that the best we can do is to set about giving rational explanation of
our diverse admirations. Others will explain theirs; and in this way,
everything good having a fit showing, taste finds it easier to become
catholic.

Whoever reverences something has a meaning. Shall he not record it? But
there are two ways in which he may express himself,--through speech and
through silence,--both of them sacred alike. Which of these we will use
on any given occasion is a question much too subtle, too surely fraught
with intuitions that cannot be formulated, to admit of arbitrary
prescription. In preferring, here, the form of speech, I feel that I
have adopted only another kind of silence.

[Illustration]




II.


SALEM.

Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand
Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once
transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different
kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers,
that an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a
man who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he
died,--little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years