seem to have lost the power to bloom, he was morally, in an
appreciative degree, a chip of the old block. His forefathers had
crossed the Atlantic for conscience' sake, and it was the idea of the
urgent conscience that haunted the imagination of their so-called
degenerate successor. The Puritan strain in his blood ran clear--there
are passages in his Diaries, kept during his residence in Europe,
which might almost have been written by the grimmest of the old Salem
worthies. To him as to them, the consciousness of _sin_ was the most
importunate fact of life, and if they had undertaken to write little
tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant adjective, could
hardly have been more frequent in their pages than in those of their
fanciful descendant. Hawthorne had moreover in his composition
contemplator and dreamer as he was, an element of simplicity and
rigidity, a something plain and masculine and sensible, which might
have kept his black-browed grandsires on better terms with him than he
admits to be possible. However little they might have appreciated the
artist, they would have approved of the man. The play of Hawthorne's
intellect was light and capricious, but the man himself was firm and
rational. The imagination was profane, but the temper was not
degenerate.

The "dreary and unprosperous condition" that he speaks of in regard
to the fortunes of his family is an allusion to the fact that several
generations followed each other on the soil in which they had been
planted, that during the eighteenth century a succession of Hathornes
trod the simple streets of Salem without ever conferring any especial
lustre upon the town or receiving, presumably, any great delight from
it. A hundred years of Salem would perhaps be rather a dead-weight for
any family to carry, and we venture to imagine that the Hathornes were
dull and depressed. They did what they could, however, to improve