Then we have the psychological vein, in "The Prophetic Pictures," "The Minister's Black Veil," "Dr. Heidegger," "Fancy's Show-Box"; and along with this the current of delicate essay-writing, as in "The Haunted Mind," and "Sunday at Home." "Little Annie's Ramble," again, foreshadows his charming children's tales. It is rather remarkable that he should thus have sounded, though faintly, the whole diapason in his first works. Moreover, he had already at this time attained a style at once flowing and large in its outline, and masterly in its minuteness. But this maturity was not won without deep suffering and long-deferred hope. If actual contact with men resulted in such grave and sorrowful reflection as we have traced, how drearily trying must have been the climaxes of solitary thought after a long session of seclusion! And much the larger portion of his time was consumed amid an absolute silence, a privacy unbroken by intimate confidences and rife with exhausting and depressing reactions from intense imagination and other severe intellectual exercise. Not only must the repression of this period have amounted at times to positive anguish, but there was also the perplexing perception that his life's fairest possibilities were still barren. "Every individual has a place in the world, and is important to it in some respects, whether he chooses to be so or not." So runs one of the extracts from the "American Note-Books"; and now and then we get from the same source a glimpse of the haunting sense that he is missing his fit relation to the rest of the race, the question whether his pursuit was not in some way futile like all the human pursuits he had noticed,--whether it was not to be nipped by the same perversity and contradiction that seemed to affect all things mundane. Here is one of his proposed plots, which turns an inner light upon his own frame of mind: "Various good and desirable things to be presented to a young man, and offered to his acceptance,--as a friend, a wife, a fortune; but he to refuse them all, suspecting that it is merely a delusion. Yet all to be real, and he to be told so when too late." Is this not, in brief, what he conceives may yet be the story of his own career? Another occurs, in the same relation: "A man tries to be happy in love; he cannot sincerely give his heart, and the affair seems all a dream. In domestic life the same; in politics, a seeming patriot: but still he is sincere, and all seems like a theatre." These items are the merest indicia of a whole history of complex emotions, which made this epoch one of continuous though silent and unseen struggle. In a Preface prefixed to the tales, in 1851, the author wrote: "They are the memorials of very tranquil and not unhappy years." Tranquil they of course were; and to the happy and successful man of forty-seven, the vexing moods and dragging loneliness of that earlier period would seem "not unhappy," because he could then see all the good it had contained.