failing to return. No doubt, also, there was a little spice of boyish mischief in this; and something of the fictionist, for it enabled him to make a strong impression on his audience. He brought out the _dénouement_ in such a way as to seem--so one of those who heard him has written--to enjoin upon them "the advice to value him the more while he stayed with" them. This choice of the lugubrious, however, seems to have been native to him; for almost before he could speak distinctly he is reported to have caught up certain lines of "Richard III." which he had heard read; and his favorite among them, always declaimed on the most unexpected occasions and in his loudest tone, was,-- "Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pass!" Though he has nowhere made allusion to the distant and sudden death of his father, Hawthorne has mentioned an uncle lost at sea, in the "English Notes," [Footnote: June 30, 1854]--a startling passage. "If it is not known how and when a man dies," he says "it makes a ghost of him for many years thereafter, perhaps for centuries. King Arthur is an example; also the Emperor Frederic [Barbarossa] and other famous men who were thought to be alive ages after their disappearance. So with private individuals. I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour. But as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons whose descriptions answered to his. Some people actually affirmed that they had seen him in various parts of the world. Thus, so far as her belief was concerned, he still walked the earth. And even to this day I never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that this may be the lost uncle." At the time of that loss Hawthorne was but eight years old; he wrote this memorandum at fifty; and all that time the early impression had remained intact, and the old semi-hallucination about the uncle's being still alive hung about his mind through forty years. When we change the case, and replace the uncle in whom he had no very distinct interest with the father whose decease had so overclouded his mother's life, and thwarted the deep yearnings of his own young heart, we may begin to guess the depth and persistence of the emotions which must have been awakened in him by this awful silence and absence of death, so early thrown across the track of his childish life. I conceive those lonely school-boy walks, overblown by shadow-freighting murmurs of the pine and accompanied by the far-off, muffled roll of the sea, to have been full of questionings too deep for words, too sacred for other companionship than that of uninquisitive Nature;--questionings not even shaped and articulated to his own inner sense.