elixirs and
potions belongs to the fairy-tale period of taste, and the idea of a
young man enabling himself to live forever by concocting and imbibing
a magic draught, has the misfortune of not appealing to our sense of
reality or even to our sympathy. The weakness of _Septimius Felton_ is
that the reader cannot take the hero seriously--a fact of which there
can be no better proof than the element of the ridiculous which
inevitably mingles itself in the scene in which he entertains his
lady-love with a prophetic sketch of his occupations during the
successive centuries of his earthly immortality. I suppose the answer
to my criticism is that this is allegorical, symbolic, ideal; but we
feel that it symbolises nothing substantial, and that the
truth--whatever it may be--that it illustrates, is as moonshiny, to
use Hawthorne's own expression, as the allegory itself. Another fault
of the story is that a great historical event--the war of the
Revolution--is introduced in the first few pages, in order to supply
the hero with a pretext for killing the young man from whose grave the
flower of immortality is to sprout, and then drops out of the
narrative altogether, not even forming a background to the sequel. It
seems to me that Hawthorne should either have invented some other
occasion for the death of his young officer, or else, having struck
the note of the great public agitation which overhung his little group
of characters, have been careful to sound it through the rest of his
tale. I do wrong, however, to insist upon these things, for I fall
thereby into the error of treating the work as if it had been cast
into its ultimate form and acknowledged by the author. To avoid this
error I shall make no other criticism of details, but content myself
with saying that the idea and intention of the book appear, relatively
speaking, feeble, and that even had it been finished it would have
occupied a very different place in the public esteem from the writer's
masterpieces.

The year 1864 brought with it for Hawthorne a sense of weakness and
depression from which he had little relief during the four or five
months that were left him of life. He had his engagement to produce
_The Dolliver Romance_, which had been promised to the subscribers of
the _Atlantic Monthly_ (it was the first time he had undertaken to
publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was unable to
write, and his consciousness of an unperformed task weighed u