paque substance of to-day, and thus make it a
bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and
indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and
wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was
now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that
was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only
because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book
than I shall ever write was there.... These perceptions came
too late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor
tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor
of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is
anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that
one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your
consciousness, like ether out of phial; so that at every
glance you find a smaller and less volatile residuum."

As, however, it was with what was left of his intellect after three
years' evaporation, that Hawthorne wrote _The Scarlet Letter_, there
is little reason to complain of the injury he suffered in his
Surveyorship.

His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled _Yesterdays with
Authors_, has related the circumstances in which Hawthorne's
masterpiece came into the world. "In the winter of 1849, after he had
been ejected from the Custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him
and inquire after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from
illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house.... I found him
alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling, and as the
day was cold he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his
future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very
desponding mood." His visitor urged him to bethink himself of
publishing something, and Hawthorne replied by calling his attention
to the small popularity his published productions had yet acquired,
and declaring that he had done nothing and had no spirit for doing
anything. The narrator of the incident urged upon him the necessity of
a more hopeful view of his situation, and proceeded to take leave. He
had not reached the street, however, when Hawthorne hurried to
overtake him, and, placing a roll of MS. in his hand, bade him take it
to Boston, read it, and pronounce upon it. "It is either very good or
very bad," said the author; "I don't know which." "On my way back to
Boston," says Mr. Fields,