America has lost her greatest and most original author. Nathaniel
Hawthorne was found dead in his bed in a country house at Plymouth, New Hampshire, whither he had gone to recruit failing health, on the 19th May. General Franklin Pierce, the Democratic President of 1852, who gave him the Liverpool Consulship in that year, and who was an old college friend of Hawthorne's, accompanied Min, we believe, on this last visit, and Was the first, it is said, to discover his death. General Pierce writes to a friend immediately after Hawthome's death :— " He lies upon his side, his position is so perfectly natural and easy, his eyes closed, that it is difficult to realize while looking upon his noble face that this is death. He must have pawed from natural slumber to that from which there is no waking without the slightest movement." His weird romances and tales all run on the mystery of the connection between mind and body, and treat that subject with a peculiar and an almost prying imaginative curiosity, were it not that the effect is never small or insignificant, though often painful. But this is no place to discuss the genius of so unique a writer. Hawthorne 'Vat just sixty years old at the time of his death; - -
