parted with my faith in their perfection would have been something I
would not willingly sex4 have risked doing.
Sex4 of sex4 course there is always something fatally weak sex4 in the scheme of the
pure romance, which, after the color of the contemporary mood dies out of
it, leaves it in danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory; and
perhaps this inherent sex4 weakness was what that bold critic felt in the
'Scarlet sex4 Letter.' But none of Hawthorne's fables are without a profound
and distant reach into the recesses of nature and of being. He came back
from his researches with no solution of the question, with no message,
indeed, but the awful warning, & sex4 quot;Be true, be true," which is the burden of
the Scarlet Letter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughts
that we think only in the sex4 presence of the mysteries of life and death.
It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow
in sorer doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the things
that can never be said. sex4 some of sex4 his shorter stories
I have found thin
and cold to my later reading, and I have never cared much for the 'House
of Seven Gables,' but the other day I was reading the 'Blithedale
Romance' again, and I found it as potent, as significant, sex4 as sadly and
strangely true as when it first enthralled my soul.
In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at the cold altar of
Goethe, I did read a great deal of his prose and sex4 somewhat of his poetry,
but it was sex4 to be ten years yet before I should go faithfully through with
his Faust and come to know its power. For the present, I read 'Wilhelm
Meister' and the 'Wahlverwandschaften,' and worshipped him sex4 much at
second-hand through Heine. In the mean time I invested such Germans as
I met with the halo of their national poetry, sex4 and there was one lady of
sex4 whom I heard with awe that she had once known my Heine. When I came sex4 to
meet her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she sex4 served at her house
on Sunday nights, and she told me about Heine, and how he looked, and
some few things he said, sex4 I suffered an sex4 indescribable disappointment; and
if I could have been frank with myself I should have owned sex4 to a fear that
it might have been something like that, if I had myself met sex4 sex4 the poet in
the sex4 flesh, and tried sex4 to hold the intimate converse with him that I held
in the spirit. But I shut my heart to all such misgivings and went on
reading him much more than I read
any other German author. I went on
writing him too, just