e Blithedale Romance" Hawthorne stood
for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich atmospheric
effects which he prefers, and in spite of the unforgetable portrait of
Zenobia and powerful passages of realistic description, the book is not
quite focussed. In "The Marble Faun" Hawthorne comes into his own again.
Its central problem is one of those dark insoluble ones that he loves:
the influence of a crime upon the development of a soul. Donatello, the
Faun, is a charming young creature of the natural sunshine until his
love for the somber Miriam tempts him to the commission of murder: then
begins the growth of his mind and character. Perhaps the haunting power
of the main theme of the book has contributed less to its fame than the
felicity of its descriptions of Rome and Italy. For Hawthorne possessed,
like Byron, in spite of his defective training in the appreciation of
the arts, a gift of romantic discernment which makes "The Marble Faun,"
like "Childe Harold," a glorified guide-book to the Eternal City.

All of Hawthorne's books, in short, have a central core of psychological
romance, and a rich surface finish of description. His style, at its
best, has a subdued splendor of coloring which is only less wonderful
than the spiritual perceptions with which this magician was endowed. The
gloom which haunts many of his pages, as I have said elsewhere, is
the long shadow cast by our mortal destiny upon a sensitive soul. The
mystery is our mystery, perceived, and not created, by that finely
endowed mind and heart. The shadow is our shadow; the gleams of insight,
the soft radiance of truth and beauty, are his own.

A college classmate of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow summed up the Portland
boy's character in one sentence: "It appeared easy for him to avoid
the unworthy." Born in 1807, of Mayflower stock that had distinguished
itself for bravery and uprightness, the youth was graduated from Bowdoin
at eighteen. Like his classmate Hawthorne, he had been a wide and
secretly ambitious reader, and had followed the successive numbers of
Irving's "Sketch Book," he tells us, "with ever increasing wonder and
delight." His college offered him in 1826 a professorship of the modern
languages, and he spent three happy years in Europe in preparation. He
taught successfully at Bowdoin for five or six years, and for eighteen
years, 1836 to 1854, served as George Ticknor's successor at Harvard,
ultimately surrendering the chair to L