of his going to such pains often to make a record of
incidents which either were not worth remembering or could be easily
remembered without its aid. But it helps us to understand the
Note-Books if we regard them as a literary exercise. They were
compositions, as school boys say, in which the subject was only the
pretext, and the main point was to write a certain amount of excellent
English. Hawthorne must at least have written a great many of these
things for practice, and he must often have said to himself that it
was better practice to write about trifles, because it was a greater
tax upon one's skill to make them interesting. And his theory was
just, for he has almost always made his trifles interesting. In his
novels his art of saying things well is very positively tested, for
here he treats of those matters among which it is very easy for a
blundering writer to go wrong--the subtleties and mysteries of life,
the moral and spiritual maze. In such a passage as one I have marked
for quotation from _The Scarlet Letter_ there is the stamp of the
genius of style.

"Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a
dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she
knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own
sphere and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of
recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them.
She thought of the dim forest with its little dell of
solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk,
where, sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and
passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How
deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man?
She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped
as it were in the rich music, with the procession of
majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his
worldly position, and still more so in that far vista in
his unsympathising thoughts, through which she now beheld
him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a
delusion, and that vividly as she had dreamed it, there
could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And
thus much of woman there was in Hester, that she could
scarcely forgive him--least of all now, when the heavy
footstep of their approaching fate might be heard, nearer,
nearer, nearer!--for being able to withdraw himself so