ne 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, which America has yet produced--finer, by much, than
Emerson's." But how does the case stand to-day? I believe that
Hawthorne's fame is secure as a whol