I read the ‘Marble Faun’ first, and then the ‘Scarlet Letter,’ and then the ‘House of Seven Gables,’ and then the ‘Blithedale Romance;’ but I always liked best the last, which is more nearly a novel, and more realistic than the others.  They all moved me with a sort of effect such as I had not felt before.  They veers so far from time and place that, although most of them related to our country and epoch, I could not imagine anything approximate from them; and Hawthorne himself seemed a remote and impalpable agency, rather than a person whom one might actually meet, as not long afterward happened with me.  I did not hold the sort of fancied converse with him that I held with ether authors, and I cannot pretend that I had the affection for him that attracted me to them.  But he held me by his potent spell, and for a time he dominated me as completely as any author I have read.  More truly than any other American author he has been a passion with me, and lately I heard with a kind of pang a young man saying that he did not believe I should find the ‘Scarlet Letter’ bear reading now.  I did not assent to the possibility, but the notion gave me a shiver of dismay.  I thought how much that book had been to me, how much all of Hawthorne’s books had been, and to have parted with my faith in their perfection would have been something I would not willingly have risked doing.

Of course there is always something fatally weak in the scheme of the pure romance, which, after the color of the contemporary mood dies out of it, leaves it in danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory; and perhaps this inherent weakness was what that bold critic felt in the ‘Scarlet Letter.’  But none of Hawthorne’s fables are without a profound and distant reach into the recesses of nature and of being.  He came back from his researches with no solution of the question, with no message, indeed, but the awful warning, “Be true, be true,” which is the burden of the Scarlet Letter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughts that we think only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death.  It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow in sorer doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the things that can never be said.  Some of his shorter stories I have found thin and cold to my later reading, and I have never cared much for the ’House of Seven Gables,’ but the other day I was reading the ’Blithedale Romance’ again, and I found it as potent, as significant, as sadly and strangely true as when it first enthralled my soul.

In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at the cold altar of Goethe, I did read a great deal of his prose and somewhat of his poetry, but it was to be ten years yet before I should go faithfully through with his Faust and come to know its power.  For the present, I read ’Wilhelm Meister’ and the ‘Wahlverwandschaften,’ and worshipped him much at second-hand through Heine.  In the mean time I invested such Germans as I met with the