Honest Tom was obeyed, and the shout rent | I owned but sunlight that they took. FROM THE FRENCH OF PIERRE-JEAN DE BÉRANGER. WELL, in this ditch I reach at last, Old, weak and tired, my closing day; Folks I'm drunk, then hurry past: say Good! there's no pity thrown away. Yes, here, of age, they'll say I die; Have sighed, as for a last resource! So In youth the artisans I prayed For leave a useful craft to learn. "We are but half employed," they said; "With us thy bread thou canst not earn!" Ye rich, who still "Go work!" repeat, Scraps from board your you gave, I Stretched on your straw my sleep was sweet; I curse not, but I die alone. own; I might have stolen, poor soul! 'tis true; They barred me in their prisons lone: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. WENTY miles north-west of tion, two hundred and fifty years ago the and in its sleepy isolation it On a tongue of land between two rivers, fourteen miles north-east of Boston, lies the oldest city in New England, settled in 1626, only five years after the Pilgrims of the Mayflower landed at Plymouth. Founded to give religious liberty to exiles from England, its inhabitants could not overcome the spirit of the age and the vindictive memory of their former grievances. Thus they presented scenes of intolerance and enforced penance little in accordance with the religion they professed. Seventy years after its foundation nineteen persons were tried, condemned and executed for witchcraft, and the beautiful eminence where they suffered is still called, not without local pride, "Gallows' Hill." It is well, of course, to say that those were comparatively dark and troublous times, but the fact remains, and the history has always influenced the Salem people. They are as proud of executing the witches-their historian defends it-as they are of the noble part they bore in the Revolutionary war, when, the English government having closed the port of Boston for contumacy, Salem opened her waters and wharves to Boston, and for a time staved off the purpose of British oppression. With this somewhat extraordinary but necessary preface, we come to consider the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born at Salem and lived at Concord, and who carried both with him in form and spirit in almost everything he wrote-not their intolerance, but their traditions, their folk-lore, their curious history and mysterious incidents. It is just to say he is an American novelist, or romancer; but as Scott was chiefly the exponent and interpreter of local Scottish life and Cooper principally the product of our border Indian life, so it is more specifically just to say that Hawthorne was the New England novelist who drew his inspiration from Salem and from Concord, with occasional influences from Boston-no mean source, I allow, but somewhat provincial and sectional. with others in Longfellow's semi-centennial Nathaniel Hawthorne came of English stock and was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in the year 1807, in the same year as Longfellow, who was his lifelong friend and admirer. His ancestors took part in the trial and execution of the witches. For several generations the men of the family, including his father, were shipmasters. The knight-pean wanderings, to muse and write and die. errantry of the stalwart men of bleak and barren New England sought wealth and adventure on the sea because so many other fields were closed to them. When Nathaniel came into the world, the outlook was better; and the boy secured an education fitting him for nobler duties. Young Hawthorne was graduated at Bowdoin College, in the same class with Longfellow, in 1825, and would have been included The old manse, with a local history, gave him the title for another series of stories, which he called Mosses from an Old Manse. Weird, vague, alluring but yet unsatisfying, these tales commend themselves to a class of romantic readers who shun daylight and take pleasure in mystery. There is no disputing, says the Latin adage, concerning tastes, and in a general company half the number will be disappointed with what the other half will thoroughly enjoy. The critic belongs to one or the other division, and his judgment will please or displease accordingly. No writer has been more under the influence of his surroundings than Hawthorne. What the French call the couleur locale is found in all his stories. As he was almost a perfect recluse, his field of vision was very limited. It is said that during these three years of sojourn at Concord he was not seen on its several streets by more than a dozen persons. In the year 1846 he was taken out of his seclusion by receiving the appointment, from President Polk, of surveyor of the port of Salem, the collector being that brave old General Miller who during the war of 1812 was asked if he could take and hold a certain position of importance. His answer was, I'll try, sir." He tried, and took it. He tried, and took it. The fancy of Hawthorne for delineating the persons and scenes around him has found a vent in his long preface to The Scarlet Letter, in which he describes, satirically but not acrimoniously, his comrades in the custom-house, including Collector Miller, for which he has been censured by the critics. After one year of this official service some changes were made in the administration, and Hawthorne lost his office, the functions of