from perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven
years, and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor
than upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and
consecutive series of notes or studies [Footnote: These studies,
extracts from which will be published in one of our magazines, are
hereafter to be added, in their complete form, to the Appendix of this
volume.] which he wrote for this Romance would of themselves make a
small volume, and one of autobiographical as well as literary interest.
There is no other instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a
writer's thought reflects itself upon paper so immediately and
sensitively as in these studies. To read them is to look into the man's
mind, and see its quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety,
the tenacity; the stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like
that of Hercules upon the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and
cool common-sense, controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent
imagination; the humorous gibes and strange expletives wherewith he
ridicules, to himself, his own failure to reach his goal; the immense
patience with which--again and again, and yet again--he "tries back,"
throwing the topic into fresh attitudes, and searching it to the marrow
with a gaze so piercing as to be terrible;--all this gives an
impression of power, of resource, of energy, of mastery, that
exhilarates the reader. So many inspired prophets of Hawthorne have
arisen of late, that the present writer, whose relation to the great
Romancer is a filial one merely, may be excused for feeling some
embarrassment in submitting his own uninstructed judgments to
competition with theirs. It has occurred to him, however, that these
undress rehearsals of the author of "The Scarlet Letter" might afford
entertaining and even profitable reading to the later generation of
writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm one another and the
public. It would appear that this author, in his preparatory work at