by any one; the mere physical strain, all conditions being favorable,
would be almost past bearing. But my father, though uniformly his
bodily health was all his life sound, was never what I would call a
robust man; he was exquisitely balanced. At the time he began his book
he was jaded from years of office drudgery, and he was in some anxiety
as to the issue of his predicament. The house in which he dwelt, small
and ill-placed in a narrow side-street, with no possibility of
shutting out the noise of traffic and of domestic alarms, could not
but make the work tell more heavily upon him. But in addition to this
there were fortuitous occasions of emotional stress, all of which I
shall not mention; but among them were the distasteful turmoil aroused
by his political mishap; and, far more poignant, the critical illness
of his mother. Circumstances led to her being housed under his roof;
there she lingered long at death's door, and there at last she died.
He profoundly loved her; but deep-rooted, too, in both of them was
that strange, New England shyness, masking in visible ice the
underlying emotion. Not since his boyhood had their mutual affection
found free, natural expression; and now, in this final hour, that
bondage of habit caused the words of tenderness to stumble on their
lips. The awful majesty of approaching death, prompting them to "catch
up the whole of love and utter it" ere it be too late, wrought this
involuntary self-repression into silent agony.

She died; his own health was shaken to its foundations; his children
fell ill, his wife underwent acute suffering; and through all this,
and more, The Scarlet Letter must be written. No wonder that, when he
came to read the story in manuscript to his wife, his voice faltered
and broke; and she slipped to her knees and hid her face on her arms
in the chair. "I had been suffering," he commentated, long afterwards,
"from a great diversity and severity of emotion." Great works of