We have spoken warmly of this volume, for it has both interested and
instructed us, and because we consider it one of the few thoroughly
creditable productions of Cisatlantic scholarship. We hope the
appreciation it meets with will be such that we shall soon have
occasion to thank Mr. Marsh for another volume on some kindred theme.
_The Marble Faun._ A Romance of Monte Beni. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 2
vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860.
It is, we believe, more than thirty years since Mr. Hawthorne's first
appearance as an author; it is twenty-three since he gave his first
collection of "Twice-told Tales" to the world. His works have received
that surest warranty of genius and originality in the widening of their
appreciation downward from a small circle of refined admirers and
critics, till it embraced the whole community of readers. With just
enough encouragement to confirm his faith in his own powers, those
powers had time to ripen and toughen themselves before the gales of
popularity could twist them from the balance of a healthy and normal
development. Happy the author whose earliest works are read and
understood by the lustre thrown back upon them from his latest! for
then we receive the impression of continuity and cumulation of power,
of peculiarity deepening to individuality, of promise more than
justified in the keeping: unhappy, whose autumn shows only the
aftermath and rowen of an earlier harvest, whose would-be
replenishments are but thin dilutions of his fame!
The nineteenth century has produced no more purely original writer than
Mr.
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