name of _The Dolliver Romance_,
is so very brief that little can be said of it. The author strikes,
with all his usual sweetness, the opening notes of a story of New
England life, and the few pages which have been given to the world
contain a charming picture of an old man and a child.

The other rough sketch--it is hardly more--is in a manner complete; it
was unfortunately deemed complete enough to be brought out in a
magazine as a serial novel. This was to do it a great wrong, and I do
not go too far in saying that poor Hawthorne would probably not have
enjoyed the very bright light that has been projected upon this
essentially crude piece of work. I am at a loss to know how to speak
of _Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of Life_; I have purposely
reserved but a small space for doing so, for the part of discretion
seems to be to pass it by lightly. I differ therefore widely from the
author's biographer and son-in-law in thinking it a work of the
greatest weight and value, offering striking analogies with Goethe's
_Faust_; and still more widely from a critic whom Mr. Lathrop quotes,
who regards a certain portion of it as "one of the very greatest
triumphs in all literature." It seems to me almost cruel to pitch in
this exalted key one's estimate of the rough first draught of a tale
in regard to which the author's premature death operates, virtually,
as a complete renunciation of pretensions. It is plain to any reader
that _Septimius Felton_, as it stands, with its roughness, its gaps,
its mere allusiveness and slightness of treatment, gives us but a
very partial measure of Hawthorne's full intention; and it is equally
easy to believe that this intention was much finer than anything we
find in the book. Even if we possessed the novel in its complete form,
however, I incline to think that we should regard it as very much the
weakest of Hawthorne's productions. The idea itself seems a failure,
and the best that might have come of it would have been very much
below _The Scarlet Letter_ or _The House of the Seven Gables_. The
appeal to our interest is not felicitously made, and the fancy of a
potion, to assure eternity of existence, being made from the flowers
which spring from the grave of a man whom the distiller of the potion
has deprived of life, though it might figure with advantage in a short
story of the pattern of the _Twice-Told Tales_, appears too slender to
carry the weight of a novel. Indeed, this whole matter of