air; until, dissolved by the heat of the sun, they would fall in gentle showers, causing the grass to spring, the fruits to ripen, and the corn to grow an inch an hour. If displeased, however, she would brew up clouds black as ink, sitting in the midst of them like a bottle-bellied spider in the midst of its web; and when these clouds broke, woe betide the valleys!

In old times, say the Indian traditions, there was a kind of Manitou or Spirit, who kept about the wildest recesses of the Catskill Mountains, and took a mischievous pleasure in wreaking all kinds of evils and vexations upon the red men. Sometimes he would assume the form of a bear, a panther, or a deer, lead the bewildered hunter a weary chase through tangled forest and among ragged rocks; and then spring off with a loud ho! ho! leaving him aghast on the brink of a beetling precipice or raging

torrent.

The favorite abode of this Manitou is still shown. It is a great rock or cliff on the loneliest part of the mountains, and from the flowering vines which clamber about it, and the wild flowers which abound in its neighborhood, is known by the name of the Garden Rock. Near the foot of it is a small lake, the haunt of the solitary bittern, with water-snakes basking in the sun on the leaves of the pond-lilies which lie on the surface. This place was held in great awe by the Indians, insomuch that the boldest hunter would not pursue his game within its precincts. Once upon a time, however, a hunter, who had lost his way, penetrated to the Garden Rock, where he beheld a number of gourds placed in the crotches of trees. One of these he seized and made off with it, but in the hurry of his retreat he let it fall among the rocks, when a great stream gushed forth, which washed him away and swept him down precipices, where he was dashed to pieces, and the stream made its way to the Hudson, and continues to flow to the present day; being the identical stream known by the name of the Kaaters-kill.

III.-NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

(1804-1864.)

LIFE.-Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, July 4, 1804. His father, a ship-master, died at Surinam in 1808. Hawthorne'; early years were spent at Salem and at Sebago Lake, Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 in the class with Longfellow Then he returned to Salem, and lived with his sisters and widowed mother in great seclusion. On July 9, 1842, Hawthorne was married in Boston to Sophia Peabody whom he had long known at Salem. At one time before his marriage Hawthorne had held a position in the Boston Custom House. In 1846 after four years of married life at Concord, Mass., he returned to Salem as surveyor in the Salem Custom House. In 1850 he retired to Lenox, Mass., but two years later settled again at Concord. From 1853 to 1857 he was U. S. Consul at Liverpool, England. Then, for three years, he travelled with his family in England and the Continent, returning to Concord in 1860. On a trip to the White Mountains in vain quest of health, he died at Plymouth, N. H., during the night of May 18-19, 1864.

The study of Hawthorne's life from his own writings should begin with the autobiographical sketch written for his friend Stoddard. Here he talks delightfully of his "grievous disinclination to go to school"-of his boyhood in the Maine woods, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in Shakspeare and The Pilgrim's Progress,' and any poetry or light books within my reach "-of his years at Bowdoin as an idle student, negligent of college rules "—of the solitary years that followed at Salem when "for months together, I scarcely held human intercourse outside of my own family."

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Next, one should turn to Hawthorne's letters. One to his mother, written March 13, 1821, shows his distaste for the three professions, law, medicine, and theology, and adds, "What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? Indeed, I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like . . . But authors are always poor devils and therefore Satan may take them." Best of all are the loveletters for the three or four years of his engagement while Sophia Peabody was an invalid. Tender, deep, playful, are these letters. He closes one from Boston, "God keep you from eastwinds and every other evil."

In The Blithedale Romance are traces of Hawthorne's experience at Brook Farm, the famous socialistic community in West Roxbury, Mass. The introduction to Mosses from an Old Manse and passages from his American Note Books are full of the idyllic Concord home of his early married life. "The Custom House," the introductory chapter to The Scarlet Letter, is a good-humored account of Hawthorne's Salem, which aroused great local indignation on account of its very truthfulness. Our Old Home, a series of English sketches, and English Note Books give Hawthorne's own pictures of his years in England. The French and Italian Note Books tell of his continental travels, and The Marble Faun is full of his studies in Italian art. Viewed in this way, Hawthorne's writings, furnish a well-nigh complete autobiography.

