Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

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[185] famous in Mosses from an old Manse. He afterwards held a post in the Salem Custom House for three years; during which period he wrote little, but The Scarlet letter gradually took shape in his mind. It was published in 1850, to be followed during the two succeeding years by The house of the seven Gables and The Blithedale romance. Then followed seven years in Europe, four of them at the Liverpool consulate, and, as a result, his last great romance, The marble Faun. He died May 19, 1864.

Hawthorne we all agree to be the greatest American imaginative prose writer; and his place in the literature of our tongue becomes every day more sure. If his genius matured slowly, it did really mature. His notebooks are frequently commonplace; probably because his art was massive and deliberate, and he had no faculty for spinning delight out of next to nothing. His personality, too, was of a subtlety and remoteness which could not be interpreted colloquially; perhaps it was only in his rarest creative morents that the man was intimate with himself. Of the originality of his best work we can, at all events, feel more certain than we