include in it a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne? Hawthorne may nevertheless justly be regarded as a classic, and there have been few writers whose short stories would bear re-reading so well as Hawthorne’s three-quarters of a century after their first appearance. The prose, as anyone may see by dipping into Mr. Carl van Doren’s admirable selection from _Twice-told Tales_, _Mosses from an Old Manse_, and _The Snow Image_, is beautiful prose, even if it falls short of supreme greatness. It flows with a rhythm at once charming and forceful. It is transparent, and through it we can see life as Hawthorne’s imagination played on it like sunlight refracted through water. He is a music-maker rather than a phrase-maker in his use of words. Movement is more to him than metaphor, though he can combine them attractively, as in the opening sentence of _The Seven Vagabonds_: Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of three directions. You may turn Hawthorne’s pages almost at random, and you can scarcely help noticing example after example of this characteristic rhythm of his. It is noticeable even in such a simple narrative sentence as that with which _The Artist of the Beautiful_ opens: An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop. And, again, we find it in a meditative passage such as: I saw mankind, in this weary old age of the world, either enduring a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or, if they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life, among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had darkened the sunshine of to-day.