"The Blithedale Romance" is only another instance in point, and here, as before, we find the principle admirably stated in the preface. "In the old countries," says Hawthorne, "a novelist's work is not put exactly side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to everyday probability, in view of the improved effects he is bound to produce thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no Faëry Land, so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, we cannot well tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This atmosphere is what the American romancer needs. In its absence, the beings of his imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same category as actually living mortals; a necessity that renders the paint and pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible." Accordingly, Hawthorne selects the Brook Farm episode (or a reflection of it) as affording his drama "a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives." In this case, therefore, an exceptional circumstance is made to answer the same purpose that was attained by different means in the other romances. But in what manner have our other writers of fiction treated the difficulties that were thus dealt with by Hawthorne?--Herman Melville cannot be instanced here; for his only novel or romance, whichever it be, was also the most impossible of all his books, and really a terrible example of the enormities which a man of genius may perpetrate when working in a direction unsuited to him. I refer, of course, to "Pierre, or the Ambiguities." Oliver Wendell Holmes's two delightful stories are as favorable examples of what can be done, in the way of an American novel, by a wise, witty, and learned gentleman, as we are likely to see. Nevertheless, one cannot avoid the feeling that they are the work of a man who has achieved success and found recognition in other ways than by stories, or even poems and essays. The interest, in either book, centres round one of those physiological phenomena which impinge so strangely upon the domain of the soul; for the rest, they are simply accurate and humorous portraitures of local dialects and peculiarities, and thus afford little assistance in the search for a universally applicable rule of guidance. Doctor Holmes, I believe, objects to having the term "medicated" applied to his tales; but surely the adjective is not reproachful; it indicates one of the most charming and also, alas! inimitable features of his work.