EXPEDITION TO PORT ROYAL. BY EUGENE TAYLOR. [The readers of the MONTHLY will call to mind the fact that a terrible storm arose soon after the departure, from Hampton Roads, of the expedition to Port Royal, which the writer of the following lines has, we think, beautifully described. -EDS.] HERE the glorious seas their fountains made, WH And the crystal walls of the deep were laid; Where the mariner's song was borne afar, Full fifty loyal ships that autumn day But, lo! what means that deep and angry cloud There the wild winds sweep with an unseen hand But the sea is His; He made the cold wave From the fathomless deep to rockbound coast, With the heavy boom of the signal gun While o'er the bay their crashing thunders fell— Their charging thunder-bolts were quickly thrown That came to the forts, like the voice of doom, 'Mid the moans of death, 'mid the battle smoke, Like destroying angels, they swept the coast HAWTHORNE.* BY ROBERT COLLYER. N ATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, raciest name in American letters, was born in the queer old city of Salem, that he has made so mysterious and yet familiar to us through his writings. He came of an old sea-faring race, that time out of mind had left their home, gone to sea, and risen through storm and shine to the rank of captain, and then, at last, had come back for good, and all to the old place, to die. The father of HAWTHORNE was a sailor, the last of the line that followed the sea. He died when NATHANIEL was six years old. His mother after this carried the boy into Maine and sent him in due time to college, where he had Longfellow, the poet, and Franklin Pierce for classmates, and whence also he graduated. And then, as if Nature would be avenged for all the gadding about of all the HawTHORNES, he retired into a seclusion so deep as to be seldom seen even in his own family circle; wrote wild tales, on which he had no more mercy than the old HAWTHORNES had for the witches, for he burnt them; printed a romance in Boston in 1832, of which no man knoweth the sepulchre unto this day; sat at the receipt of customs, under Mr. Bancroft, on the Long Wharf in Boston, and there showed enough of the salt to make him a favorite with the sailors; went out of that, when Harrison set up his log cabin, into the Brook Farm experiment, the mother-bird of his "Blithdale Romance;" married when he was forty, and went to live in that Old Manse at Concord, of whose mosses he has preserved such exquisite specimens. Then the new wave of democracy that carried Polk into the whitehouse carried HAWTHORNE into the custom-house at Salem; but when the Whigs divided the spoils, they snatched HawTHORNE'S bit of loaf among the rest. In 1853 Franklin Pierce made him Consul at Liverpool, the best thing he had in his gift. In 1857 this was done with, and after some travel on the continent of Europe, HAWTHORNE came home to die. And so, on one of the softest and sweetest May-days that ever breathed over New England, with apple blossoms from the orchard of the Old Manse and his last manuscript laid on his coffin, he was buried, with floods of sunshine about him, on the crowning eminence of the beautiful cemetery at Concordwith a multitude of New England's children standing about his dust, while James Freeman Clarke, his dear friend, said words of hope and consolation to the weepers at the grave. For in the years that had come and gone since his stillborn romance was buried in a level grave in Boston, HAWTHORNE had done better things than acting as a tide-waiter to a political party. He had written some books of a quality and flavor as separate, unique and rare as the "Heart of Mid Lothian " or “Adam Bede," and had done more than any other man, except Emerson, to establish our claim to a literature of our own-something smacking of our own sun and soil-the true wine of the American vintage. And the reason for this lies in the fact that HAWTHORNE was, in the purest sense, no doubt, a man of genius. Yet I am aware, when I say this, that few things are more difficult than to tell what genius really is. "It is common sense intensified," says one. "It is the power to make vast effort," says another. "It is unconquerable patience," Buffon says; and John Foster, "It is the faculty to light your own fire." "It is a *Note-Books of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1868. J mind of large powers accidentally determined in some particular direction," says ponderous six-syllabled Samuel Johnson; and so on infinitely. I think one thing in the genius for literature is that which will never let the book that is full of genius lose its novelty. It is the greatest thing a man can do, yet that which he does most spontaneously, "never cackling over his effort," as Carlyle says, and wondering why all the world does not wonder at it. It is related of George the Fourth, of England, that he had some wine of a wonderful quality he treasured for rare occasions befitting a king. His butler, supposing the occasion would never come, drank the wine, and then it did come, and word was given that the wine must be ready on such a day. The butler went to a great wine merchant to try if he could not find some. There was none to be had in the three kingdoms, but the merchant said, "If you have left a single bottle in the cellar, I can make you as much as you want and defy the king to tell the difference, if it is used within a week, but after a week it will be no better than dishwater." The story illustrates the difference between pure genius and mere talent. A man of talent will write a book that will sell like the "Ledger." Genius will write a book that will have to darkle and ripen down in the publisher's cellars, but the wine of genius percolates through twenty centuries into the comet year, and once ripened and gathered, the time that turns the work of mere talent into dishwater, puts spirit and life into the work of genius. I can remember