fragmentary studies The Ancestral Footstep, Septimius Felton, Dr Grimshawe's Secret, and The Dolliver Romance-are all painful gropings on the elusive track of a single idea that could not be firmly caught and held. He had no power to 'see it steadily and see it whole.' Another burden was that of the Civil War and his inability to take either side with heartiness. He went to the front and looked upon the scenes transacted there, wrote of them with a singular detachment, and saw President Lincoln with as little penetration as the dullest in those times. He had lived so long with shadows that he had no vital apprehension of the nation's agony in the birth-throes of a new and better time. There is a striking incongruity between the moonlit or twilight scene and atmosphere of his books and the bright glare of our contemporary life; here so much noise and shouting, there low and whispered tones. But even those who are well pleased with the immediate time should certainly be glad sometimes to draw apart with Hawthorne into a scene so different from that of their habitual life as his mysterious world.

From The Great Stone Face.'

[This allegory was suggested by the Old Man of Profile Mountain, in the Franconia Notch of the White Mountains, a remarkable resemblance in the high cliff to a human face.]

It was a happy lot for children to grow up to manhood or womanhood with the Great Stone Face before their eyes, for all the features were noble, and the expression was at once grand and sweet, as if it were the glow of a vast, warm heart, that embraced all mankind in its affections, and had room for more. It was an education only to look at it. According to the belief of many people, the valley owed much of its fertility to this benign aspect that was continually beaming over it, illuminating the clouds and infusing its tenderness into the sunshine. As we began with saying, a mother and her little boy sat at their cottage door, gazing at the Great Stone Face, and talking about it. The child's name was Ernest.

'Mother,' said he, while the Titanic visage smiled on him, I wish that it could speak, for it looks so very kindly that its voice must needs be pleasant. If I were to see a man with such a face I should love him dearly.'

'If an old prophecy should come to pass,' answered his mother, we may see a man, some time or other, with exactly such a face as that.'

'What prophecy do you mean, dear mother?' eagerly inquired Ernest. Pray, tell me all about it!'

So his mother told him a story that her own mother had told to her when she herself was younger than little Ernest; a story, not of things that were past, but of what was yet to come; a story, nevertheless, so very old that even the Indians, who formerly inhabited this valley, had heard it from their forefathers, to whom, as they affirmed, it had been murmured by the mountain-streams, and whispered by the wind among the tree-tops. The purport was, that, at some future day, a child should be born hereabouts who was destined to become the greatest and noblest personage of his time, and whose countenance in manhood should bear an exact resemblance to

the Great Stone Face. Not a few old-fashioned people, and young ones likewise, in the ardour of their hopes, still cherished an enduring faith in this old prophecy. But others, who had seen more of the world, had watched and waited till they were weary, and had beheld no man with such a face, nor any man that proved to be much greater or nobler than his neighbours, concluded it to be nothing but an idle tale. At all events, the great man of the prophecy had not yet appeared.

'O mother, dear mother!' cried Ernest, clapping his hands above his head, 'I do hope that I shall live to see him!'

His mother was an affectionate and thoughtful woman, and felt that it was wisest not to discourage the generous hopes of her little boy; so she only said to him, 'Perhaps you may.'

[The story describes Mr Gathergold and a great general and statesman for whom a resemblance to the Great Stone Face was claimed, and finally a poet in whom Ernest himself imagined a likeness. But the poet protested that he did not live the poems that he wrote.]

The poet spoke sadly, and his eyes were dim with So, likewise, were those of Ernest.

tears.

At the hour of sunset, as had long been his frequent custom, Ernest was to discourse to an assemblage of the neighbouring inhabitants in the open air. He and the poet, arm in arm, still talking together as they went along, proceeded to the spot. It was a small nook among the hills, with a gray precipice behind, the stern front of which was relieved by the pleasant foliage of many creeping plants, that made a tapestry for the naked rock, by hanging their festoons from all its rugged angles. At a small elevation above the ground, set in a rich framework of verdure, there appeared a niche, spacious enough to admit a human figure, with freedom for such gestures as spontaneously accompany earnest thought and genuine emotion. Into this natural pulpit Ernest ascended, and threw a look of familiar kindness around upon his audience. They stood, or sat, or reclined upon the grass, as seemed good to each, with the departing sunshine falling obliquely over them, and mingling its subdued cheerfulness with the solemnity of a grove of ancient trees, beneath and amid the boughs of which the golden rays were constrained to pass. In another direction was seen the Great Stone Face, with the same cheer, combined with the same solemnity, in its benignant aspect.

Ernest began to speak, giving to the people of what was in his heart and mind. His words had power, because they accorded with his thoughts; and his thoughts had reality and depth, because they harmonised with the life which he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life of good deeds and holy love was melted into them. Pearls, pure and rich, had been dissolved into this precious draught. The poet, as he listened, felt that the being and character of Ernest were a nobler strain of poetry than he had ever written. eyes glistening with tears, he gazed reverentially at the venerable man, and said within himself that never was there an aspect so worthy of a prophet and a sage as that mild, sweet, thoughtful countenance, with the glory of white hair diffused about it. At a distance, but distinctly to be seen, high up in the golden light of the setting sun, appeared the Great Stone Face, with hoary mists around it, like the white hairs around the brow of Ernest. Its look of grand beneficence seemed to embrace

His

the world. At that moment, in sympathy with a thought which he was about to utter, the face of Ernest assumed a grandeur of expression, so imbued with benevolence that the poet, by an irresistible impulse, threw his arms aloft and shouted, 'Behold! Behold! Ernest is himself the likeness of the Great Stone Face!'

Then all the people looked, and saw that what the deep-sighted poet said was true. The prophecy was fulfilled. But Ernest, having finished what he had to say, took the poet's arm, and walked slowly homeward, still hoping that some wiser and better man than himself would by-and-by appear, bearing a resemblance to the Great Stone Face.

The Minister's Vigil.

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr Dimmesdale reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived through her first hour of public ignominy. The same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven long years, and footworn, too, with the tread of many culprits who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.

It was an obscure night of early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform, nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark gray of the midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night-air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had seen him in his closet wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous grip, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of Heaven-defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation, Mr Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily

pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to restrain himself, he shrieked aloud; an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background, as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro.

'It is done!' muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands. The whole town will awake, and hurry forth, and find me here!'

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater power to his own startled ears than it actually possessed. The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices, at that period, were often heard to pass over the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered his eyes and looked about him. . . .

Shortly afterwards the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break, and find him there. The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely defined figure aloft on the place of shame, and, half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go, knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost-as he needs must think it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. . . . All people, in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood !

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart-but he knew not whether of exquisite pain or pleasure as acute he recognised the tones of little Pearl.

'Pearl! Little Pearl!' cried he, after a moment's pause; then, suppressing his voice-'Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?'

'Yes, it is Hester Prynne!' she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the side-walk, along which she had been passing. 'It is I, and my little Pearl.'

'Whence come you, Hester?' asked the minister. 'What sent you hither?'

'I have been watching at a death-bed,' answered Hester Prynne-' at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and am now going homeward to my dwelling.'

'Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,' said the Reverend Mr Dimmesdale. 'Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together.'

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the plat

form, holding little Pearl by the hand.

The minister felt for the child's other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain. (From The Scarlet Letter.)

Hawthorne's complete works are published in Boston and New York in several editions: Little Classic,' 25 vols. ; 'Riverside,' 15 vols.; Standard Library,' 15 vols. The second and third of these editions contain the biography, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, by his son Julian. Other biographies are Henry James's in 'English Men of Letters' (1880); George Parsons Lathrop's Study of Hawthorne (1876); a Life by M. D. Conway, in 'Great Writers' series (1890); Memories of Hawthorne, by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897); and, best of all for critical analysis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, by George E. Woodberry in American Men of Letters' (1902).

