have photographed them, warts and all.

Thus it was that the great currents of human sympathy never swept him
away. The character of his genius isolated him, and he stood aloof
from the common interests. Intent upon studying men in certain
aspects, he cared little for man; and the high tides of collective
emotion among his fellows left him dry and untouched. So he beholds
and describes the generous impulse of humanity with sceptical courtesy
rather than with hopeful cordiality.

He does not chide you if you spend effort and life itself in the
ardent van of progress, but he asks simply, "Is six so much better
than half a dozen?" He will not quarrel with you if you expect the
millennium to-morrow. He only says, with that glimmering smile, "So
soon?" Yet in all this there was no shadow of spiritual pride. Nay, so
far from this, that the tranquil and pervasive sadness of all
Hawthorne's writings, the kind of heartache that they leave behind,
seem to spring from the fact that his nature was related to the moral
world, as his own Donatello was to the human. "So alert, so alluring,
so noble", muses the heart as we climb the Apennines towards the tower
of Monte Beni; "alas! is he human?" it whispers, with a pang of doubt.

How this directed his choice of subjects, and affected his treatment
of them, when drawn from early history, we have already seen. It is
not, therefore, surprising, that the history into which he was born
interested him only in the same way.

When he went to Europe as consul, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ was already
published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved
its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No