"Oh, you will be glad to hear, and I meant to have written it to father the other day, that in consideration of the recent decisions with regard to the copyright question, Mr. Bentley is to give Herman £150 and half profits after, for his new book-a much smaller sum than before, to be sure, but certainly worth waiting for-and quite generous on Mr. Bentley's part considering the unsettled state of things.

"I cannot write any more-it makes me terribly nervousI don't know as you can read this I have scribbled it so."

At the time of Melville's moving to Arrowhead he was writing Moby-Dick. In the brief life of Melville in her journal, Mrs. Melville says: "Wrote White-Whale or Moby-Dick under unfavourable circumstances-would sit at his desk all day not writing anything till four or five o'clock-then ride. to the village after dark-would be up early and out walking before breakfast-sometimes splitting wood for evercise. Published White-Whale in 1851-wrote Pierre, published 1852. We all felt anxious about the strain on his health in the spring of 1853."

When Hawthorne moved to Lenox he was forty-six years old-Melville's senior by fifteen years. "Bidding good-bye for ever to literary obscurity and to Salem," Mr. Julian Hawthorne says in his Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, “Hawthorne now turned his face towards the mountains. The preceding nine months had told upon his health and spirits: and, had The Scarlet Letter not achieved so fair a success, he might have been long in recovering his normal frame of mind. But the broad murmur of popular applause, coming to his unaccustomed ears from all parts of his native country, and rolling in across the sea from academic England, gave him the spiritual refreshment born of the assurance that our fellowcreatures think well of the work we have striven to make good. Such assurance is essential, sooner or later, to soundness and serenity of mind. No man can attain secure repose and happiness who has never found that what moves and interests him has power over others likewise. Sooner or later he will begin to doubt either his own sanity or that of all the rest

of the world." Melville was never to know any such repose

and happiness.

Within the sanctities of the Red House, and among the solitudes of the surrounding country, Hawthorne enjoyed all the companionship he desired. In 1842, Mrs. Hawthorne had written to her mother: "Mr. Hawthorne's abomination of visiting still holds strong, be it to see no matter what angel;" and in 1850, Hawthorne was no more eager for alliances even with celestials. Not, indeed, that he was indifferent to his fellowmen: that, his literary vocation would not permit. In Sights from a Steeple he states: "The most desirable mode of existence might be that of a spiritualised Paul Pry, hovering invisible round men and women, witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself." Hawthorne's son writes: "Now Hawthorne, both by nature and by training, was of a disposition to throw himself imaginatively into the shoes (as the phrase is) of whatever person happened to his companion. For the time being, he would seem to take their point of view and to speak their language; it was the result partly of a subtle sympathy and partly of a cold intellectual insight, which led him half consciously to reflect what he so clearly perceived. Thus, if he chatted with a group of rude sea-captains in the smokingroom of Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house, or joined a knot of boon companions in a Boston bar-room, or talked metaphysics with Herman Melville on the hills of Berkshire, he would aim to appear in each instance a man like as they were; he would have the air of being interested in their interests and viewing life by their standards. Of course, this was only apparent; the real man stood aloof and observant." "Seeing his congenial aspect towards their little round of habits and beliefs, they would leap to the conclusion that he was no more and no less than one of themselves; whereas they formed but a tiny arc in the great circle of his comprehension." Yet even when not in the rôle of unimpassioned spectator, Hawthorne was not the man to sit in pharisaical judgment upon his fellows. In Fancy's Show-Box he wrote: "Man must not dis

claim his brotherhood, even with the guiltiest, since, though his hand be clean, his heart has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity." Emerson once said that there was no crime he could not commit: an amiable vanity he shared with many a more prosaic fellow. Hawthorne studied his own pure heart and learned that "men often over-estimate their capacity for evil." "I used to think," he wrote, "that I could imagine all feelings, all passions, and states of the heart and mind." Again: “Living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. Had I sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude." G. P. Lathrop, in his Study of Hawthorne, says: "The visible pageant is only of value to him as it suggests the viewless host of heavenly shapes that hang above it like an idealising mirage." Yet never for a second did he lose himself among these heavenly visitations. He was eminently a man of sound sense: as W. C. Brownell has pointed out, he was "distinctly the most hard-headed of our men of genius." His son said of him: "He was the slave of no theory and no emotion; he always knew, so to speak, where he was and what he was about." His nature clearly was self-sustaining. He never felt the need of the support that in the realm of the affections is the reward of selfsurrender. "He had no doubt an ideal family life," W. C. Brownell points out "that is to say, ideal in a peculiar way, for he had it on rather peculiar terms, one suspects. These were, in brief, his own terms. He was worshipped, idolised, canonised, and on his side it probably required small effort worthily to fill the rôle a more ardent nature would have either merited less or found more irksome. He responded at any rate with absolute devotion. His domestic periphery bounded his vital interests."

J. E. A. Smith, however, who knew Hawthorne in the flesh, undertakes to portray Hawthorne in less austere outline. In his book Taghconic: The Romance and Beauty of the Hills (Boston, 1879) J. E. A. Smith, writing under the pseu