trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood."
A little further on he adds his statement of what the sketches both are and are not:—
"They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so, they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable), but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world."
To Hawthorne himself these tales seemed so external; and his analysis, however much may be allowed for modesty in the statement, appears to be true.
Hawthorne left himself out of his work, so far as a man can. Indeed, his own life was neither vigorous nor one of much variety of faculty, outside of his art. He had the indolence of the meditative habit, or of the artistic nature, if one chooses to call it so. He clearly spent a great deal of time doing nothing in particular; he read, observed the world of the passing seasons, made long memoranda of nature and human nature and short notes of ideas for tales and sketches, and had in fact large leisure, except in the years when he was in the Boston Custom House, and he was not without leisure even then. He shows no inclination toward scholarship, but was a desultory reader of English, with some French; he had no intellectual interests, apparently, of a philosophical kind; the aloofness in which he stood from
