me to be regarded as a
mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensitive, and not
very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name,
the quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to
symbolize his personal and literary traits. He is by no means
certain that some of his subsequent productions have not been
influenced and modified by a natural desire to fill up so
amiable an outline, and to act in consonance with the character
assigned to him; nor, even now, could he forfeit it without a
few tears of tender sensibility. To conclude, however,--these
volumes have opened the way to most agreeable associations, and
to the formation of imperishable friendships; and there are
many golden threads, interwoven with his present happiness,
which he can follow up more or less directly, until he finds
their commencement here; so that his pleasant pathway among
realities seems to proceed out of the Dream-Land of his youth,
and to be bordered with just enough of its shadowy foliage to
shelter him from the heat of the day. He is therefore
satisfied with what the _Twice-Told Tales_ have done for him,
and feels it to be far better than fame."

That there should be any truth in this statement that the public was so
slow to recognize so fine a genius, is a mortifying evidence of the
worthlessness of a literary popularity. But it may be said of
Hawthorne's fame that it has grown steadily, and that while many who
have received the turbulent applause of the multitude since he began his
career are forgotten, it has widened and brightened, until his name is
among the very highest in his domain of art, to shine there with a
lustre equally serene and enduring.

Mr. Hawthorne's last work is _The House of Seven Gables_, a romance of
the present day. It is not less original, not less striking, not less
powerful, than The Scarlet Letter. We doubt indeed whether he has
elsewhere surpassed either of the three strongly contrasted characters
of the book. An innocent and joyous child-woman, Phoebe Pyncheon,
comes from a farm-house into the grand and gloomy old mansion where her
distant relation, Hepzibah Pyncheon, an aristocratical and fearfully
ugly but kind-hearted unmarried woman of sixty, is just coming down from
her faded state to keep in one of her drawing-rooms a small shop, that
she may be able to maintain an elder brother who is e