very moment
expected home from a prison to which in his youth he had been condemned
unjustly, and in the silent solitude of which he has kept some
lineaments of gentleness while his hair has grown white, and a sense of
beauty while his brain has become disordered and his heart has been
crushed and all present influences of beauty have been quite shut out.
The House of Seven Gables is the purest piece of imagination in our
prose literature.

The characteristics of Hawthorne which first arrest the attention are
imagination and reflection, and these are exhibited in remarkable power
and activity in tales and essays, of which the style is distinguished
for great simplicity, purity and tranquillity. His beautiful story of
Rappacini's Daughter was originally published in the Democratic Review,
as a translation from the French of one M. de l'Aubepine, a writer whose
very name, he remarks in a brief introduction, (in which he gives in
French the titles of some of his tales, as _Contes deux foix racontees_,
_Le Culte du Feu,_ etc.) "is unknown to many of his countrymen, as well
as to the student of foreign literature." He describes himself, under
this _nomme de plume_, as one who--

"Seems to occupy an unfortunate position between the
transcendentalists (who under one name or another have their
share in all the current literature of the world), and the
great body of pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and
sympathies of the multitude. If not too refined, at all events
too remote, too shadowy and unsubstantial, in his mode of
development, to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too
popular to a satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions
of the former, he must necessarily find himself without an
audience, except here and there an individual, or possibly an
isolated clique."

His writings, to do them justice, he says--

"Are not altogether destitute of fancy and originality; they
might have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate
love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and
characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds,
and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions. His
fictions are sometimes historical, sometimes of the present
day, and sometimes, so far as can be discovered, have little or
no reference either to time or space. In any case, he generally
conten