again and again; "and," he adds, "I suppose they aptly
enough symbolized the poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts that had
flown from one hand to another along the muddy pathway of life, instead
of being treasured up in one faithful bosom. Really, it was great
nonsense."

It is true--such uncongenial interpretation--if you feel