raphy of Emerson, described Transcendentalism as an outbreak of romanticism. The romantic spirit is almost always transcendental. Now, even the stories of Irving are pervaded with one kind of romantic temper, - that which delights in the splendours of a vanished past, and in the mysteries of supernatural fancy. Something more deeply deeply romantic underlies the inarticulate work of Brockden Brown, and still more the poems and the tales of Poe. Both Brown and Poe had a deep sense of what horror may lurk in the mysteries which always lie beyond human ken. Even Brown, however, and surely Poe conceived these melodramatically. Brown can sometimes thrill you; and Poe often; but when you wake again to normal placidity, you find in your nostrils some lingering trace of such fumes as fill theatres where red lights have been burning. In common with Irving and Poe, Hawthorne had an instinctive tendency to something like classic precision of form. In common with them he possessed, too, a constant sensitiveness to the mysteries of romantic sentiment; but the romanticism of Hawthorne differs from that of either Poe or Irving as distinctly as it differs from that of Brockden Brown. In Hawthorne's there is no trace of artificiality. Beyond human life he feels not only the fact of mystery; he feels the mysteries which are truly there. In the mere fact of romantic temper, then, Hawthorne is broadly American, typically native to this new world which has been so starved of antiquity. In the fact that his romantic spirit is fundamentally true he proves individual, and more at one than our other artists with the deepest spirit of his peculiar country. The darkly passionate idealism of the Puritans had involved a tendency towards conceptions, which when they reached artistic form must be romantic. The phase of mystery on which the grim dogmas of these past generations incessantly dwelt lies in the world-old facts, which nothing shall ever much abate, of evil and sin and suffering. Now Hawthorne had passed so far beyond Puritan dogma that in mature life he could rarely be persuaded to attend a religious service. His temper, indeed, when not concerned with the forms of artistic expression, was impatient of all formality. Just as truly, however, as his nature was that of a born artist, it could never shake off the temperamental earnestness of the Puritan. Throughout his work, then, he is most characteristic when in endlessly varied form he expresses that constant, haunting sense of ancestral sin in which his Puritan forefathers found endless warrant for their doctrines of depravity and of eternal retribution. With the Puritans, of course, this sense of sin was a conviction of fact; they believed in the Devil,. whose essential wickedness, lurking within every human heart, is bound if we lack divine help to sweep us into deserved and lasting torment. Hawthorne, on the other hand, felt all this only as a matter of emotional experience. To him Puritanism was no longer a motive of life; in final ripeness it had become a motive of art. When any human impulse has thus ripened, we may generally conclude it historically a thing of the past. Another aspect of this deep sense of sin and mystery shows us that it involves morbid development of conscience. Conscience in its artistic form Hawthorne displays throughout; and though artistic conscience be very different from moral, the two have in common an aspiration toward beauty. For all its perversities of outward form, the impulse of the moral conscience is really toward beauty of conduct; artistic conscience, often evident in works morally far from edifying, is a constant, strenuous impulse toward beauty of expression. In America this latter trait has generally seemed more frequent than in England; one feels it even in Brockden Brown, one feels it strongly in Irving and Poe, one feels it in the delicately sentimental lines of Bryant, and one feels it now and again through most of the expression of renascent New England. Whatever American writers have achieved, they have con stantly tried to do their best. Hawthorne, we have seen, surpassed his countrymen in the genuineness of his artistic impulse; he surpassed them, too, in the tormenting strenuousness of his artistic conscience. In his choice of words and, above all, in the delicacy of his very subtle rhythm, he seems never to have relaxed his effort to write as beautifully as he could. He displays the ancestral conscience of New England, then, in finally exquisite form. Of course the man has limits. Comparing his work with the contemporary work of England, one is aware of its classically careful form, of its profoundly romantic sentiment, and of its admirable artistic conscience. One grows aware, at the same time, of its unmistakable rusticity; in turns of thought as well as of phrase one feels monotony, provincialism, a certain thinness. Throughout, one feels again that tendency to shrink from things of the flesh which to some foreign minds makes all American writing seem either emasculate or hypocritical. It is reported of Hawthorne, indeed, who first saw Europe, we should remember, when he was nearly fifty years. old, that he could never reconcile his taste to the superbly unconscious nudities of masterly sculpture and painting. Here is an incalculable limit; and he has plenty more. One and all of these limits, however, prove, like his merits, to be deeply characteristic of the New England which surrounded his life. - It is hard to sum up the impression which such a writer makes. He was ideal, of course, in temper; he was introspective, with all the self-searching instinct of his ancestry; he was solitary; he was permeated with a sense of the mysteries of life and sin; and by pondering over them he tended to exaggerate them more and more. In a dozen aspects, then, he seems typically Puritan. His artistic conscience, however, as alert as that of any pagan, impelled him constantly to realise in his work those forms of beauty which should most beautifully embody the ideals of his incessantly creative imagi nation. Thus he grew to be of all ou writers the least imitative, the most surely individual. The circumstances of his life combined with the sensitiveness of his nature to make his individuality indigenous. Beyond any one else, then, he expresses the deepest temper of that New England race which brought him forth, and which now, at least in the phases we have known, seems vanishing from the earth. XV THE DECLINE OF NEW ENGLAND AMONG the numerous writers of the New England Renaissance on whom we have not touched there were doubtless some who wrote significantly. The unconscious selection of the public, however, has preferred those on whom we have consequently found it worth our while to dwell. What is more, little was thought or said in nineteenth-century New England, and above all little was written there which will not fall under one or another of the heads which we have considered. The earlier volumes of the "Atlantic," for example, taken with the "Dial" and the "North American Review," represent the literature of this period; and although among the contributors to each you may find persons whom we have neglected, you will be at pains to find in any of them traces of any general spirit in the air with which our study has not now made us reasonably familiar. It is hard, too, quite to realise that we have been dealing not with the present but with the past. The days of the Renaissance are still so recent that plenty of Bostonians instinctively feel its most eminent figures to be our contemporaries. As we begin to ponder over the group of our lately vanished worthies, however, the most obvious fact about them grows to seem that they represent a kind of eminence which no longer distinguishes New England. The social history of Boston, one begins to see, has been exceptional. Early in the reign of Charles II., Cotton Mather was born there. Living all his life in that remote colonial town, he managed, both as a man of science and as a |