excellence as a novelist consists. Nothing can exceed the penetration
and vividness with which such persons as Zenobia, in "The Blithedale
Romance," and Holgrave, in "The House of the Seven Gables," are
described. The homeward walk of the fallen young minister, in "The
Scarlet Letter," when he had resolved to desert his flock and to
connect himself again with Hester Prynne, is an unsurpassed delineation
of sudden moral degeneration. There is nothing of modern realism in
Hawthorne's novels, and yet they leave a realistic impression behind
them. The greater number of his characters appear to us rather as
representatives of certain mental conditions then as real flesh and
blood. Neither in the dialogue, nor in what may be called the
"properties" of his writing did Hawthorne strive at realistic effects.
Still, when the reader lays down "The Scarlet Letter," or "The House of
the Seven Gables," he insensibly feels himself embued with the spirit
and atmosphere of Puritan New England. Hawthorne was so intensely a New
Englander in his sympathies, prejudices, and habits of mind, that his
writings were always colored by the thought and sentiment of his native
land. In "The Scarlet Letter," there is little evidence of the use of
historical researches, and yet in that volume, colonial life has been
made real and actual to us by the very intensity of the author's
national feeling.

New England fiction includes a number of other celebrated and honored
names. Catherine M. Sedgwick began her literary career with "Hope
Leslie," a story founded on the early history of Massachusetts, which
was followed by "Redwood" and "The Linwoods, or Sixty Years Since in
America." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes studied New England village life in
"Elsie Venner," and Sylvester Judd that of the Maine backwoods in
"Margaret." Mr. T.W. Higginson has written "Malbone." Mr. W.D. Howells,
Rev. Edward Everett Hale, and Miss E.S. Phelps are still adding to