eyes looked upon him, and many a stupid head wagged in derision as he passed by.  But there was always waiting for him a sweet and honest welcome by the pleasant hearth where his mother and sisters sat and listened to the beautiful creations of his fresh and glowing fancy.  We can imagine the happy group gathered around the evening lamp!  “Well, my son,” says the fond mother, looking up from her knitting-work, “what have you got for us to-night?  It is some time since you read us a story, and your sisters are as impatient as I am to have a new one.”  And then we can hear, or think we hear, the young man begin in a low and modest tone the story of “Edward Fane’s Rosebud,” or “The Seven Vagabonds,” or perchance (O tearful, happy evening!) that tender idyl of “The Gentle Boy!” What a privilege to hear for the first time a “Twice-Told Tale,” before it was even once told to the public!  And I know with what rapture the delighted little audience must have hailed the advent of every fresh indication that genius, so seldom a visitant at any fireside, had come down so noiselessly to bless their quiet hearthstone in the sombre old town.  In striking contrast to Hawthorne’s audience nightly convened to listen while he read his charming tales and essays, I think of poor Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, facing those hard-eyed critics at the house of Madame Neckar, when as a young man and entirely unknown he essayed to read his then unpublished story of “Paul and Virginia.”  The story was simple and the voice of the poor and nameless reader trembled.  Everybody was unsympathetic and gaped, and at the end of a quarter of an hour Monsieur de Buffon, who always had a loud way with him, cried out to Madame Neckar’s servant, “Let the horses be put to my carriage!”

Hawthorne seems never to have known that raw period in authorship which is common to most growing writers, when the style is “overlanguaged,” and when it plunges wildly through the “sandy deserts of rhetoric,” or struggles as if it were having a personal difficulty with Ignorance and his brother Platitude.  It was capitally said of Chateaubriand that “he lived on the summits of syllables,” and of another young author that “he was so dully good, that he made even virtue disreputable.”  Hawthorne had no such literary vices to contend with.  His looks seemed from the start to be

    “Commercing with the skies,”

and he marching upward to the goal without impediment.  I was struck a few days ago with the untruth, so far as Hawthorne is concerned, of a passage in the Preface to Endymion.  Keats says:  “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.”  Hawthorne’s imagination had no middle period of decadence or doubt, but continued, as it began, in full vigor to the end.

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