willing that you should know all that a man may fairly reveal of
himself. The great interior story he does not tell, of course, but the
Introduction to the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, the opening chapter of
_The Scarlet Letter_, and the _Consular Experiences_, with much of the
rest of _Our Old Home_, are as intimate and explicit chapters of
autobiography as can be found. Nor would it be easy to find anywhere a
more perfect idyl than that introductory chapter of the _Mosses_. Its
charm is perennial and indescribable; and why should it not be, since
it was written at a time in which, as he says, "I was happy?" It is,
perhaps, the most softly-hued and exquisite work of his pen. So the
sketch of "The Custom-house", although prefatory to that most
tragically powerful of romances,

_The Scarlet Letter_, is an incessant play of the shyest and most airy
humor. It is like the warbling of bobolinks before a thunder-burst.
How many other men, however unreserved with the pen, would be likely
to dare to paint, with the fidelity of Teniers and the simplicity of
Fra Angelico, a picture of the office and the companions in which and
with whom they did their daily work? The surveyor of customs in the
port of Salem treated the town of Salem, in which he lived and
discharged his daily task, as if it had been, with all its people, as
vague and remote a spot as the town of which he was about to treat in
the story. He commented upon the place and the people as modern
travellers in Pompeii discuss the ancient town. It made a great
scandal. He was accused of depicting with unpardonable severity worthy
folks, whose friends were sorely pained and indignant. But he wrote
such sketches as he wrote his stories. He treated his companions as he
treated himself and all the personages in history or experience with
which he dealt, merely as phenomena to be analyzed and described, with
no more private malice or personal emotion than the sun, which would