And wipe the tear-drop dry;
It is when moonlight sheds its ray,
More pure and beautiful than day,
And earth is like the sky."

At a time when the taste and manner of Pope in poetry still held such
strong rule over readers as it did in the first quarter of the century,
these simple stanzas would not have been unworthy of praise for a
certain independence; but there is something besides in the refined
touch and the plaintive undertone that belong to Hawthorne's
individuality. This gentle and musical poem, it is curious to remember,
was written at the very period when Longfellow was singing his first
fresh carols, full of a vigorous pleasure in the beauty and inspiration
of nature, with a rising and a dying fall for April and Autumn, and the
Winter Woods. One can easily fancy that in these two lines from "Sunrise
on the Hills":--

"Where, answering to the sudden shot, thin smoke
Through thick-leaved branches from the dingle broke,"

it was the fire of Hawthorne's fowling-piece in the woods that attracted
the young poet, from his lookout above. But Longfellow had felt in the
rhythm of these earliest poems the tide-flow of his future, and Hawthorne
had as yet hardly found his appropriate element.

In 1828, however, three years after graduating, he published an
anonymous prose romance called "Fanshawe," much more nearly approaching
a novel than his later books. It was issued at Boston, by Marsh and
Capen; but so successful was Hawthorne in his attempt to exterminate the
edition, that not half a dozen copies are now known to be extant. We