vulgar and imbecile curiosity which often mars it, a sort of homage that
it is right to satisfy. It is a respect apt to be paid only to men whose
winning personal qualities have reached through their writing, and
touched a number of grateful and appreciative hearts. But two objections
may be urged against giving such details here: one is, that Hawthorne
especially disapproved the writing of a Life of himself; the other, that
the history of Salem and the works of Hawthorne are easily accessible to
any one, without intervention.

Of the first it may frankly be said, indeed, that Hawthorne alone could
have adequately portrayed his life for us; though in the same breath it
should be added that the idea of his undertaking to do it is almost
preposterous. To such a spirit as his, the plan would have had an
exquisite absurdity about it, that might even have savored of
imposition. The mass of trivial details essential to the accurate and
consecutive account of an entire life could never have gained his
serious attention: his modesty would have made as little of them as of
boyish slate-scribblings, full of significance, fun, and character to
observers, but subjected to the sponge without a pang by their producer.
There is something natural and fine in this. I confess that to me the
spectacle presented by Goethe when dwelling on the minutest incidents of
his childhood with senile vanity and persistence, and fashioning with
avaricious care the silver shrine and crystal case in which--like a very
different sort of Saint Charles Borromeo--he hopes to have the reverent
ages view him, is one which increases my sense of his defective though
splendid personality. And yet I cannot suppress the opposite feeling,
that the man of note who lets his riches of reminiscence be buried with
him inflicts a loss on the world which it is hard to take resignedly. In
the Note-Books of Hawthorne this want is to a large extent made good.
His shrinking sensitiveness in regard to the embalming process of