been altogether amiss,
in those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with this
heavy-footed traveller and feed on the gross diet that he
carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now! And
then, how English! Many of the latent sympathies that
enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that so
readily amalgamated themselves with the American ideas that
seemed most adverse to them, may have been derived from, or
fostered and kept alive by, the great English moralist.
Never was a descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than
that! Doctor Johnson's morality was as English an article as
a beef-steak."

And for mere beauty of expression I cannot forbear quoting this
passage about the days in a fine English summer:--

"For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far
as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer
day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake,
at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through
the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath
quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon
their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious
that it is bedtime again, while there is still enough
daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book
distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such season,
hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day
beholds its successor; or if not quite true of the latitude
of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern
parts of the island that To-morrow is born before its
Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden
twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face
of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may
simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of
recollection and another of prophecy."

The Note-Books, as I have said, deal chiefly with, the superficial
aspect of English life, and describe the material objects with which
the author was surrounded. They often describe them admirably, and the
rural beauty of the country has never been more happily expressed. But
there are inevitably a great many reflections and incidental
judgments, characterisations of people he met, fragments of psychology
and social criticism, and it is here that Hawthorne's mixture of
subtlety and simplic