they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a magic,
and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the
beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets in especial that
one might not have been present on a certain occasion which made a
sensation, an era--the delivery of an address to the Divinity School
of Harvard University, on a summer evening in 1838. In the light,
fresh American air, unthickened and undarkened by customs and
institutions established, these things, as the phrase is, told.

Hawthorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to have arrived at
Brook Farm in the midst of one of those April snow-storms which,
during the New England spring, occasionally diversify the inaction of
the vernal process. Miles Coverdale, in _The Blithedale Romance_, is
evidently as much Hawthorne as he is any one else in particular. He is
indeed not very markedly any one, unless it be the spectator, the
observer; his chief identity lies in his success in looking at things
objectively and spinning uncommunicated fancies about them. This
indeed was the part that Hawthorne played socially in the little
community at West Roxbury. His biographer describes him as sitting
"silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of the
house, where he could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment
of the young people, himself almost always holding a book before him,
but seldom turning the leaves." He put his hand to the plough and
supported himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do,
by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum of voices. Some of
his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a
gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of
coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely
psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched
the inmates when they were off their guard, analysing their