JOHN WHITE CHADWICK.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65), President of the United States at the crisis of his country's fortunes, rose nobly to the occasion. His other services to the Republic need no comment in this place; but though he was as far as possible removed from what usually constitutes the man of letters, he has earned to all time a place in the literature of his country by his letters, his State papers, his speeches, and especially by his two inaugural addresses and the address, quoted below, at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery in November 1863.

The Gettysburg Address.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

William Wetmore Story (1819-95), son of an eminent judge, publicist, and law professor, was born at Salem, Massachusetts, and trained for the Bar, but went to Italy (1848) and became a

sculptor; and his writings rank him amongst the American litterateurs of the period-several collections of poems, Roba di Roma (1862), The Tragedy of Nero (1875), The Castle of St Angelo (1877), He and She (1883), Fiammetta (1885), Conversations in a Studio, Excursions (1891), and A Poet's Portfolio (1894). He died at Vallombrosa.

Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), destined to be known to fame as 'Hans Breitmann,' was born of Quaker parentage in Philadelphia, graduated at Princeton, and continued his studies at Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris. He was admitted to the Philadelphia Bar in 1851, but turned to journalism; and residing chiefly in England and Italy from 1869 on, made a special study of the Gypsies, the fruits of which appeared between 1873 and 1891 in four important and much-discussed works. It was in 1871 that the famous Hans Breitmann Ballads, in the grotesque mixture of German and American-English known as Pennsylvania Dutch, first appeared; they were extraordinarily popular in America and Britain, and were constantly quoted, so that scraps of them are permanent parts of conversational English even now. A continuation in 1895, however, fell flat. Other works of Leland's, some of them results of serious research not unmingled with too confident speculation, are The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams (1855); Meister Karl's Sketch-Book (1855); Legends of Birds (1864); Egyptian SketchBook (1873); Fu-Sang, or the Chinese Discovery of America (1875); Algonquin Legends (1884); Etruscan-Roman Remains in Tradition (1892); a translation in prose and verse of Heine's works; a series of art manuals; Legends of Florence (1895); and Flaxius, or Leaves from the Life of an Immortal, a humorous melange of Italian folk-lore, ancient history, and prophecy; besides his own Memoirs (2 vols. 1893).

George William Curtis (1824-92), born in Providence, Rhode Island, had a short experience of Brook Farm, and after four years in Europe (1846-50), joined the staff of the New York Tribune, and was one of the editors of Putnam's Monthly from 1852 to 1869. He commenced the 'Editor's Easy-Chair' papers in Harper's Monthly in 1853, and became principal leader-writer for Harper's Weekly on its establishment in 1857. His famous story of New York life, Trumps (1862), and most of his books appeared first in these journals. Prue and I (1856) was of sweet domesticity. His Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852) were bright-and light-impressions of his travels; Lotus-Eating (1852) was a series of letters from fashionable watering-places. More famous in their day were The Potiphar Papers (1853), satires on the pretentious life of New York. He was a strong anti-slavery orator and publicist, and a zealous writer in the cause of Civil Service reform. See Lives of him by Winter (1893), Chadwick (1893), and Cary (1894).

