his mind, as his subjects
were apt to do; so that he appears completely to possess it, to know
it and feel it. It is simpler and more complete than his other novels;
it achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about it that
charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the
first time he has touched his highest mark--a sort of straightness and
naturalness of execution, an unconsciousness of his public, and
freshness of interest in his theme. It was a great success, and he
immediately found himself famous. The writer of these lines, who was a
child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced,
and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a
peculiar horror were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to
read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the
book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief
indeed that the "letter" in question was one of the documents that
come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him
that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it was
difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester
Prynne's blood-coloured _A_. But the mystery was at last partly
dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the
annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a
representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and
a white coif, holding between her knees an elfish-looking little girl,
fantastically dressed and crowned with flowers. Embroidered on the
woman's breast was a great crimson _A_, over which the child's
fingers, as she glanced strangely out of the picture, were maliciously
playing. I was told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and
that when I grew older I might read their interesting history. But the
picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind; I had been vaguely
frightened and made uneasy by it; and when, years afterwards, I first
read the novel, I seemed to myself to have read it before, and to be
familiar with its two strange heroines, I mention this incident simply
as an indication of the degree to which the success of _The Scarlet
Letter_ had made the book what is called an actuality. Hawthorne
himself was very modest about it; he wrote to his publisher, when
there was a question of his undertaking another novel, that what had
given the history of Hester Prynne its "vogue" was simply t