space and scope prevent my commenting on. But the first outline
requiring our attention involves a distant retrospect.

The history of Hawthorne's genius is in some sense a summary of all New
England history.

From amid a simple, practical, energetic community, remarkable for its
activity in affairs of state and religion, but by no means given to
dreaming, this fair flower of American genius rose up unexpectedly
enough, breaking the cold New England sod for the emission of a light
and fragrance as pure and pensive as that of the arbutus in our woods,
in spring. The flower, however, sprang from seed that rooted in the old
colonial life of the sternly imaginative pilgrims and Puritans.
Thrusting itself up into view through the drift of a later day, it must
not be confounded with other growths nourished only by that more recent
deposit; though the surface-drift had of course its own weighty
influence in the nourishment of it. The artistic results of a period of
action must sometimes be looked for at a point of time long subsequent,
and this was especially sure to be so in the first phases of New England
civilization. The settlers in this region, in addition to the burdens
and obstacles proper to pioneers, had to deal with the cares of forming
a model state and of laying out for posterity a straight and solid path
in which it might walk with due rectitude. All this was in itself an
ample enough subject to occupy their powerful imaginations. They were
enacting a kind of sacred epic, the dangers and the dignity and
exaltation of which they felt most fervently. The Bible, the Bay Psalm
Book, Bunyan, and Milton, the poems of George Wither, Baxter's Saint's
Rest, and some controversial pamphlets, would suffice to appease
whatever yearnings the immense experiment of their lives failed to
satisfy. Gradually, of course, the native press and new-comers from