when Tennyson was excluded from the Subscription Library in Leeds, because, as they said, he was only a newspaper poet. I suppose Shakespeare did not understand himself so well as many bright souls now understand him, because his genius has ripened, and grown strong and fine through time. This is some hint of genius, and HAWTHORNE was a man of genius, so he had to submit to this common experience of his order. He claimed for a long time to be the most thoroughly unknown author in America. If the noble gentleman whose name now stands at the head of the firm that has published HAWTHORNE'S Note Books, and whose service to American literature is beyond all praise, will sometime print a book like "Lackington's Confessions," I hope it will contain a story he told me once of the way he found the "Scarlet Letter" and the author of it. It is among the most touching and pathetic things I ever listened to. HAWTHORNE, then, was clean broken down. The public neglect had chilled him, and made him feel that his idea of writing to any purpose was a mere chimera. And it is sad also to remember now that all through these times this man of genius had to float out and in on the rising and falling tide of a political party. It is possible that we can never be quite in time with our aid to struggling men of this fine grain. It is none the less pitiful that a man like HAWTHORNE, proud, shy, and sensitive, as any soul God ever made, should have to be a camp follower, and wait on the fortunes of the campaign. And when Franklin Pierce stands before the great white throne of the generations to come, it will hide a multitude of sins, to remember that he loved his old schoolmate so well, as to give him the best he had, and so in money, at least, and what money will buy, to save this nation some such regret as the Scotch will always feel for their neglect of Burns. Noticing HAWTHORNE'S genius briefly on the side of its limitations, I would venture to say that he is the Hamlet of the American mind. He sees deeply, but, on the whole, too sadly. No man among our writers equals him in the power to touch the innermost springs of the soul; and yet I think the whole result of what he does differs somehow from the whole truth and life, because you can never rise from reading what he has written feeling quite so cheerful and confident in God and man, and life here and everywhere, as when you sat down. HAWTHORNE never really laughs with you, or life, or at you or at life. He will often tell you laughable things, yet there is little that is bright and breezy even in them. He speaks somewhere of his work as the "moonlight of romance." His light is the moonlight of life. If there was no greater light to rule the day than HAWTHORNE'S, there would be neither corn nor roses. There is no great reach of bright, rippling sunlight in his books. A grain of nightshade pervades them all, as a grain of musk will pervade a chamber. Then I wonder sometimes if it is not because HAWTHORNE'S ancestors were such mighty witch-burning Puritans, that the sin was visited on the fourth generation, in that fatal faculty for seeing the grim side of Puritanism, and remaining sand-blind to so much in it that was beautiful and good. It is possible that the fine nature of the HAWTHORNES, culminating in this man, made it imperative that a blind devotion to Puritanism in the seventeenth century should grow into a blind prejudice against it in the nineteenth. Not seen so clearly, however, in his antagonism to the churches, and the religion socalled, but to the great anti-slavery movement-the ripest and best fruit of the old tree. Then I would mention HAWTHORNE'S preferences for what is fearful and criminal over what is healthy and inspiring, and the sense you have that the author is telling you what he has dreamed, rather than what he has seen and handled, while his dream still assumes a sharp and solid reality. So I don't expect, when I go to Salem, to meet the man whose wife lost five dollars by keeping a cent shop; but if Emerson had told me about him I should look out for him at every turn ing. These, I think, are HAWTHORNE'S limitations, or some of them. But then it is the simple truth to say that we can find in this man's books what cannot be found, beside, in the native literature of this new world. Each one of the HAWTHORNE's great works is devoted to the gradual development of a great idea. The "Scarlet Letter" is a revelation of the truth of Paul's words, that "some men's sins are open beforehand going before them to judgment, and some men's sins follow after them." In opening this truth through the sin on which the story turns, it is wonderful to notice how the man manages to keep on the exact line between a Puritan reserve and a wild imagination. Esther's slow and painful purification is crowned by no perfect happiness. Dimmesdale's confessions is only the last relief of the soul on earth from what must have barred its entrance into heaven, and he has to bear the dreadful burden of his secret sin into the holiest places a man can enter, until the weight and corrosion of it kills him. the tall woman in gray, whose dust is laid in the old King's Chapel graveyard at last, is not buried so near another grave that their dust can ever mingle. While The "House of the Seven Gables" is devoted to the development of the idea that evil deeds can be transmitted, with an ever-gathering force, from age to age, blighting some life in every generation. HAWTHORNE makes the shadow of the first bad Pincheon hang like a black cloud about the house he built. It spoils the water in the well, eats into the heart of the roses on the wall. Every detail, to the minutest, points back to that old time. While the first Pincheon dead in his mint new house, with a gout of blood on his lips, and the last Pincheon dead in the same chair, and the same way; when the chips and shavings of the new building are turned to fat soil by the |