village, look into the post-office, and spend an hour at the
reading-room; and then return home, generally without having spoken a
word to any human being.... In the way of exercise I saw and split
wood, and physically I was never in a better condition than now." He
adds a mention of an absence he had lately made. "I went alone to
Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight,
leading the same life in which ten years of my youth flitted away like
a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had got hold of a
reality which never could be taken from me. It was good thus to get
apart from my happiness for the sake of contemplating it."

These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid for, appeared in
the _Democratic Review_, a periodical published at Washington, and
having, as our author's biographer says, "considerable pretensions to
a national character." It is to be regretted that the practice of
keeping its creditors waiting should, on the part of the magazine in
question, have been thought compatible with these pretensions. The
foregoing lines are a description of a very monotonous but a very
contented life, and Mr. Lathrop justly remarks upon the dissonance of
tone of the tales Hawthorne produced under these happy circumstances.
It is indeed not a little of an anomaly. The episode of the Manse was
one of the most agreeable he had known, and yet the best of the
_Mosses_ (though not the greater number of them) are singularly dismal
compositions. They are redolent of M. Montégut's pessimism. "The
reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil," says Mr. Lathrop, "had
been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series
the idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking
strength, and the pits of hell seem yawning beneath us." This is very
true (allowing for Mr. Lathrop's rather too emphatic way of putting
it); but the anomaly is, I think, on the whole, only superficial. Our