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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
With a keen eye and overflowing heart…
He pours out truth in works by thoughtful love
Inspired—works potent over smiles and tears.
Although an author of some years’ standing, and of considerable repute in his own country, Mr. Hawthorne has been, until quite recently, all but unknown among ourselves. Only a few practised littérateurs recognised him, as a writer who could rifle "Twice-told Tales" of their proverbial tedium, and could distil spirit and life from the "Mosses of an Old Manse." What would lately have been deemed an "impossible quantity" of his writings, is now circulated up and down these islands, wherever railways and shilling libraries are on the qui vive. He is now fairly seated on the same eminence with Cooper and Washington Irving; and we trust that the sympathy with his singular but fascinating works, at length evoked among the old Britishers, will encourage him to strains in a yet higher mood,—for he would seem to be one of those self-distrustful and diffident authors to whom the "inward witness" of genius is naught, unless confirmed by the "external evidence" of third and fourth editions. Sooth to say, we know of few living tale-tellers who even approach him in the art of investing with an appropriate halo of visionary awe those subjects which relate to the supernatural—those legendary themes whose province is the dim borderland of fancy. His is the golden mean between the Fee-faw-fum terrors of spectre-factors extraordinary, and that chill rationalism which protests there are not more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of—pshaw, it never dreams!—say, rather, seen and handled, weighed and analysed to the minutest globule—in its philosophy. He is far enough, on the one hand, from the red-and-blue-light catastrophes of Monk Lewis; and, on the other, he steers clear of the irony of scepticism, and narrates his traditions with a grave simplicity and cordial interest, the character of which is, as it should. be, highly contagious. Of this "unfathomable world" of ours he can say,
I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries;[1]
and he has pondered much on what Wordsworth calls
That superior mystery—
Our vital frame, so fearfully devised,
And the dread soul within.
He throws deep and scrutinising glances on those realities which cluster around man's heart of hearts. He loves to give way to dreamy yet serious speculations,—to the wayward, undulating motion of thoughts that wander through eternity. He is one of the subtlest of psychologists, while reporting the results of his study without any affectation of scholastic jargon. His still waters run deep: how clearly they reflect the "human face divine" of man, woman, and child, let those testify who
