"I read the germ of _The Scarlet Letter_;
before I slept that night I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration
of the marvellous story he had put into my hands, and told him that I
would come again to Salem the next day and arrange for its
publication. I went on in such an amazing state of excitement, when we
met again in the little house, that he would not believe I was really
in earnest. He seemed to think I was beside myself, and laughed sadly
at my enthusiasm." Hawthorne, however, went on with the book and
finished it, but it appeared only a year later. His biographer quotes
a passage from a letter which he wrote in February, 1850, to his
friend Horatio Bridge. "I finished my book only yesterday; one end
being in the press at Boston, while the other was in my head here at
Salem, so that, as you see, my story is at least fourteen miles
long.... My book, the publisher tells me, will not be out before
April. He speaks of it in tremendous terms of approbation, so does
Mrs. Hawthorne, to whom I read the conclusion last night. It broke her
heart, and sent her to bed with a grievous headache--which I look
upon, as a triumphant success. Judging from the effect upon her and
the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers call a ten-strike. But
I don't make any such calculation." And Mr. Lathrop calls attention,
in regard to this passage, to an allusion in the English Note-Books
(September 14, 1855). "Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at
his coolness in respect to his own pathos, and compare it to my
emotions when I read the last scene of _The Scarlet Letter_ to my
wife, just after writing it--tried to read it rather, for my voice
swelled and heaved as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it
subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous state then, having
gone through a great diversity of emotion while writing it, for many
months."

The work has the tone of the circumstances in which it was produced.
If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood, and if his future was painfully
vague, _The Scarlet Letter_ contains little enough of gaiety or of
hopefulness. It is densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in
it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy of
English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the
author's masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue to be, for other
generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame. The
subject had probably lain a long time in