r upon a
briefer journey, from which he never returned. His health was
seriously disordered, and in April, according to a letter from Mrs.
Hawthorne, printed by Mr. Fields, he had been "miserably ill." His
feebleness was complete; he appears to have had no definite malady,
but he was, according to the common phrase, failing. General Pierce
proposed to him that they should make a little tour together among the
mountains of New Hampshire, and Hawthorne consented, in the hope of
getting some profit from the change of air. The northern New England
spring is not the most genial season in the world, and this was an
indifferent substitute for the resource for which his wife had, on his
behalf, expressed a wish--a visit to "some island in the Gulf Stream."
He was not to go far; he only reached a little place called Plymouth,
one of the stations of approach to the beautiful mountain scenery of
New Hampshire, when, on the 18th of May, 1864, death overtook him. His
companion, General Pierce, going into his room in the early morning,
found that he had breathed his last during the night--had passed away,
tranquilly, comfortably, without a sign or a sound, in his sleep. This
happened at the hotel of the place--a vast white edifice, adjacent to
the railway station, and entitled the Pemigiwasset House. He was
buried at Concord, and many of the most distinguished men in the
country stood by his grave.

He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life had been
singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations and vulgar efforts. It
had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated, as his work. He had
lived primarily in his domestic affections, which were of the
tenderest kind; and then--without eagerness, without pretension, but
with a great deal of quiet devotion--in his charming art. His work
will remain; it is too original and exquisite to pass away; among the
men of imagination he will always have his niche. No one has had just
that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more
successfully expressed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was
not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in a
sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He
combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with
a haunting care for moral problems. Man's conscience was his theme,
but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its
own substance, an interest,