riters--Emerson, for example--in the idealism peculiar to his
native land (in so far as such idealism of a country can be conceived
of as separate from the political) would be as unreasoning as to hold
that he was more interested in social progress than Thoreau, because he
was in the consular service and Thoreau was in no one's service--or
that the War Governor of Massachusetts was a greater patriot than
Wendell Phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties. Hawthorne's
art was true and typically American--as is the art of all men living in
America who believe in freedom of thought and who live wholesome lives
to prove it, whatever their means of expression.

Any comprehensive conception of Hawthorne, either in words or music,
must have for its basic theme something that has to do with the
influence of sin upon the conscience--something more than the Puritan
conscience, but something which is permeated by it. In this relation he
is wont to use what Hazlitt calls the "moral power of imagination."
Hawthorne would try to spiritualize a guilty conscience. He would sing
of the relentlessness of guilt, the inheritance of guilt, the shadow of
guilt darkening innocent posterity. All of its sins and morbid horrors,
its specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness play
around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less guilty
Elves of the Concord Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man Alcott may have
felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne. There is often a
pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset
"without posture, without noise but penetrating." There is at times the
mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its
horizon rather than in its waters." There is a sensitiveness to
supernatural sound waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to
paint them rather than explain them--and here, some may say that he is
wiser in a more practical way and so more artistic than Emerson.
Perhaps so, but no greater in the deeper ranges and profound mysteries
of the interrelated worlds of human and spiritual life.

This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted in our music (the
2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended fragment" trying
to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical adventures into the
half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms. It may have something
to do with the children's excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning,
and t