Excerpt from American Prose: Hawthorne; Irving; Longfellow Whittier; Holmes; Lowell; Thoreau; Emerson

There was one class of subjects which had a peculiar in terest for Hawthorne, and in a measure afiected his work. He had a strong taste for New England history, and he found in the scenes and characters of that history favorable material for the representation of spiritual conflict. He was himself the most New English of New Englanders, and held an extraordinary sympathy with the very soil of his section of the country. By this sympathy, rather than by any painful research, he was singularly acquainted with the historic life of New England. His stories, based directly on historic facts, are true to the spirit of the times in some thing more than an archaeological way. One is astonished at the ease with which he seized upon characteristic fea tures, and reproduced them in a word or phrase. Merely careful and diligent research would never be adequate to give the life-likeness of the images in Howe's Masquerade.

There is, then, a second fact discovered by a study of Hawthorne, that while one finds in the N ate-books, for ex ample, the material out of which stories and sketches seem to have been constructed, and while the facts of New Eng land history have been used without exaggeration or distor tion, the result in stories and romances is something far be yond a mere report of what has been seen and read. The charm of a vivifying imagination is the crowning charm Of Hawthorne's stories, and its medium is a graceful and often exquisitely apt diction. Hawthorne's sense of touch as a writer is very fine. He knows when to be light, and when to press heavily; a very conspicuous quality is what one is likely to term quaintness, - a gentle pleasantry which seems to spring from the author's attitude toward his own Work, as if he looked upon that, too, as a part of the spirit ual universe which he was surveying.

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