It is noteworthy, also, that when Hawthorne was struggling with fate, and, with the consciousness of death stealing over him, made ineffectual efforts to embody his profoundest thoughts of life and immortality, he should have expended his chief art in loving characterization of Pansie, in the Dolliver Romance. Whatever might have come of this last effort, could fate have been conquered, I for one am profoundly grateful that the two figures of grandsire and grandchild stand thus fully wrought, to guard the gateway of Hawthorne’s passage out of life. * * * * * The advent of the child in literature at the close of the last century was characterized, as I have pointed out, by a recognition of personality in childhood as distinct from relationship. The child as one of the family had always been recognized, and the child also in its more elemental nature; it was the child as possessed of consciousness, as isolated, as disclosing a nature capable of independent action, thought, and feeling, that now came forward into the world’s view, and was added to the stock of the world’s literature, philosophy, and art. “The real virtues of one age,” says Mozley, “become the spurious ones of the next,” and it is hardly strange that the abnormal development of this treatment of childhood should be most apparent in the United States, where individualism has had freest play. The discovery appears to have been made here that the child is not merely a person, but a very free and independent person indeed. The sixteenth amendment to the constitution reads, “The rights and caprices of children in the United States shall not be denied or abridged on account of age, sex, or formal condition of tutelage,” and this amendment has been recognized in literature, as in life, while waiting its legal adoption. It has been recognized by the silence of great literature, or by the kind of mention which it has there received. I am speaking of the literature which is now current rather than of that which we agree to regard as standard American literature; yet even in that I think our study shows the sign of what was to be. The only picture of childhood in the poets drawn from real life is that of the country boy, while all the other references are to an ideal conception. Hawthorne, in his isolation, wrote of a world which was reconstructed out of elemental material, and his insight as well as his marvelous sympathy with childhood precluded him from using diseased forms. But since the day of these men, the literature which is most representative of national life has been singularly devoid of reference to childhood. One notable exception emphasizes this silence. Our keenest social satirist has not spared the children. They are found in company with the young American girl, and we feel the sting of the lash which falls upon them.