aspect of American scenery and the hardly less wild features of pioneer character. He painted with equal skill the life of the American sailor, at a time when that life had an interest and excitement it no longer possesses. Long Tom Coffin, Tom Tiller, Bob Yarn, belonged to a period when the United Stales was a maritime country, before American enterprise and industry were shut off from the sea by legislative imbecility. No marine novelist has given a more life-like impression of a ship than Cooper, and none have excelled him in descriptions of the sea and in studies of those peculiar forms of human nature produced by life on the ocean. So long as Cooper confined himself to purely national subjects, his success was brilliant and continuous; but many of his works show the effect of misdirected talent, and have fallen into neglect. The "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and "Rip Van Winkle" are the specimens of American fiction most intimately associated with New York. In these stories the traditions and scenery of the Hudson River were treated by Washington Irving with all the richness of imagination and delicacy of expression of which he had so great a store. Some part of that romantic interest afforded to the traveller by the castles of the Rhine, has been imparted to the Hudson by the exquisite pages of the "Sketch Book." The stories of Nathaniel P. Willis and some of the novels of Bayard Taylor and of J.G. Holland also belong especially to New York. At the head of New England, and, indeed, of American writers of fiction, stands Nathaniel Hawthorne. His three great works, "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Blithedale Romance," are the finest specimens of imaginative writing which American genius has yet produced. The interest of Hawthorne's novels lies almost entirely in their subtle and astute studies of the hidden workings of the human mind. His fictions are remarkable for their want of action. "The Scarlet Letter" can hardly be said to have a plot. The series of chapters which intervene between the exhibition of Hester Prynne on the scaffold and the voluntary self-exposure there of the Puritan minister, simply represent gradual changes from the first to the last situation of the principal characters. But narrative excitement was never Hawthorne's object, and the want of it is never felt by his reader. Each scene is an appropriate sequel to the last, and a natural introduction to the next. Each chapter has its special interest,--the analysis of a condition of mind, a dramatic situation, or a highly finished domestic picture. It is in the delineation of character and the study of human motives that Hawthorne's chief excellence as a novelist consists. Nothing can exceed the penetration and vividness with which such persons as Zenobia, in "The Blithedale Romance," and Holgrave, in "The House of the Seven Gables," are described. The homeward walk of the fallen young minister, in "The