MR. HAWTHORNE'S LAST FRAGMENT.*

Tits last brief fragment of Mr. Hawthorne's contains one of the finest and most delicate specimens of his exquisitely clear yet dusky pictures. The colours in which he paints, never either various or brilliant, yet always pure and mellow, remind one continually of that clear rich. brown in streams just fresh from the Yorkshire fells and from feeding the roots of broom and heather. In precisely the same way Mr. Hawthorne's style, rarely rivalled for beauty either in England or America,— and it is remarkable that a classical simplicity and refinement of style has especially distinguished almost all the greater authors of America Washington Irving, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Hawthorne,—always seems to take its dusky-clear beauty from the roots of the fresh New England nature through which it has flowed so long, and to have been slowly distilled by the pensive musings of many generations, rather than to be the indivi- dual style of a single author. Never in any of his numerous dreamy and yet shrewd, transcendental and yet half-cynical essays,—never in any of his meditative and yet almost prying analyses of character and fortune, has Mr. Hawthorne drawn anything so striking and yet so simple, so full of truth and so full of subtlety, so homely, so mellow, and so toned down into the sort of depth that age gives to great paintings, as the un- finished sketch which opens what was to have been his new tale.

There is a special adaptation, too, in the subject of the sketch to the qualities of his genius. It is the picture—a most marvellous picture—of great age almost losing its hold on the world, and seeing it afar off through the bedimming cloud of failing senses, yet still held back from the grave by love for a lonely child. Now the main characteristic of Mr. Hawthome's genius was always the far-off sort of twilight solitude from which his shrewd and curious eye watched and dissected the movements of the human heart. He had a sort of monopoly in the representation of that mental non-conducting medium which forbids the close approach between mind and mind even when it does not obscure the vision of him who is enveloped in it as in an atmosphere. It was this that gave him both the great shyness and profound sense of the weariness of life which his friend Mr. Dicey recently pourtrayed so admirably in the sketch in Macmillan's Magazine. It was to him that Hawthorne remarked when they were discuss. ing the question of the immediate resurrection or prolonged sleep of the soul after death, that he trusted there would be at least a sleep of a thousand years or so, for rest and restored vitality, before the labour of a new life began. That expresses precisely the literary impression conveyed by all his tales, of a mind operating with difficulty on the world through a long line of communications which it took much labour to put in motion,—of an eye watching acutely from the recesses of a cave the forms that flit to and fro in the sunlight before its mouth, but hardly caring to establish any system of mutual recognition. All his finest conceptions are removed in this way into an atmosphere of intellectual solitude, painful and burdensome in itself, more painful and more burdensome to break through,—and when he wrote his tale of " The Minister's Black Veil," of the clergyman who to typify the inaccessible solitude of every human heart puts a black veil over his face which no one is to remove, and so while he frightens away his betrothed wife and all his friends gains a mysterious spiritual power over the imagination of his flock,—be did but write a parable of his own life. And this great characteristic of Mr. Hawthorne's imagination which, like aged sight, magnified even while it interposed a separating film between him and the outer world, gave him peculiar advantages for the story of which we have here a brief but exquisite com- mencement.

In a New England town or village a great-grandfather is left the only guardian of a child of three years of age, their house standing on the edge of the burial-ground where all the old man's relatives and descendants lie buried, and all that we have left us of the story is Mr. Hawthorne's opening delinea- tion of the old man and the tie between him and the child,—the unfrozen drop of youthfulness " which sometimes expands in the former's veins, diminishing time otherwise painful distance between him and the world, and almost restoring to him for a moment that tendency to repudiate age and feebleness as essentially unnatural to man which, as Mr. Hawthorne truly says, lurks somewhere even

• Pansie. By Nathaniel Hawthorne;—his last literary effort- London: Jahn Camden Hotteu.

ip the recesses of the most sluggish and agesworn heart. No picture more exquisite and minute of the slow mental pulses of age, of the gradual retreat of life-into-the-last stronghold and the occasional sallies that it makes thence, as a spring sunbeam, or a child's hand and voice, or the sip of a cordial, or any other acci- dental influence for a moment restores some of the vivacity of former sensation, has ever been drawn than this by Hawthorne of the aged apothecary Dr. Dolliver, as he still feebly clings to the guardianship of his great-grandchild Pansie. He has availed himself of his own experience of a nature far withdrawn from the tingling sympathies of the outer world, to depict the state of a mind where the chills of old age had produced what peculiarity of organization had effected for himself.

