with a pitchfork he made what seemed to him a gallant attack upon a heap of manure. He turned grindstones and milked cows; hoed potatoes and picked apples; made hay and gathered squashes; and then for supper devoured huge mounds of buckwheat cakes. But at last his sense of humor, which kept him for a time from taking life at Brook Farm too seriously, began to fail him. His tasks became intensely prosaic; and finally he fell into the carnal state that made him welcome the idleness of a rainy day, or kept him on the sick-list longer than the necessities of the case actually required.

406. The Blithedale Romance." At Brook Farm, as elsewhere, Hawthorne not only made "a prey of people's individualities," to use his own phrase, but he observed nature also with microscopic vision. According to his custom, which he kept up through life, he stored his note-books with interesting observations and reflections. A few years later he etherealized his Brook Farm experience into the "Blithedale Romance," which ranks as one of his best productions. It was published in 1852. Though he protests in the preface against a too literal understanding of his romance, Margaret Fuller is thought to have furnished some traits of Zenobia; and it is impossible not to associate Hawthorne himself with Miles Coverdale.

The following extract, which sets forth the cruel disillusion of the Brook Farm visionaries, is not fiction: "While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field to let the wind exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated. . . . The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and

left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise."

one.

407. A Happy Union. Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm not quite a year. He returned to Boston, where he married Miss Sophia Peabody in 1842. The union was a peculiarly happy Mrs. Hawthorne was a gifted and amiable woman, who appreciated her husband's genius; and throughout their wedded career, which seems to have been unmarred by a single misunderstanding, she stood at his side as a wise counsellor, sympathetic friend, and helpful companion. Their correspondence, not only during the days of courtship, but also during the whole course of their wedded life, constantly breathes a spirit of delicate, tender, reverent love.

408. Poverty and Contentment. The newly wedded pair at once took up their residence in the Old Manse at Concord, where they numbered among their friends Emerson, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau. Hawthorne had not waited for wealth before marrying. It sometimes became a serious problem to satisfy the grocer and the butcher. But in spite of the cares growing out of their humble circumstances, the happy pair maintained a cheerful courage. "The other day," wrote Mrs. Hawthorne, "when my husband saw me contemplating an appalling vacuum in his dressing-gown, he said he was a man of the largest rents in the country, and it was strange he had not more ready money.' Our rents are certainly not to be computed; for everything seems now to be wearing out all at once. But, somehow or other, We

I do not care much, because we are so happy.

'Sail away

Into the regions of exceeding day,'

and the shell of life is not of much consequence."

409. Mosses from an Old Manse." - In the introductory chapter to the "Mosses from an Old Manse," a delightful book made up of stories written for the most part at this period, Hawthorne gives us a minute description of his new home. The Old

Manse had never been "profaned by a lay occupant," he says, (( until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it, a priest had succeeded to it, other priestly men from time to time had dwelt in it, and children born in its chambers had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written

there.

There was in the rear of the house the most delightful little nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote 'Nature'; for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and the Paphian sunset and moonrise from the summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the room, its walls were blackened

with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of Puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad angels — or, at least, like men who had wrestled so continually and so sternly with the devil that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been imparted to their own visages."

410. Opinion of his Native Town. - Hawthorne lived at Concord four years, a period of ripened manhood and deepened character. He was then appointed surveyor in the custom-house at Salem, where he went to live in 1846. He was not very partial to his native town; and in one of his letters of an earlier date he gives humorous expression to his dislike: "Methinks, all enormous sinners should be sent on pilgrimage to Salem, and compelled to spend a length of time there, proportioned to the enormity of their offences. Such punishment would be suited to crimes that do not quite deserve hanging, yet are too aggravated for the State's prison." He discharged the duties of his office with exemplary fidelity. He did but little literary work; but he was not so entirely absorbed in his prosaic duties as not to make his customary but silent and unsuspected observations upon the characters of those about him.

411. Portraits from the Custom-House. In the introduction to "The Scarlet Letter," which was published in 1850, he gives an account of his custom-house experiences, and furnishes us a delightful series of portraits of his subordinates. Take, for example, a single trait in the character of the patriarch of the custom-house: "His gormandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. As he possessed no higher attribute, and neither sacrificed nor vitiated any spiritual endowment by devoting all his energies and ingenuities to subserve the delight and profit of his maw, it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring

the savor of pig or turkey under one's very nostrils. There were flavors on his palate that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as the muttonchop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for worms. .. The chief tragic event of the old man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose which lived and died some twenty or forty years ago; a goose of most promising figure, but which at table proved so inveterately tough that the carving-knife would make no impression on its carcass, and it could only be divided with an ax and handsaw."

412. The Scarlet Letter." - After three years a change of administration again led to Hawthorne's retirement. "Now you will have leisure to write your book," cheerfully exclaimed his wife, when he told her of his removal. When he asked what they would live on meanwhile, she led him to a desk, and proudly pointed to a heap of gold that she had saved out of her weekly allowance for household expenses. He set to work at once upon "The Scarlet Letter," perhaps the best known of his writings, and one of the most subtile and powerful pieces of fiction produced in this country. It is a tragedy of sin and remorse, in which thoughts are acts. Its extraordinary merits were at once recognized, and at a single bound Hawthorne attained the literary eminence that his genius deserved. His day of obscurity was past; the praises of "The Scarlet Letter" in America were reechoed in England. This enthusiastic reception of his work, which his frequent disappointments had not prepared him for, brought him satisfaction and encouragement. It seems to have acted upon him as a stimulus to renewed effort; and the years immediately following were the most productive of his life. Even the greatest genius needs the encouragement of appreciation. 413. The House of the Seven Gables." In 1850, the year in which "The Scarlet Letter" appeared, Hawthorne moved to Lenox in western Massachusetts. He occupied a small red cot