describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that
they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and
decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having
suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have
determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is
too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other
hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are
curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of
Hawthorne's mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it),
but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we
find in them. Our business for the moment, however, is not with the
light that they throw upon his intellect, but with the information
they offer about his habits and his social circumstances.

I know not at what age he began to keep a diary; the first entries in
the American volumes are of the summer of 1835. There is a phrase in
the preface to his novel of _Transformation_, which must have lingered
in the minds of many Americans who have tried to write novels and to
lay the scene of them in the western world. "No author, without a
trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a
country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no
picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace
prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with
my dear native land." The perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books
operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat ominous text. It
does so at least to my own mind; it would be too much perhaps to say
that the effect would be the same for the usual English reader. An
American reads between the lines--he completes the suggestions--he
constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice
in saying that the picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American