wig and gown--the parish priest of a century ago--a friend of
Whitefield." He is likely to come under the spell of this
reverend Ghost who haunts the "Manse" and as it rains and darkens
and the sky glooms through the dusty attic windows, he is likely
"to muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that
the works of man's intellect decay like those of his hands"...
"that thought grows moldy," and as the garret is in
Massachusetts, the "thought" and the "mold" are likely to be
quite native. When the same anyone puts his poetry into novels
rather than essays, he is likely to have more to say about the
life around him--about the inherited mystery of the town--than a
poet of philosophy is.

In Hawthorne's usual vicinity, the atmosphere was charged with
the somber errors and romance of eighteenth century New England,-
-ascetic or noble New England as you like. A novel, of necessity,
nails an art-effort down to some definite part or parts of the
earth's surface--the novelist's wagon can't always be hitched to
a star. To say that Hawthorne was more deeply interested than
some of the other Concord writers--Emerson, for example--in the
idealism peculiar to his native land (in so far as such idealism
of a country can be conceived of as separate from the political)
would be as unreasoning as to hold that he was more interested in
social progress than Thoreau, because he was in the consular
service and Thoreau was in no one's service--or that the War
Governor of Massachusetts was a greater patriot than Wendell
Phillips, who was ashamed of all political parties. Hawthorne's
art was true and typically American--as is the art of all men
living in America who believe in freedom of thought and who live
wholesome lives to prove it, whatever their means of expression.