th and beauty. He
read Spenser, Rousseau, and the "Newgate Calendar," was graduated at
Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem
for thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself
the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are essays
in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a setting for a
preconceived "moral"; he is in love with allegory and parable. His own
words about his first collection of stories, "Twice-Told Tales," have
often been quoted: "They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed
in too retired a shade." Yet they are for the most part exquisitely
written. After a couple of years in the Boston Custom-House, and a
residence at the socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the
happiest of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt
in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest of his
essays, the Preface to "Mosses from an Old Manse," his second collection
of stories. After three years in the Custom-House at Salem, his
dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to produce his masterpiece, "The
Scarlet Letter," published in 1850. He was now forty-six. In 1851, he
published "The House of the Seven Gables," "The Wonder-Book," and "The
Snow Image, and Other Tales." In 1852 came "The Blithedale Romance," a
rich ironical story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years
in the American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of
residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except carefully
filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral romance, "The Marble
Faun." Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and settled in the Wayside at
Concord, busying himself with a new, and, as was destined, a never
completed story about the elixir of immortality. But his vitality was
ebbing, and in May, 1864, he passed away in his sleep. He rests under
the pines in Sleepy Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons.

It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of such
a man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few books. His rare,
delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing events. Not many of
his countrymen really love his writings, as they love, for instance the
writings of Dickens or Thackeray or Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some
time of his life, "The Scarlet Letter," and trembles at its passionate
indictment of the sin of concealment, at its agonized admonition, "Be