creasingly as a writer of tales; hardly at all as a poet. His early poems, however, were apt to reappear in the tales and to furnish their points of departure, as 'The Haunted Palace' in his most perfect tale, The Fall of the House of Usher, and 'Ligeia' in the powerful but ghastly tale of the same name. Here was legitimate economy, but no one ever utilised his 'funeral baked meats' more openly. He warmed them over with sublime assurance that, however served, they made a tempting dish. The repetend, his favourite poetical device, was central to the manner of his literary and personal life, which had much that was highly significant and much damnable iteration.' In 1840 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, in two volumes, bound up a full sheaf of his tales, including many of the best but not any of the ratiocinative kind which The Golden Bug was soon to usher in. Meantime, proud and ambitious, he fretted in subordination to his inferiors and aspired to have a magazine of his own, the Penn or Stylus, neither of which ever came to birth. Could he have kept his besetting sin at bay, his success as a journalist, already enviable, would have become one of the proudest of his time; but this he could not do, especially after the beginning, with a broken blood-vessel, of his childwife's fatal illness in 1842. This filled him with a passionate despair. Though he was never an habitual drunkard, his periods of indulgence now became more frequent, each marked by wild excitement, followed by horrible lassitude and depression. The conflicting accounts of his character and behaviour mark the difference between Philip drunk and Philip sober. The latter was gracious, gentle, and refined; the former bitter, sour, contentious, the victim of degenerate will. To drink he added opium, which, if it sometimes touched his page to more ethereal fancy, exacted fearful penaltles. Rumours of 'other vices' are without foundation. Even his most sensuous imagination was never sensual.

In 1844 he removed to New York, where his principal editorial connection was with the Broadway Journal, of which for a short and brilliant period he was the nominal owner. In 1845 he entered with The Raven on a second period of poetical production, after a fallow period of fifteen years' duration, except for the refashioning of his early crudities. The Raven did more for his reputation than all his reviews and tales. The Bells (1847) chimed in, and other poems followed, of less popular character, but of more inwardness and more exquisite beauty From 1846 his health was utterly broken and his poverty was made a subject of public notice and relief Those who wonder at his chronic impecuniosity and inveterate borrowing should remember the miserable pay he got for his best work. The good aunt kept his home as neat as it was bare, the neatness a necessity of his personal refinement, as was the delicate hand in which he always wrote, as if never putting

He

pen to paper when fallen from his best estate. He always had a genius for attracting friends; too frequently disappointing them and wearing out their kindly disposition. In January 1847 the crowning misery befell, the death of poor little Virginia. had then two years to live. These he so conducted that the most charitable, and probably the truest, explanation is that drink, opium, and sorrow had shaken sovereign reason from her seat. If the long-drawn futility of his pseudo-scientific Eureka does not require this construction, what does is his vain insistence on a first edition of fifty thousand copies and his claim for its worthless and yet powerful lucubrations of a revolutionary importance equal to Newton's theory of gravitation. From his sorrow for his lost Virginia he passed quickly to a series of sentimental consolations, looking here and there to marriage, and a union of sordid convenience had been negotiated in Richmond when a fatal lapse in Baltimore betrayed him into the hands of certain vile politicians who, drugging him for their base uses, induced a brain-fever of which he died, 7th October 1849. In the city of his first literary triumph he was followed to his grave by five persons, one of whom was the officiating clergyman.

His mournful death effected his entrance on a posthumous career which has been marked by stranger vicissitudes than those of his life. The details of that life have been contested in many particulars; its general character no less. A host of petty critics, with others of great competency, have endeavoured to assign his rank, with results ranging through wide degrees of difference. The principal line of cleavage is between those who value most his poems and those who value most his tales, but some have set the highest value on his critical writings.. These made his widest reputation in their day, but they have little value now except for the literary historian. If they were not the best of their kind in America when written, they were near to that, while marred by envy, favouritism, and a distorting personal equation. He made himself the measure of things. What he could not do must not be done. Hence (pace Homer) a long poem could not be written, nor (pace Scott) a long story. Didacticism and plagiarism were the Paynim against whom he tilted with the grimmest joy of battle. Of the former he was wholly innocent; of the latter often guiltier than those whom he assailed, while in his bravery of recondite learning he was frequently the ingenious charlatan.

Passing from his criticism to his tales, we pass from transient reputation to enduring fame. Their style commends them all, while, bettering with time, it is, at its best, far below the level of Hawthorne's more flexible medium. They exhibit the tendency to narrowness of range and iteration, which mark all the products of his mind, far less than the poems. A sentiment of horror is their prevailing trait, engagement with death and ruin