one would ask, from the point of view of Hawthorne's pessimism, of
the singularly objective and unpreoccupied tone of the Introduction to
the _Old Manse_, in which the author speaks from himself, and in which
the cry of metaphysical despair is not even faintly sounded?

We have seen that when he went into the village he often came home
without having spoken a word to a human being. There is a touching
entry made a little later, bearing upon his mild taciturnity. "A
cloudy veil stretches across the abyss of my nature. I have, however,
no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees
through my heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he
is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may any
mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come
into my depths. But he must find his own way there; I can neither
guide nor enlighten him." It must be acknowledged, however, that if he
was not able to open the gate of conversation, it was sometimes
because he was disposed to slide the bolt himself. "I had a purpose,"
he writes, shortly before the entry last quoted, "if circumstances
would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife's absence without
speaking a word to any human being." He beguiled these incommunicative
periods by studying German, in Tieck and Bürger, without apparently
making much progress; also in reading French, in Voltaire and
Rabelais. "Just now," he writes, one October noon, "I heard a sharp
tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a
volume of Rabelais), behold, the head of a little bird, who seemed to
demand admittance." It was a quiet life, of course, in which these
diminutive incidents seemed noteworthy; and what is noteworthy here
to the observer of Hawthorne's contemplative simplicity, is the fact
that though he finds a good deal to say about the little bird (he
devotes several lines more to it) he makes no remark upon Rabelais. He