The relation which Hawthorne held to his own children, as illustrated both in the memoirs of him and in his Note-Books, was unquestionably a sign of that profound humanity which was the deep spring of his writings. But it was not, as some seem to think, a selfish love which he bore for them; he could show to them, because the relation was one of the elemental things in nature, a fullness of feeling which found expression otherwise only as all his nature found outlet,—in spiritual communion with mankind. How deep this inherent love of childhood lay is instanced in that passage in Our Old Home which one reads as it were with uncovered head. It is in the chapter entitled Some Glimpses of English Poverty, and relates how one of the party visiting an almshouse—Hawthorne himself, as his wife has since told us—was unexpectedly and most unwillingly made the object of demonstrative attention on the part of a poor, scrofulous, repulsive waif of humanity. Nothing that he had done had attracted the child,—only what he was; and so, moved by compassion, this strange, shy man took the child in his arms and kissed it. Let any one read the entire passage, note the mingled emotions which play about the scene like a bit of iridescent glass, and dare to speak of Hawthorne again except with reverence. In the same chapter occurs that delicious little description of children playing in the street, where the watchfulness of the older children over the younger is noted, and a small brother, who is hovering about his sister, is gravely noted as “working a kind of miracle to transport her from one dust heap to another.” He makes the reflection, “Beholding such works of love and duty, I took heart again, and deemed it not so impossible after all for these neglected children to find a path through the squalor and evil of their circumstances up to the gate of heaven.” One of the earliest and most ambitious of his short tales, The Gentle Boy, gathers into itself the whole history of a pathetic childhood, and there seems to have been an intention to produce in Ilbrahim precisely those features which mark the childish martyr and confessor. Again, among the Twice-Told Tales is the winning sketch of Little Annie’s Ramble, valuable most of all for its unconscious testimony to the abiding sense of companionship which Hawthorne found with children. In Edward Fane’s Rosebud, also, is a passage referring to the death of a child, which is the only approach to the morbid in connection with childhood that I recall in Hawthorne. Little Daffydowndilly, a quaint apologue, has by virtue of its unquestionable fitness found its way into all reading-books for the young.