ainly seeking to
return to it." And Hawthorne devotes a chapter to this idea of the
child's having, by putting the brook between Hester and herself,
established a kind of spiritual gulf, on the verge of which her little
fantastic person innocently mocks at her mother's sense of
bereavement. This conception belongs, one would say, quite to the
lighter order of a story-teller's devices, and the reader hardly goes
with Hawthorne in the large development he gives to it. He hardly goes
with him either, I think, in his extreme predilection for a small
number of vague ideas which are represented by such terms as "sphere"
and "sympathies." Hawthorne makes too liberal a use of these two
substantives; it is the solitary defect of his style; and it counts as
a defect partly because the words in question are a sort of specialty
with certain writers immeasurably inferior to himself.

I had not meant, however, to expatiate upon his defects, which are of
the slenderest and most venial kind. _The Scarlet Letter_ has the
beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions, and its
weaker spots, whatever they are, are not of its essence; they are mere
light flaws and inequalities of surface. One can often return to it;
it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of
great works of art. It is admirably written. Hawthorne afterwards
polished his style to a still higher degree, but in his later
productions--it is almost always the case in a writer's later
productions--there is a touch of mannerism. In _The Scarlet Letter_
there is a high degree of polish, and at the same time a charming
freshness; his phrase is less conscious of itself. His biographer very
justly calls attention to the fact that his style was excellent from
the beginning; that he appeared to have passed through no phase of
learning how to write, but was in possession of his means from the
first of his handling a pen. His early tales, perhaps, were not of a
character to subject his faculty of expression to a very severe test,
but a man who had not Hawthorne's natural sense of language would
certainly have contrived to write them less well. This natural sense
of language--this turn for saying things lightly and yet touchingly,
picturesquely yet simply, and for infusing a gently colloquial tone
into matter of the most unfamiliar import, he had evidently cultivated
with great assiduity. I have spoken of the anomalous character of his
Note-Books--