the beautiful. To perform that duty
effectually is perhaps the highest of artistic merits; and though we
may complain of Hawthorne's colouring as too evanescent, its charm
grows upon us the more we study it.

Hawthorne seems to have been slow in discovering the secret of his own
power. The 'Twice-Told Tales,' he tells us, are only a fragmentary
selection from a great number which had an ephemeral existence in
long-forgotten magazines, and were sentenced to extinction by their
author. Though many of the survivors are very striking, no wise reader
will regret that sentence. It could be wished that other authors were as
ready to bury their innocents, and that injudicious admirers might
always abstain from acting as resurrection-men. The fragments which
remain, with all their merits, are chiefly interesting as illustrating
the intellectual development of their author. Hawthorne, in his preface
to the collected edition (all Hawthorne's prefaces are remarkably
instructive) tells us what to think of them. The book, he says,
'requires to be read in the clear brown twilight atmosphere in which it
was written; if opened in the sunshine it is apt to look exceedingly
like a volume of blank pages.' The remark, with deductions on the score
of modesty, is more or less applicable to all his writings. But he
explains, and with perfect truth, that though written in solitude, the
book has not the abstruse tone which marks the written communications of
a solitary mind with itself. The reason is that the sketches 'are not
the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart, but his attempts
... to open an intercourse with the world.' They may, in fact, be
compared to Brummel's failures; and, though they do not display the
perfect grace and fitness which would justify him in presenting himself
to society, they were well worth taking up to illustrate the skill of
the master's manipulation. We see him trying various experiments to hit
off that delicate mean between the fanciful and the prosaic, which
shall satisfy his taste and be intelligible to the outside world.
Sometimes he gives us a fragment of historical romance, as in the story
of the stern old regicide who suddenly appears from the woods to head
the colonists of Massachusetts in a critical emergency; then he tries
his hand at a bit of allegory, and describes the search for the mythical
carbuncle which blazes by its inherent splendour on the face of a
mysterious cliff in the depths