furniture in a warehouse, which will come of use by and by; Hawthorne’s, the rich, subdued colour of furniture in a Tudor mansion-house—­which has winked to long-extinguished fires, which has been toned by the usage of departed generations.  In many of the “Twice-Told Tales” this peculiar personality is charmingly exhibited.  He writes of the street or the sea-shore, his eye takes in every object, however trifling, and on these he hangs comments, melancholy and humourous.  He does not require to go far for a subject; he will stare on the puddle in the street of a New England village, and immediately it becomes a Mediterranean Sea with empires lying on its muddy shores.  If the sermon be written out fully in your heart, almost any text will be suitable—­if you have to find your sermon in your text, you may search the Testament, New and Old, and be as poor at the close of Revelation as when you started at the first book of Genesis.  Several of the papers which I like best are monologues, fanciful, humourous, or melancholy; and of these, my chief favourites are “Sunday at Home,” “Night Sketches,” “Footprints on the Seashore,” and “The Seven Vagabonds.”  This last seems to me almost the most exquisite thing which has flowed from its author’s pen—­a perfect little drama, the place, a showman’s waggon, the time, the falling of a summer shower, full of subtle suggestions which, if followed, will lead the reader away out of the story altogether; and illuminated by a grave, wistful kind of humour, which plays in turns upon the author’s companions and upon the author himself.  Of all Mr. Hawthorne’s gifts, this gift of humour—­which would light up the skull and cross-bones of a village churchyard, which would be silent at a dinner-table—­is to me the most delightful.

Then this writer has a strangely weird power.  He loves ruins like the ivy, he skims the twilight like the bat, he makes himself a familiar of the phantoms of the heart and brain.  He is fascinated by the jarred brain and the ruined heart.  Other men collect china, books, pictures, jewels; this writer collects singular human experiences, ancient wrongs and agonies, murders done on unfrequented roads, crimes that seem to have no motive, and all the dreary mysteries of the world of will.  To his chamber of horrors Madame Tussaud’s is nothing.  With proud, prosperous, healthy men, Mr. Hawthorne has little sympathy; he prefers a cracked piano to a new one; he likes cobwebs in the corners of his rooms.  All this peculiar taste comes out strongly in the little book in whose praise I am writing.  I read “The Minister’s Black Veil,” and find it the first sketch of “The Scarlet Letter.”  In “Wakefield,”—­the story of the man who left his wife, remaining away twenty years, but who yet looked upon her every day to appease his burning curiosity as to her manner of enduring his absence—­I find the keenest analysis of an almost incomprehensible act.