only on high days and festivals of the spirit.  Him I never lay down without feeling my appreciation increased for lesser men—­never without the same kind of comfort that one returning from the presence feels when he doffs respectful attitude and dress of ceremony, and subsides into old coat, familiar arm-chair, and slippers.  After long-continued organ-music, the jangle of the jews-harp is felt as an exquisite relief.  With the volumes on the special shelf I have spoken of, I am quite at home, and I feel somehow as if they were at home with me.  And as to-day the trees bend to the blast, and the rain comes in dashes against my window, and as I have nothing to do and cannot get out, and wish to kill the hours in as pleasant a manner as I can, I shall even talk about them, as in sheer liking a man talks about the trees in his garden, or the pictures on his wall.  I can’t expect to say anything very new or striking, but I can give utterance to sincere affection, and that is always pleasant to one’s self and generally not ungrateful to others.

First; then, on this special shelf stands Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales.”

It is difficult to explain why I like these short sketches and essays, written in the author’s early youth, better than his later, more finished, and better-known novels and romances.  The world sets greater store by “The Scarlet Letter” and “Transformation” than by this little book—­and, in such matters of liking against the judgment of the world, there is no appeal.  I think the reason of my liking consists in this—­that the novels were written for the world, while the tales seem written for the author; in these he is actor and audience in one.  Consequently, one gets nearer him, just as one gets nearer an artist in his first sketch than in his finished picture.  And after all, one takes the greatest pleasure in those books in which a peculiar personality is most clearly revealed.  A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker; and Mr. Hawthorne’s personality is peculiar, and specially peculiar in a new country like America.  He is quiet, fanciful, quaint, and his humour is shaded by a meditativeness of spirit.  Although a Yankee, he partakes of none of the characteristics of a Yankee.  His thinking and his style have an antique air.  His roots strike down through the visible mould of the present, and draw sustenance from the generations under ground.  The ghosts that haunt the chamber of his mind are the ghosts of dead men and women.  He has a strong smack of the Puritan; he wears around him, in the New England town, something of the darkness and mystery of the aboriginal forest.  He is a shy, silent, sensitive, much ruminating man, with no special overflow of animal spirits.  He loves solitude, and the things which age has made reverent.  There is nothing modern about him.  Emerson’s writing has a cold cheerless glitter, like the new