"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be
encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a
sunshiny book."

And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is little
probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although I
have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He did
indeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in January that
he could not go on.

"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present, lost
its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better
keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I wait quietly
for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say to the public
about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will
be. I shall never finish it.... I cannot finish it unless a great change
comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my
death."

Finally, work had to be given over indefinitely. In April he went
southward with Mr. Ticknor, the senior partner of his publishing house;
but Mr. Ticknor died suddenly in Philadelphia, and Hawthorne returned to
The Wayside more feeble than ever. He lingered there a little while. Then,
early in May, came the last effort to recover tone, by means of a
carriage-journey, with his friend Ex-President Pierce, through the
southern part of New Hampshire. A week passed, and all was ended: at the
hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he and his companion had stopped
to rest, he died in the night, between the 18th and the 19th of May, 1864.