er of horrors Madame Tussaud's is nothing. With proud, prosperous,
healthy men, Mr. Hawthorne has little sympathy; he prefers a cracked
piano to a new one; he likes cobwebs in the corners of his rooms. All
this peculiar taste comes out strongly in the little book in whose praise
I am writing. I read "The Minister's Black Veil," and find it the first
sketch of "The Scarlet Letter." In "Wakefield,"--the story of the man
who left his wife, remaining away twenty years, but who yet looked upon
her every day to appease his burning curiosity as to her manner of
enduring his absence--I find the keenest analysis of an almost
incomprehensible act.

And then Mr. Hawthorne has a skill in constructing allegories which no
one of his contemporaries, either English or American, possesses. These
allegorical papers may be read with pleasure for their ingenuity, their
grace, their poetical feeling; but just as, gazing on the surface of a
stream, admiring the ripples and eddies, and the widening rings made by
the butterfly falling into it, you begin to be conscious that there is
something at the bottom, and gradually a dead face wavers upwards from
the oozy weeds, becoming every moment more clearly defined, so through
Mr. Hawthorne's graceful sentences, if read attentively, begins to flash
the hidden meaning, a meaning, perhaps, the writer did not care to
express formally and in set terms, and which he merely suggests and
leaves the reader to make out for himself. If you have the book I am
writing about, turn up "David Swan," "The Great Carbuncle," "The Fancy
Show-box," and after you have read these, you will understand what I mean.

The next two books on my shelf--books at this moment leaning on the
"Twice-Told Tales"--are Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland," and the
"Lyra Germanica." These books I keep side by side with a purpose. The
forms of existence with which they deal seem widely separated; but a
strong kinship exists between them, for all that. I open Professor
Aytoun's book, and all this modern life--with its railways, its
newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in
Parliament--fades into nothingness and silence. Scotland, from Edinburgh
rock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest. The
wind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. That which lives
now has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling and ivied
ruins, are warm with household