the whole, perhaps equally good. The _Blithedale Romance_, published
in the same year, though not strikingly inferior to the others, adhered
more to conventional patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature
of its ending. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the
terrible scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the
author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the account of
which, in his own words, may be read in Julian Hawthorne's _Nathaniel
Hawthorne and His Wife_. In 1852 Hawthorne returned to Concord and
bought the "Wayside" property, which he retained until his death. But
in the following year his old college friend Pierce, now become
President, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad for
seven years. The most valuable fruit of his foreign residence was the
romance of the _Marble Faun_, 1860, the longest of his fictions and the
richest in descriptive beauty. The theme of this was the development
of the soul through the experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery
thrown about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the beginning
and the end. There is even a delicate teasing suggestion of the
preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation as original as
Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouque's Undine, and yet quite on this side
the border-line of the human. _Our Old Home_, a book of charming
papers on England, was published in 1863. Manifold experience of life
and contact with men, affording scope for his always keen observation,
had added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety which had
manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two admirable books for
children, the _Wonder Book_ and _Tanglewood Tales_, in which the
classical mythologies were retold, should also be mentioned in the list
of Hawthorne's writings, as well as the _American_, _English_, and
_Italian Note Books_, the first of which contains the seed-thoughts of
some of his finished works, together with hundreds of hints for plots,
episodes, descriptions, etc., which he never found time to work out.