" While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the uncarpoted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system, and yet made him shiver ; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving blood tingled through them with a half painful and only half pleasurable' titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed, he kept his back to the sunny window and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing thitherward; but as the June fervour pervaded him more and more thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and-looked forth at a burial-ground on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance, who had gone to sleep with the flavour of Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders upon his tongue; was the patient's final bitter taste of this world, and perhaps doomed be a recollected nau- seousness in the next. Yesterday, in the chill of his forlorn old age, the Doctor expected soon to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community, and might scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account, except indeed that ho dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with the repose of the approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp earth, under the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his cough and his rheumatism. But this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bed-time, or the fitful vigour that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand.— 'Hem! ahem !' quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat of the dregs of a ten years' cough. `Matters are not so far gone with me as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a little -age-Stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere faint- heartedness, a great deal sooner than they need.'—He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to impress the apophthegm on that shadowy representative of himself ; and for his part he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as be possibly could, if it was only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion of good Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he formerly had, and the entire confraternity of persons whom be once loved, had long ago departed, and the poor Doctor could not follow them because the grasp of Pansie's baby fingers held him back."

Nor is the picture of the little girl, though much less complete,— scarcely indeed commenced,—less •touching so far as it is given

. at all. The child was intended, we imagine, to be moulded by her forlorn destiny into early imperiousness and yet a melancholy concentrated• tenderness and dreamy wonder, and to be almost as far removed from the rest of mankind by the peculiarity of her .education, and the shadow of her parents and grand-parents' neighbouring graves, as her grandsire is by the dullness of failing . sense :—

" Half-way to the bottom, however, the Doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little Pansie,-2-Queen Pansie, as she might fairly have been styled, in reference to her position in the household,—call- ing amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He was startled into such perilous activity by the summons that his heels slid on the stairs, the slippers were shuffled off hie feet, and he saved himself from a tumble only by quickening his pace and coming down at almost a run.— `Mercy on my poor old bones !' mentally exclaimed the Doctor, fancy-

• lug himself fractured in fifty places. Some of them are broken surely, and methinks my heart has leaped out of my mouth ! What ! all right? Well, well ! but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing down this steep staircase like a kid of three months old

!'- He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff ; and meanwhile Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's descent, and was pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to oome at him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large-eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a motherless child, dwelling in an unoheerful house, with no other playmates than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better

, atmosphere within doors than the odour of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighbourhood than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where

- all her relatives, from her great-grandmother downward, lay calling to her, ' Pansie, Pansie, it is bed-time !' even in the prime of the summer morning. For those dead womenfolk, especially her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and grandaunts, could not but be anxious about the child, knowing that little Pansie would be far safer under a tuft of dandelions than if left alone, as she soon must be, in this difficult and deceitful world."

It is sad that a picture begun with outlines so clear and shades so delicate, should be so mere a fragment ; but it is a fragment which embodies more of the essence of Hawthorne's genius than almost any other of equal length in all his writings. The last . lines which he appears to have written are, as poets' last words (and in some sense Hawthorne was a poet) so often have been, a sort of farewell to the world, and a farewell as musical as it was probably unconscious,—sounding as if the deepest chords of his nature had just been touched by a breath of inspiration :—

" And there were seasons, it might be, happier than even these, when Pansie had been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his fireside, gazing in among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into those cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels or fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them in bygone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect treat that made him as beautiful to look at, in hishigh-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her pillow ; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a calm surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet not so vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse within. All the night afterwards he would be semi-conscious of an intangibleblissdiffusedthrough the fitful lapses of an old man's slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the heartstrings, as if there had been music .just now wandering over them."

There is in that sentence a silvery beauty which Hawthorne him- self has seldom equalled. It is curious that by far the most original of American literary men strikes us so often both in style and substance as nearer the classical standard of English authors than any Englishman we could produce. New England has filtered away much of the richness and also much of the impurity of Anglo-Saxon genius. There is something exquisitely delicate, but refined away almost to gossamer, in the tissue of the noblest genius of the New World.