are for the most part exquisitely written. After a couple of
years in the Boston Custom-House, and a residence at the
socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the happiest
of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt
in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest
of his essays, the Preface to "Mosses from an Old Manse," his
second collection of stories. After three years in the
Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to
produce his masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter," published in 1850.
He was now forty-six. In 1851, he published "The House of the
Seven Gables," "The Wonder-Book," and "The Snow Image, and Other
Tales." In 1852 came "The Blithedale Romance," a rich ironical
story drawn from his Brook Farm experience. Four years in the
American Consulate at Liverpool and three subsequent years of
residence upon the Continent saw no literary harvest except
carefully filled notebooks and the deeply imaginative moral
romance, "The Marble Faun." Hawthorne returned home in 1860 and
settled in the Wayside at Concord, busying himself with a new,
and, as was destined, a never completed story about the elixir of
immortality. But his vitality was ebbing, and in May, 1864, he
passed away in his sleep. He rests under the pines in Sleepy
Hollow, near the Alcotts and the Emersons.

It is difficult for contemporary Americans to assess the value of
such a man, who evidently did nothing except to write a few
books. His rare, delicate genius was scarcely touched by passing
events. Not many of his countrymen really love his writings, as
they love, for instance the writings of Dickens or Thackeray or
Stevenson. Everyone reads, at some time of his life, "The Scarlet
Letter," and trembles at its passionate indictment of the sin of