He was not to complete his design. The four versions of the story, _The Dolliver Romance_, _The Ancestral Footstep_, _Septimius Felton_, and _Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret_, furnish another glimpse into Hawthorne’s literary studio, though we are warned not to infer that he always worked in the way the existence of these fragments might suggest. * * * * * Hawthorne was the most gifted of our American romancers. In a certain sense his field was a narrow one, but the soil was rich, and there was magic in his husbandry. He himself once declared that he never knew what patriotism was until he met an Englishman; that he was not an American, New England was as big a lump of earth as he could hold in his heart. The defect (if indeed it be a defect) was one of the sources of his power. Hawthorne did indeed love New England, but to suppose that he loved it with a blind and uncritical love is wholly to misunderstand both the man and his work. He was the genius of his little world. He knew its poetry and its prose, its mystery, charm, beauty, and its repellent and sordid features. New England will have no profounder interpreter, though it may be that as the superficial characteristics of the people change, his transcripts of life will increasingly take on the qualities of pure romance. FOOTNOTES: [38] Enlarged edition, 1854. [39] Published in England under the absurd title of _Transformation_. Hawthorne wrote to Henry Bright: ‘Smith and Elder do take strange liberties with the titles of books. I wanted to call it the _Marble Faun_, but they insisted on _Transformation_ which will lead the reader to expect a sort of pantomime.’ [40] Letter to Horatio Bridge, May 26, 1861. [41] Henry James: _Terminations_. XI _Henry David Thoreau_ REFERENCES: =R. W. Emerson=: ‘Thoreau’ in the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ August, 1862. =W. E. Channing=: _Thoreau: the Poet Naturalist_, 1873. =F. B. Sanborn=: _Thoreau_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1882. =H. S. Salt=: _Thoreau_, ‘Great Writers,’ 1896. I HIS LIFE Philippe Thoreau, of the parish of Saint Helier in the Isle of Jersey, had a son John who emigrated to America and opened a store on the Long Wharf in Boston. He married Jane Burns, daughter of a well-to-do Scotchman from the neighborhood of Stirling. John’s son John, a lead-pencil maker of Concord, Massachusetts, married Cynthia Dunbar, daughter of the Reverend Asa Dunbar, of Keene, New Hampshire. Of their four children Henry David Thoreau, the author of _Walden_, was the third. He was born at Concord on July 12, 1817.