remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in
thinking that future years may be more varied, and therefore
more tolerable, than the past. You give me more credit than
I deserve in supposing that I have led a studious life. I
have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so
desultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it
left me the fruits of study.... I have another great
difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so
little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to
concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a
life-like semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes,
through a peephole, I have caught a glimpse of the real
world, and the two or three articles in which I have
portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others."

It is more particularly for the sake of the concluding lines that I
have quoted this passage; for evidently no portrait of Hawthorne at
this period is at all exact which, fails to insist upon the constant
struggle which must have gone on between his shyness and his desire to
know something of life; between what may be called his evasive and his
inquisitive tendencies. I suppose it is no injustice to Hawthorne to
say that on the whole his shyness always prevailed; and yet,
obviously, the struggle was constantly there. He says of his
_Twice-Told Tales_, in the preface, "They are not the talk of a
secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so they could
hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable,) but
his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an
intercourse with the world." We are speaking here of small things, it
must be remembered--of little attempts, little sketches, a little
world. But everything is relative, and this smallness of scale must