the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature. None of the feathered race has yet realized my youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. I had seen the red election-birds brought from their recesses on my comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of evening, in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen such strong and wild tints on any poet's string."

It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended transcendentalism. Mysticism has been defined as the soul's recognition of its identity with nature. This thought lies plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and he illustrated it by his famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature are one; they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In man, the Absolute-that is, God-becomes conscious of himself; makes of himself, as nature, an object to himself as mind. "The souls of men," said Schelling, "are but the innumerable individual eyes with which our infinite WorldSpirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly present in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be accused of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doctrine that the underlying principle of the universe is matter or force, none of the transcendentalists was a pantheist. In their view nature was divine. Their poetry is always haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality which abides beyond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's Two Rivers:

"Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,1
Repeats the music of the rain,

But sweeter rivers pulsing flit

Through thee as thou through Concord plain.

The Indian name of Concord River.

"Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes;
Through flood and sea and firmament,

Through light, through life, it forward flows.

"I see the inundation sweet,

I hear the spending of the stream,

Through years, through men, through nature fleet,

Through passion, thought, through power and dream."

This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in it-sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In me is the sucker that I see;" and, of Walden Pond,

"I am its stony shore,

And the breeze that passes o'er."

...

"Suddenly old Time winked at me-ah, you know me, you rogue and news had come that IT was well. That ancient universe is in such capital health, I think, undoubtedly, it will never die. . . . I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that everlasting something to which we are allied, at once our maker, our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was something ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. "The other world," he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other: my jack-knife will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, however, like Emerson, to "examine too microscopically the universal tablet." He was a close observer and accurate reporter of the ways of birds and plants and the minuter. aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in none of them is there that unique combination of the poet, the naturalist, and the mystic which gives his page its wild original flavor. He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with

the fact.

The sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods was to him " as though a door had shut somewhere in the damp and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cosmic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the reader the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far and unknown regions. The river just above Sherman's Bridge, in time of flood "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober billows," was like Lake Huron, "and you may run aground on Cranberry Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord.

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American literature-not national and not inclusive of all sides of American life—it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer, came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of his American Note Books, posthumously published. Hawthorne was thirty-eight when

he took his place among the Concord literati. His child. hood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820, the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had withdrawn entirely from the world. For months at a time Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no other society than that of his mother and sisters, reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most of which he destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight he would emerge from the house for a solitary ramble through the streets of the town or along the sea-side, Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its associations. It had been the scene of the witch trials in the seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father had been a ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in 1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death. The thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing horror, and he utilized it afterward in his House of the Seven Gables. Many of the old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now and then the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which haunted posterity with its curse till all the stock died out or fell into poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's romance. In the preface to the Marble Faun Hawthorne wrote: "No author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance

about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may be doubted whether any environment could have. been found more fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any preparation better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than these long, lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to time he contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S. G. Goodrich's annual, the Token, or the Knickerbocker Magazine. Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were anonymous and signed by various noms de plume, and their author was at this time-to use his own words "the obscurest man of letters in America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a short romance, entitled Fanshawe. It had little success, and copies of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a collection of his magazine pieces under the title, Twice-Told Tales. The book was generously praised in the North American Review by his former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genuine romance. Poe compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of the American Note Books, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over Tieck with a German dictionary. The Twice-Told Tales are the work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact with men. Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psycho