ning not to go among the savages on the ground that they would probably eat him and add to their cruelty the cool malignity of pepper and vinegar. The talk cannot be reported and the genius and humor which lie in his essays and letters cannot be dissected or even transferred to a discourse like this of mine. It was my purpose at the outset to try to do this, but I noticed that I was marring the rare beauty and completeness of the essays I touched. It was as if you should cut a face from some rare picture and say "Look at that," or show the fragment of a rare marble. I may try again sometime to speak of some of the essays. It will only be as if you should patch cloth of gold with serge. Two years ago about this time I made discourse about good books and said I would name some of the best as they came books you can put on a shelf or two and feel you are rich beyond any man you can name who has not learned to love the best. I name Charles Lamb's among them and among the first. You may not be of my mind, as I was not of my blind friend's mind, or you may never be of my mind, for Lamb still has his own audience. But if once you catch his secret and wander with him wherever the humor takes him, watching the life he opens to you with a heart somewhat like his own a life which never breaks forth into the bluff and hearty freedom you find here and there in Shakespeare, where laughter is lord of the day, to me and is never flooded with the noontide sunshine or dipped in baths of hissing tears or riven with shocks of doom (for this would be harking too near his own experience) but is full of the sweet golden light of our October days rather, when the haze falls, or clouded with the gray fleeces that still have mostly a silver lining—if you can do this you will find such treasures as I know not where to look for otherwheres and know what is in his good heart when he sings: "It were unwisely done should we refuse HAWTHORNE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, the raciest name in American letters, was born in the queer old city of Salem he has made so mysterious and yet so familiar to us through his writings. He came of an old sea-faring race that, time out of mind, had left their home, gone to sea, and risen through storm and shine to the rank of captain, and then, at last, had come back for good and all to the old place, to die. The father of Hawthorne was a sailor, the last of the line that followed the sea; he died when Nathaniel was six years old. His mother, after this, carried the boy into Maine, and sent him, in due time, to college, where he had Longfellow, the prince of our poets, and Franklin Pierce, for classmates, and whence, also, he graduated. And then, as if Nature would be avenged for all the gadding about of all the Hawthornes, he retired into a seclusion so deep as to be seldom seen, even in his own family circle; wrote wild tales, also, on which he had no more mercy than the old Hawthornes had for the witches, for he burnt them, and printed a romance in Boston in 1832 of which no man knoweth the sepulcher unto this day; sat at the receipt of customs, under Mr. Bancroft, on the Long Wharf in Boston, and there showed enough of the salt to make him a favorite with the sailors; but went out of that, when Harrison set up his log cabin, into the Brook farm experiment, the mother-bird of his "Blithedale Romance ; married when he was forty and went to live in that old manse at Concord, of whose mosses he has preserved such exquisite specimens. Then the new wave of democracy that carried Polk into the White House carried Hawthorne into the Custom House at Salem; but when the Whigs divided the spoils, they snatched Hawthorne's bit of loaf among the rest. But in 1853 Franklin Pierce made him Consul at Liverpool, the best thing he had in his gift. Then in 1857 this was done with, and after some travel on the Continent of Europe Hawthorne came home to die. And so, on one of the softest and sweetest May-days that ever breathed over New England, with apple-blossoms from the orchard of the Old Manse and his last manuscript laid on his coffin, he was buried with floods of sunshine about him, on the crowning eminence of the beautiful cemetery at Concord, with a multitude of New England's children standing about his dust, while James Freeman Clarke, his dear friend of many years, said words of hope and consolation to the weepers at the grave. For in the years that had come and gone since his still-born romance was buried in a level grave in Boston, Hawthorne had done better things than acting as 66 some tide-waiter to a political party. He had written some books of a quality and flavor as separate and unique and rare as "The Heart of Mid-Lothian " or Adam Bede," and had done more than any other man, I suppose, except Emerson, to establish our claim to a literature of our own thing really smacking of our own sun and soilthe true wine of the American vintage. And the reason for this lies in the fact that Hawthorne was, in the purest sense, no doubt, a man of genius. Yet I am aware, when I say this, that few things are more difficult than to tell what genius really is. "It is common sense, intensified," says one; "it is the power to make vast effort on long lines," says another. "It is unconquerable patience," Buffon says; and John Forster tells us: "It is the faculty to light your own fire." "It is a mind of large powers accidentally determined in some particular direction," says ponderous, six-syllabled Samuel Johnson; and so on indefinitely, as it was all things to all men. But I think one thing in the genius for literature is that which will never let the book, which is full of genius, lose its novelty. It is the greatest thing a man can do, also, and yet that which he does most spontaneously, "never cackling over his effort," as Carlyle says, and never wondering why all the world does not wonder at it when the thing is done. It is related of George the Fourth, of England, that he had some wine of a wonderful quality he |