WRITINGS. In 1828, three years after graduating from Bowdoin, Hawthorne published anonymously a romance entitled Fanshawe. In 1836 he became editor and almost sole author of the American Magazine of Useful Knowledge. To the Token, the Knickerbocker Magazine, and other publications Hawthorne contributed occasional sketches and stories. In 1837 he collected a number of these in the volume called Twice Told Tales, which was revised and much enlarged in 1842. In 1846 followed another similar collection, Mosses from an Old Manse.

Hawthorne's first great novel, The Scarlet Letter, a colonial romance, came out in 1850. The House of Seven Gables (1851) is reminiscent of Hawthorne's Salem, and The Blithedale Romance (1852) is an idyll based on the Brook Farm idea. In 1860 appeared The Marble Faun, an Italian romance, the longest

of Hawthorne's fictions, and in 1863 the series of English sketches called Our Old Home.

In addition to these works Hawthorne retold some of the classical myths in his Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, described his travels in his American, English, French, and Italian NoteBooks, and left three unfinished studies for another romance.

LITERARY QUALITIES.-Hawthorne is generally regarded as the greatest American romancer. He studied the German romances of Tieck with whom Edgar Allan Poe compared him. Symbolism is conspicuous in his romance. The scarlet letter of Hester Prynne is the symbol of her moral guilt--the furry ears of Donatello are the symbol of his animal instinct. From early boyhood he studied two great masters of allegory, Bunyan and Spenser. Hawthorne's characters often run so dangerously close to allegory that the over-fanciful have a certain reason in explaining Donatello as the personification of the senses, Miriam of the imagination, Kenyon of the reason, and Hilda of the conscience. Conscience, indeed, was the theme that fascinated this Puritan romancer. On sin and its subtle but inevitable consequences Hawthorne brooded as on sombre mysteries. He saw not so much the stern piety of the Puritan as the under-current of human sin and struggle.

For the setting of his New England romances Hawthorne turned to the past, to the haunting curse of the Pyncheon family and to the scarlet blot on the scutcheon of Arthur Dimmesdale. While his own country was racked with the terrible human struggle over slavery, Hawthorne wrote calmly in the Preface to The Marble Faun, "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land."

In each of Hawthorne's great romances the dramatis personae, are few-some four or five. In character-drawing Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter grappled with the elemental human passions but in The Marble Faun Donatello belongs to the imaginative world of Shakespeare's Tempest. In literary style Hawthorne by practice outgrew early faults. To the facile style of Irving

Hawthorne added stronger imagination and higher literary art. He used to profess that he could not distinguish between Hail Columbia and Yankee Doodle, but the rhythm of literary prose he mastered almost perfectly.

THE GREAT STONE FACE.-The following sketch first appeared in a periodical, a four-page Washington weekly, The National Era. It occupied four and a half columns of small print in the issue for Jan. 24, 1850. It is now found in the volume The Snow Image and other Twice- Told Tales. According to Conway, it was probably sent to the editor of the National Era by

Whittier.

The Great Stone Face has a very obvious moral-success is not to be measured by human standards. Not Mr. Gathergold-whose name is as obviously allegorical as any of Bunyan's characters— not "Old Blood-and-Thunder "-the genius of victory-not "Old Stony Phiz"-the statesman-fulfils the prophecy that a great man shall come who shall be known by his likeness to The Great Stone Face. It is the modest Ernest, who waits ever the coming of the hero, who one day is himself recognized as the fulfilment of the prophecy.

That Hawthorne himself saw the obviousness of his allegory we know from a letter written by his wife, Sept. 2, 1849. "I am glad you like The Great Stone Face. Mr. Hawthorne says he is rather ashamed of the mechanical structure of the story, the moral being so plain and manifest. He seemed dissatisfied with it as a work of art. But some persons would prefer it precisely on account of its evident design. And Ernest is a divine creation, so grand, so comprehensive, and so simple."

The general setting of the scene is the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The Great Stone Face suggests the "Old Man of the Mountain," the Profile Mountain. After the manner of Spenser, Hawthorne has made his characters stand not merely for allegorical figures, but for real personages. "Old Blood-andThunder" is probably General Jackson, " Old Stony Phiz" Daniel Webster, and Ernest, some say, is Emerson.

In a later Preface to The Twice Told Tales dated from Lenox, Jan. 11, 1851, Hawthorne speaks thus of the general tone of his sketches: "They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed