which he has dreamed about, and which, when they cease to be purely ideal in his mind, will have lost the truest of their truth, the loftiest and profoundest part of their power over his sympathies. Facts, as we really find them, whatever poetry they may involve, are covered with a stony excrescence of prose, resembling the crust on a beautiful sea-shell, and they never show their most delicate and divinest colors until we shall have dissolved away their grosser actualities by steeping them long in a powerful menstruum of thought. And seeking to actualize them again, we do but renew the crust. If this were otherwise—if the moral sublimity of a great fact depended in any degree on its garb of external circumstances, things which change and decay—it could not itself be immortal and ubiquitous, and only a brief point of time and a little neighborhood would be spiritually nourished by its grandeur and beauty."
When Hawthorne was settled in the Old Manse, an abode so happily adapted to his still contemplative habit, he had pondered, he intimates, various grave literary projects, and had "resolved at least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson and should possess physical substance enough to stand alone." He wrote there some of his finest short stories, "The Birthmark," "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "The Artist of the Beautiful"; but the production of his novel was to take place in another scene and under a rather singular stimulus. By 1846 the prospect of being able to make both
