At this point it will be well to take note of Hawthorne’s principal writings subsequent to the publication of the second edition of the Twice-Told Tales. They are: The Celestial Railroad, 1843; Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846;[38] The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of the Seven Gables, 1851; A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, 1852; The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, 1852; The Blithedale Romance, 1852; Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852; Tanglewood Tales, 1853; The Marble Faun, or the Romance of Monte Beni, 1860;[39] Our Old Home, 1863.

The posthumous publications are: Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1868; Passages from the English Note-Books ..., 1870; Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books ..., 1872; Septimius Felton, 1872; The Dolliver Romance, 1876; Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, 1883.

In June, 1860, after an absence of seven years, Hawthorne returned to ‘The Wayside.’ He felt the burden of the political situation now culminating in civil war. With little sympathy for the cause of Abolition, Hawthorne, when the conflict had actually begun, found it ‘delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time’ and to feel that he had a country.[40]

His health began to decline and he was spiritless and depressed. In March, 1864, accompanied by his friend W. D. Ticknor, he started southward, hoping for benefit from the change. Ticknor, who was seemingly in perfect health, died suddenly in Philadelphia. Hawthorne was unnerved by the shock. In May he undertook a carriage journey among the New Hampshire hills with Pierce. The friends proceeded by easy stages, reaching Plymouth in the evening of May 18. Hawthorne was growing visibly weaker and Pierce had already determined that he would send for Mrs. Hawthorne. Shortly after midnight he went into his friend’s room. Hawthorne was apparently sleeping. He went again between three and four in the morning. Hawthorne was dead.

II
HAWTHORNE’s CHARACTER

‘I am a man, and between man and man there is always an insuperable gulf,’ said Kenyon in The Marble Faun.

Hawthorne might have been speaking through Kenyon’s lips, so accurately does the saying voice his private thought. He lived in a world apart. No experience of custom-house, consulate, or farm could bring him quite out of his world into the common world of men. Hawthorne had more reason than Emerson to complain of the wall between him and his fellow-mortals. When glib talkers were displaying no end of conversational change, Hawthorne kept his hands in his pockets. He had no mind to indulge in that form of matching pennies known as small talk.

Observers have voiced their impressions of him in different ways; their testimony is not discordant. The romantically inclined described Hawthorne as mysterious. Plain people thought him queer. Even his brother authors found him odd. Longfellow described Hawthorne as ‘a strange owl, a very peculiar individual, with a dash of originality about him very pleasant to behold.’ Yet Hawthorne was without a grain of affectation, and took keen interest in the homely facts of life. His books everywhere betray this interest. He who wrote that description of his kitchen garden in The Old Manse would seem to be just the man to lean over the fence and talk cabbages and squashes with some neighborhood farmer. And perhaps he did.

He was not fond of men of letters as a class—which is not surprising. The friends who stood close to him were not literary. Bridge was a naval officer. Pierce was a politician, representative of a type for which Hawthorne had contempt. Hillard was a lawyer, a man of the world.

Hawthorne was not without his share of ‘human nature,’ as we say. He had his prejudices, and they were sometimes deeply rooted. When smarting under a sense of injustice he could wield a caustic pen. He was a good hater, but not narrow-minded. He hated spirit-rapping, table-tipping, and all the vulgar machinery and manifestations of a vulgar delusion. He hated noise, brawling, and dissension. He loved his home. His letters to his wife reveal a nature of exquisite delicacy. He loved children, Nature, and he was chivalrous in his attitude towards the animal creation.