is always a dreamy quality about the action: no violent quarrels, no passionate love scenes. Thus it has been often pointed out that in "The Scarlet Letter" we do not get the history of Dimmesdale's and Hester's sin: not the passion itself, but only its sequels in the conscience. So in "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Marble Faun," a crime has preceded the opening of the story, which deals with the working out of the retribution.

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When Hawthorne handled real persons, it was in the form of the character sketchoften the satirical character sketch, as in the introduction to "The Scarlet Letter” which scandalized the people of Salem. If he could have made a novel out of his customhouse acquaintances, he might have given us something less immaterial. He felt the lack of solidity in his own creations: the folly of constructing "the semblance of a world out of airy matter”; the "value hidden in petty incidents and ordinary characters." better book than I shall ever write was there," he confesses, but "my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it."

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Now and then, when he worked from observation, or utilized his own experiences, a piece of drastic realism results. The suicide of Zenobia is transferred, with the necessary changes, from a long passage in "The Ameri

can Note Books," in which he tells of going out at night, with his neighbors, to drag for I the body of a girl who had drowned herself in the Concord. Yet he did not refrain the touch of symbolism even here. There is a wound on Zenobia's breast, inflicted by the pole with which Hollingsworth is groping the river bottom.

And this is why one finds his "American Note Books" quite as interesting reading as his stories. Very remarkable things, these note books. They have puzzled Mr. James, who asks what the author would be at in them, and suggests that he is writing letters I to himself, or practising his hand at description. They are not exactly a journal intime; nor are they records of thought, like Emerson's ten volumes of journals. They are carefully composed, and are full of hints for plots, scenes, situations, characters, to be later worked up. In the three collections, "Twice-Told Tales," "Mosses from an Old Manse," and "The Snow Image," there are, in round numbers, a hundred tales and sketches; and Mr. Conway has declared that, in the number of his original plots, no modern author, save Browning, has equalled Hawthorne. Now, the germ of many, if not most, of these inventions may be found in some brief jotting a paragraph, or a line or two-in "The American Note Books."

Yet it is not as literary material that these notes engage me most-by far the greater portion were never used, but as records of observation and studies of life. I will even acknowledge a certain excitement when the diarist's wanderings lead him into my own neighborhood, however insignificant the result. Thus, in a letter from New Haven in 1830, he writes, "I heard some of the students at Yale College conjecturing that I was an Englishman." Mr. Lathrop thinks that it was on this trip through Connecticut that he hit upon his story, "The Seven Vagabonds," the scene of which is near Stamford, in the van of a travelling showman, where the seven wanderers take shelter during a thunderstorm. How quaintly true to the old provincial life of back-country New England are these figures—a life that survives to-day in out-of-the-way places. Holgrave, the young daguerreotypist in "The House of the Seven Gables," a type of the universal Yankee, had practised a number of these queer trades: had been a strolling dentist, a lecturer on mesmerism, a salesman in a village store, a district schoolmaster, editor of a country newspaper; and "had subsequently travelled New England and the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut manufactory of Cologne water and other essences." The Note Books tell us that,

at North Adams in 1838, the author foregathered with a surgeon-dentist, who was also a preacher of the Baptist persuasion: and that, on the stage-coach between Worcester and Northampton, they took up an essence-vender who was peddling anise-seed, cloves, red-cedar, wormwood, opodeldoc, hair-oil, and Cologne water. Do you imagine that the essence-peddler is extinct? No, you may meet his covered wagon to-day on lonely roads between the hill-villages of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

It was while living that strange life of seclusion at Old Salem, compared with which Thoreau's hermitage at Walden was like the central roar of Broadway, that Hawthorne broke away now and then from his solitude, and went rambling off in search of contacts with real life. Here is another item that he fetched back from Connecticut under date of September, 1838: "In Connecticut and also sometimes in Berkshire, the villages are situated on the most elevated ground that can be found, so that they are visible for miles around. Litchfield is a remarkable instance, occupying a high plain, without the least shelter from the winds, and with almost as wide an expanse of view as from a mountain-top. The streets are very wide-two or three hundred feet at least-with wide green margins, and sometimes there is a wide green

space between two road tracks. . . . The graveyard is on the slope, and at the foot of a swell, filled with old and new gravestones, some of red freestone, some of gray granite, most of them of white marble and one of cast iron with an inscription of raised letters." Do I not know that wind-swept hilltop, those grassy avenues? Do I not know that ancient graveyard, and what names are on its headstones? Yes, even as the heart knoweth its own bitterness.

As we go on in life, anniversaries become rather melancholy affairs. The turn of the year the annual return of the day-birthdays or death-days or set festal occasions like Christmas or the New Year, bring reminders of loss and change. This is true of domestic anniversaries; while public literary celebrations, designed to recall to a forgetful generation the centenary or other dates in the lives of great writers, appear too often but milestones on the road to oblivion. Fifty years is too short a time to establish a literary immortality; and yet, if any American writer has already won the position of a classic, Hawthorne is that writer. Speaking in this country in 1883, Matthew Arnold said: "Hawthorne's literary talent is of the first order. His subjects are generally not to me subjects of the highest interest; but his literary talent is . . . the finest, I think,