history, which are scarcely less admirable, and of which _The Grey
Champion_, _The Maypole of Merry Mount_, and the four beautiful
_Legends of the Province House_, as they are called, are the most
successful specimens. Lastly come the slender sketches of actual
scenes and of the objects and manners about him, by means of which,
more particularly, he endeavoured "to open an intercourse with the
world," and which, in spite of their slenderness, have an infinite
grace and charm. Among these things _A Rill from the Town Pump_, _The
Village Uncle_, _The Toll-Gatherer's Day_, the _Chippings with a
Chisel_, may most naturally be mentioned. As we turn over these
volumes we feel that the pieces that spring most directly from his
fancy, constitute, as I have said (putting his four novels aside), his
most substantial claim to our attention. It would be a mistake to
insist too much upon them; Hawthorne was himself the first to
recognise that. "These fitful sketches," he says in the preface to the
_Mosses from an Old Manse_, "with so little of external life about
them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose--so reserved even while
they sometimes seem so frank--often but half in earnest, and never,
even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they
profess to image--such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis
for a literary reputation." This is very becomingly uttered; but it
may be said, partly in answer to it, and partly in confirmation, that
the valuable element in these things was not what Hawthorne put into
them consciously, but what passed into them without his being able to
measure it--the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination.
This is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing--this purity and
spontaneity and naturalness of fancy. For the rest, it is interesting
to see how it borrowed a particular colour from the other faculties
that lay near it--how the imagination, in this capital son of the old
Puritans, reflected the hue of the more purely moral part, of the