was an inveterate observer of small things, and he found a field for
fancy among the most trivial accidents. There could be no better
example of this happy faculty than the little paper entitled "Night
Sketches," included among the _Twice-Told Tales_. This small
dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call attention to it is
almost to overrate its importance. This fact is equally true, indeed,
of a great many of its companions, which give even the most
appreciative critic a singular feeling of his own indiscretion--almost
of his own cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial,
that simply to mention them is to put them in a false position. The
author's claim for them is barely audible, even to the most acute
listener. They are things to take or to leave--to enjoy, but not to
talk about. Not to read them would be to do them an injustice (to read
them is essentially to relish them), but to bring the machinery of
criticism to bear upon them would be to do them a still greater wrong.
I must remember, however, that to carry this principle too far would
be to endanger the general validity of the present little work--a
consummation which it can only be my desire to avert. Therefore it is
that I think it permissible to remark that in Hawthorne, the whole
class of little descriptive effusions directed upon common things, to
which these just-mentioned Night Sketches belong, have a greater
charm than there is any warrant for in their substance. The charm is
made up of the spontaneity, the personal quality, of the fancy that
plays through them, its mingled simplicity and subtlety, its purity
and its _bonhomie_. The Night Sketches are simply the light, familiar
record of a walk under an umbrella, at the end of a long, dull, rainy
day, through the sloppy, ill-paved streets of a country town, where
the rare gas-lamps twinkle in the large puddles, and the blue jars in
the druggist's window shine through the vulgar drizzle. One would say
that the inspiration of such a theme could have had no great force,