No other author has affected me quite so profoundly as did Hawthorne.  The period of my development from childhood through youth to maturity was coeval with the time of his literary activities.  The first vivid impression I received from books came from his stories for children, Grandfather’s Chair, Famous Old People, and The Liberty Tree; when somewhat older I read The Rill from the Town Pump and Little Annie’s Ramble, still later came the weird creations in which Hawthorne’s expanding genius manifested itself, such as The Minister’s Black Veil, Rappaccini’s Daughter, and The Celestial Railroad.  And not less in young manhood I was awed and absorbed in the great works of his maturity, The Scarlet Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables, and the Marble Faun. Meat and drink as they were to me in my youth and first entrance into life, I naturally feel that the author of these books was in mind profoundly powerful.  In point of genius among our Americans I should set no man before him.  He was not a moral inspirer nor a leader, he gave to no one directly any spiritual uplift, nor did he help one directly to strength in fighting the battles of life.  He was a peerless artist portraying marvellously the secret things of the human soul, his concrete pictures taken from the old Puritan society, from the New England of his day and from the passionate Italian life.  He portrays but he draws no lesson any more than Shakespeare, his books are pictures of the souls of men, of the sweet and wholesome things and also the weakness, the sin and the morbid defect.  These having been revealed the reader is left to his own inferences.  It is fully made plain that he was a soft-hearted man, at any rate in his earlier time.  The stories he wrote at the outset for children are often full of sweetness and sympathy.  But as he went on with his work these qualities are less apparent, the spirit of the artist more and more prevailing, until he paints with relentless realism even what is hideous, not approving or condemning; it is part of life and must be set down.  Many have thought it strange that Hawthorne apparently had no patriotism.  In our Civil War he stood quite indifferent, a marked contrast with the men among whom he lived and who like him have literary eminence.  These passages stand in his diary and letters.  “February 14, 1862, Frank Pierce came here to-night....  He is bigoted as to the Union and sees nothing but ruin without it.  Whereas I should not much regret an ultimate separation.”  “At present we have no country....  New England is really quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in.  I have no kindred with or leaning toward the abolitionists.”  But his coolness to his country’s welfare was of a piece with the general coolness toward well and ill in the affairs of the world.  Humanity rolls before him as it did before Shakespeare, sometimes weak, sometimes heroic, depressed, exultant, suffering, happy.  He did not concern himself to regulate its movement, to heighten its joy, or mitigate its sorrow.  His work was to portray it as it moved, and in that conception of his mission he established his masterfulness as an artist, though it abates somewhat, does it not? from his wholeness as a man.