languid and dispirited.... O that
Providence would build me the merest little shanty, and mark me out a
rood or two of garden ground, near the sea-coast!" He was at this time
for a while out of health; and it is proper to remember that though
the Massachusetts Berkshire, with its mountains and lakes, was
charming during the ardent American summer, there was a reverse to
the medal, consisting of December snows prolonged into April and May.
Providence failed to provide him with a cottage by the sea; but he
betook himself for the winter of 1852 to the little town of West
Newton, near Boston, where he brought into the world _The Blithedale
Romance_.

This work, as I have said, would not have been written if Hawthorne
had not spent a year at Brook Farm, and though it is in no sense of
the word an account of the manners or the inmates of that
establishment, it will preserve the memory of the ingenious community
at West Roxbury for a generation unconscious of other reminders. I
hardly know what to say about it save that it is very charming; this
vague, unanalytic epithet is the first that comes to one's pen in
treating of Hawthorne's novels, for their extreme amenity of form
invariably suggests it; but if on the one hand it claims to be
uttered, on the other it frankly confesses its inconclusiveness.
Perhaps, however, in this case, it fills out the measure of
appreciation more completely than in others, for _The Blithedale
Romance_ is the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest, of this
company of unhumorous fictions.

The story is told from a more joyous point of view--from a point of
view comparatively humorous--and a number of objects and incidents
touched with the light of the profane world--the vulgar, many-coloured
world of actuality, as distinguished from the crepuscular realm of the
writer's own reveries--are mingled with its course. The book indeed is
a mixture of elements, and it leaves in the memory an impression
analogous to that of an April day--an alternation of brightness and
shadow, of broken sun-patches and sprinkling clouds. Its denoument is
tragical--there is indeed nothing so tragical in all Hawthorne, unless
it be the murder-of Miriam's persecutor by Donatello, in
_Transformation_, as the suicide of Zenobia; and yet on the whole the
effect of the novel is to make one think more agreeably of life. The
standpoint of the narrator has the advantage of being a concrete one;
he is no longer, as in the precedin