Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's "petrific mace"
before he had had time to do more than lay the groundwork and begin the
main structure of the fiction he had in hand; and, as in the case of
Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has never been clearly accounted
for. The precise nature of his malady was not known, since with quiet
hopelessness he had refused to take medical advice. His friend Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes was the only physician who had an opportunity to take even
a cursory view of his case, which he did in the course of a brief walk and
conversation in Boston before Hawthorne started with Mr. Pierce; but he
was unable, with that slight opportunity, to reach any definite
conclusion. Dr. Holmes prescribed and had put up for him a remedy to
palliate some of the poignant symptoms, and this Hawthorne carried with
him; but "I feared," Dr. Holmes writes to the editor, "that there was some
internal organic--perhaps malignant--disease; for he looked wasted and as
if stricken with a mortal illness."

The manuscript of the unfinished "Dolliver Romance" lay upon his coffin
during the funeral services at Concord, but, contrary to the impression
sometimes entertained on this point, was not buried with him. It is
preserved in the Concord Public Library. The first chapter was published
in the "Atlantic" as an isolated portion, soon after his death; and
subsequently the second chapter, which he had been unable to revise,
appeared in the same periodical. Between this and the third fragment there
is a gap, for bridging which no material was found among his papers; but,
after hesitating for several years, Mrs. Hawthorne copied and placed in
the publishers' hands that final portion, which, with the two parts
previously printed, constitutes the whole of what Hawthorne had put into
tangible form.

Hawthorne had purposed prefixing a sketch of Thoreau, "because, from a