compiled in 1862 from his English note-books. His health was sadly shattered from some mysterious disease that baffled the skill of physicians. He attempted at least three romances, all of which he left unfinished. Hoping to stay his fast-ebbing energies, in the spring of 1864 he started with his lifelong friend, ex-President Pierce, on a carriage drive through the White Mountains. A few days later, on May 19, the sad word came from Plymouth, New Hampshire, where they had been stopping for the night, that Hawthorne had suddenly passed away. At the funeral the half-finished manuscript of his last romance was laid upon his coffin, rendering deeply significant the noble lines read by Longfellow: "Ah! who shall lift again that wand of magic power The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower Our Old Home. Since Hawthorne's death his unfinished romances and many extracts from his note-books, which he had kept with extreme care from day to day throughout the greater part of his life, have been given to the world. These volumes, although of a fragmentary nature, a storehouse of descriptions, plots for romances, characterizations of peculiar personalities, Dr. Grimshaw's written to be drawn from for his more ambitious literary efforts,-are of untold value to the student of Hawthorne's life and philosophy. The fragments of romances produced in his last years, The Dolliver Septimius Felton. Secret. In while full of melancholy evidence of failing powers, contain here and there some of his strongest work. these fragments we find work in every stage of development. These and the note-books admit us into the romancer's literary workshop. The note-books, in connection with the autobiographical chapters of the romances and tales published during Hawthorne's lifetime, give us as complete a picture of the romancer as we shall ever have. No one can ever reveal him to the world any more vividly than he has chosen to reveal himself. Well might he enjoin upon his family to publish no biography, for he had been his own Boswell. Hawthorne's Style. (Richardson, II.; Whipple's Literature and Life, American Literature; Welsh's English Literature and Language, II.; Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library; Taylor's Essays and Notes; Higginson's Short Studies of American Authors; Curtis' Literary and Social Essays; Hutton's Essays in Literary Criticism; Lathrop's Study of Hawthorne; Julian Hawthorne's Hawthorne's Philosophy,")Century Magazine, May, 1886.) As a writer of strong, idiomatic, musical English, Hawthorne must be ranked with the great masters of the brightest age of English literature. He stands as a perpetual rebuke to those who insist that perfect English is a lost art. His style has not a hint of artificiality, not a suggestion of painstaking revision, or of slavery to the lifeless rules of rhetoric. It seems as natural and spontaneous as a talk by the fireside with a friend, and yet the reader looks in vain for a single careless or slovenly sentence, one that is not of crystal clearness and limpid sweetness. A delicate humor, which, like all true humor, is very close to pathos, plays over every page. There is not a prose writer of the century upon whose work one would be more willing to stake the reputation of our stout old English tongue. r "Wherein this excellence in Hawthorne's style consists it is not easy to say; the charm is too airy and impalpable for the grasp of language. It is to be described by negatives rather than positives; his style is not stiff, not pedantic; it is free from mannerism, caricature, and rhetoric; it has a sap and flavor of its own; it is a peculiar combination of ease and finish. The magic of style is like the magic of manner, it is felt by all, but it can be analyzed and defined by few. . . Hawthorne never was, could not be, a careless writer. By an inevitable law of his mind, every conception to which his pen gave shape was graceful and exact. Before his exquisite sentences verbal criticism folds its hands for lack of argument." G. S. Hillard. XIX. THE CAMBRIDGE POETS (1). Old Cambridge. No history of American literature can be complete that fails to mention the great service done by Harvard College in introducing to the American people the culture and the art of Europe. For more than half a century Cambridge was our literary port of entry, our distributing centre, our literary capital. In 1818 Washington Allston, our first evangelist of culture, came back from his long sojourn in the art galleries of Europe, a member of the Royal Academy, to spend his last years in Boston and Cambridgeport. His studio became the art centre of America, an chanted spot amid the wilds of the New World, where, in the words of Lowell, "one might go to breathe Venetian air and, better yet, the very spirit wherein the elder brothers of art labored." In 1819 Edward Everett, "the best Grecian" of his generation, returned from Germany and Greece to take the chair of Greek at Harvard, and to inspire with his own boundless enthusiasm all who came in contact with him. Four years later Channing told to eager audiences of the treasures of literature and art in the European capitals. Through the efforts of the Harvard scholars, the Greek language and literature soon began to emerge from the obscurity into which they had been thrown by Mather and Barlow. In 1830 Felton edited Homer, and shortly afterwards Isocrates and Æschylus. Under the influence of Buckminster, Felton, Ripley, Emerson, and others, the German literature and philosophy began to be better known. In 1838 Ripley published the first two volumes of his Foreign Standard Literature, a series soon to be expanded into fourteen volumes; two years later Felton translated Mentzel's German Literature, and in 1848 Dr. Hedge, German professor at Harvard, published his valuable Prose Writers of Germany. The effect upon American thought and literature of the influx of German philosophy has been already noted. But the American people as a whole knew little of Continental literature until Longfellow "opened the sluices through which the flood of German sentimental poetry poured into the United States." Longfellow's early translations from the Spanish, the French, and the German, and his Hyperion, which is full of the intoxicating Rhine wine, mark an epoch in the history of American poetry. He did for Germany and the Continent of Europe what Irving had done for England. Full freighted as he was with all that was purest and best in the Old World culture, and uniting with this a rare sympathy and a sweetly gentle spirit, he commanded from the very first an audience of his countrymen such as no American had ever won before or will ever win again. With the appearance of Longfellow and the remarkable group that soon gathered about |