Poe and Irving and Hawthorne have all met with acceptance in other countries, and their works have been translated into several languages. Irving has exercised no perceptible influence on literature at home or abroad; Poe has entered more or less into the workings of a school in England and a group in France. Hawthorne's position on the Continent has perhaps not been so much one of conquest as of receiving an abstract admiration; but he has taken much stronger hold of the Anglo-Saxon mind than either of the others, and it is probable that his share in inspiring noble literature in America will--as it has already begun to show itself an important one--become vastly greater in future. It is impossible, as we have seen, to fix an absolute ratio between these writers. Irving has a more human quality than Poe, but Poe is beyond dispute the more original of the two. Each, again, has something which Hawthorne does not possess. But, if we must attempt at all to reduce so intricate a problem to exact terms, the mutual position of the three may be stated in the equation, Poe _plus_ Irving _plus_ an unknown quantity equals Hawthorne. XIII. THE LOSS AND THE GAIN. The suddenness with which Hawthorne faded away and died, when at the zenith of his fame, is no less strange and sad and visionary now than it was a poignant anguish then. He returned from Europe somewhat lingeringly, as we have seen, knowing too well the difference between the regions he was quitting and the thinner, sharper, and more wasting atmosphere of a country where every one who has anything to give is constantly drawn upon from every side, and has less resource for intellectual replenishment than in other lands. His seven years in England and Italy had, on the whole, been a period of high prosperity, of warm and gratifying recognition, of varied and delightful literary encounter, in addition to the pleasure of sojourning among so many new and suggestive scenes. And when he found himself once more on the old ground, with the old struggle for subsistence staring him steadily in the face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of depression would follow. Just as this reaction had set in, the breaking out of civil war threw upon Hawthorne, before he had time to brace himself for the shock, an immense burden of sorrowing sympathy. The conflict of feelings which it excited on the public side has been sketched; and that alone should have been enough to make the years of strife a time of continuous gloom and anxiety to him; but it would be losing sight of a very large element in his distress, not to add that he mourned over the multitude of private griefs which were the harvest of battle as acutely as if they had all been his own losses. His intense imagination burned them too deeply into his heart. How can we call this weakness, which involved such strength of manly tenderness and sympathy? "Hawthorne's life was shortened by the war," Mr. Lowell says. Expressing