is of especial importance to look into. What had a development was
his imagination--that delicate and penetrating imagination which was
always at play, always entertaining itself, always engaged in a game
of hide and seek in the region in which it seemed to him, that the
game could best be played--among the shadows and substructions, the
dark-based pillars and supports, of our moral nature. Beneath this
movement and ripple of his imagination--as free and spontaneous as
that of the sea surface--lay directly his personal affections. These
were solid and strong, but, according to my impression, they had the
place very much to themselves.

His innocent reserve, then, and his exaggerated, but by no means
cynical, relish for solitude, imposed themselves upon him, in a great
measure, with a persistency which helped to make the time a tolerably
arid one--so arid a one indeed that we have seen that in the light of
later happiness he pronounced it a blank. But in truth, if these were
dull years, it was not all Hawthorne's fault. His situation was
intrinsically poor--poor with a poverty that one almost hesitates to
look into. When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life,
of taste, must have been in a small New England town fifty years ago;
and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of
literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form and
colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of them,
compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sentiment, and we
see the large dry village picture in perhaps almost too hard a light.
It seems to me then that it was possibly a blessing for Hawthorne that
he was not expansive and inquisitive, that he lived much to himself
and asked but little of his _milieu_. If he had been exacting and
ambitious, if his appetite had been large and his knowledge various,
he would probably have found the bounds of Salem intolerably narrow.
But his culture had been of a simple sort--there was little of any
other sort to be obtained in America in those days, and though he was
doubtless haunted by visions of more suggestive opportunities, we may
safely assume that he was not to his own perception the object of
compassion that he appears to a critic who judges him after half a
century's civilization has filtered into the twilight of that earlier
time. If New England was socially a very small place in those days,
Salem was a still smaller one; and if the