which, by-the-bye, he had performed with great skill and exactitude. In 1850 he published what is considered his greatest workThe Scarlet Letter-to which I shall briefly refer presently, only saying here that it was received with favor, as the most striking historical romance yet produced in America. In 1851 he had removed temporarily to a home at Lenox, in Berkshire, on the lake called Stockbridge Bowl. There he followed up his good fortune by presenting to the world his House of the Seven Gables, a ghostly psychological story, to which I venture to apply the words of the English critic Hazlitt in speaking of Dr. Johnson's Rasselas: "It is the most melancholy and debilitating moral speculation that was ever put forth." Then in 1852 appeared his Blithedale Romance, which is based upon his connection with the Brook Farm before his marriage. This Brook Farm Community, at West Roxbury, was the attempt of a gentle communism to bring together a few literati and philosophers of both sexes-called by Hawthorne a "knot of dreamers "--who should have everything in common, who laid aside their pens to use the hoe and axe and tend the cattle, and who formed a scheme romantic but so uncomfortable that they were glad to abandon it. Margaret Fuller was the Zenobia of the story, but she was too material to play the part of the virgin martyr. In the mean time, Hawthorne had found a vein of ore worth the working, and one in which he was a master-workman then and throughout his life-stories for children. They are, in my judgment, the very best of his works. Who has not read the Tanglewood Tales and learned and better remembered than all the classical dictionaries could teach about the Minotaur, the Dragon's teeth, Circe's palace and the Golden Fleece? In the year 1852, Hawthorne's friend General Franklin Pierce became a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and the novelist-actuated first by a lifelong friendship, and second by a certainty of official preferment should Pierce be elected-wrote what is called a campaign Life of Pierce. It certainly was nothing more: Pierce as a man had no great claim to a permanent | uncommon power. Great praise is due to his Italian Note-Books on the same ground: he was at home in depicting Italian art, life, nature, scenery and costumes. He sketches with a master-hand, and in such simple and beautiful language as is well pleasing to all classes of readers. Although interesting, his French Note-Books are not equal to the Italian. record of his life; but it accomplished its temporary purpose, in that it aided in electing him and secured for Hawthorne, after the election, the lucrative position of United States consul to Liverpool, which he held for four years, from 1853 to 1857. In one of his books (Our Old Home) he has given us the story of his consulship. After leaving this office he resided on the Continent, principally in France and Italy, until 1860, and during this period he wrote his most elaborate work, The Marble Faun of Monte Beni, a work on art rather than a novel-a fresh, intelligent, correct, beautiful picture of Art and the home of Art absorbed, assimilated and transmitted to us from the ruins of Rome. He He says, with point as well as with truth, "Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them grow." A splendid work this, tinged with the curious individuality of the writer, but full of thought, art-enthusiasm, fine local coloring, and marking the very exact condition and relations of Art in Italy at the time he wrote. criticise his stories, but his art-fancies are above me I cannot presume to criticise The Marble Faun. His enthusiasm for Art was shared by his countrymen who were his companions at Rome. He pays honest and admiring tributes to W. C. Story, Randolph Rogers and Miss Harriet Hosmer, who no doubt shared with him the pleasure he experienced in finding the real Donatello, the man of the soil, the very faun of Praxiteles, who concealed under his massive curls the leaf-shaped ears of the woodland creature, terminating in little peaks. The murder by Donatello's hand leading to the mystic dungeon of St. Angelo is described with I can In 1860, Hawthorne returned from Europe to his old home at Concord a successful and an honored man. He did not come back to the old manse-which had gone into the hands of the son of the former ministerbut he bought a house, which he called "The Wayside." His new and greater works brought the feebler essays into Vogue; his volumes sold, were generally read, and he was pronounced by a large circle of admiring friends the greatest novelist America had produced. Highly valued and honored in England, his Transatlantic reputation enhanced his popularity at home, and more and better things were looked for from his pen; but in 1864, while travelling with his friend ex-President Pierce through New Hampshire-in not very good health, indeed, but by no means infirm or expecting deathhe was found one morning dead in his bed at an inn in Plymouth. Some chapters of an unfinished work entitled The Dolliver Romance appeared in numbers of the Atlantic Monthly for 1864, and in 1872 a few other remains were published, among which was Septimius Felton; or, The Elixir of Life: A Psychological Romance. A brief examination of Hawthorne's works will present proof that he was of an original mind, with an uncommon individuality-an isolated man among thousands, |