In 1860 he returned quietly to his Concord home. His health was failing, but he promised to write for the _Atlantic Monthly_ another romance, called _The Dolliver Romance_. This, however, was never finished, and _The Marble Faun_ remains the last of his great romances. His health continued to fail, and in May, 1864, Pierce, thinking that a trip might prove beneficial, started with him on a journey to the White Mountains. Hawthorne retired for the night at the hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and the next morning Pierce found that Hawthorne's wish of dying unawares in his sleep had been gratified. He had passed away before the completion of his fifty-ninth year. He was buried underneath the pines in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord. His classmate, Longfellow, wrote:-- "There in seclusion and remote from men, The wizard hand lies cold." "TWICE TOLD TALES" AND "MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE."--Many do not realize that these two volumes contain eighty-two tales or sketches and that they represent the most of Hawthorne's surviving literary work for the first forty-five years of his life. The title for _Twice-Told Tales_ (1837) was probably suggested by the line from Shakespeare's _King John:_ "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale." The second volume, _Mosses from an Old Manse_ (1846), took its name from Hawthorne's first Concord home. His last collection is called _The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales_ (1851). Each one of these volumes contains some of his short-story masterpieces, although, taken as a whole, the collection in _Mosses from an Old Manse_ shows the greatest power and artistic finish. The so-called tales in these volumes are of several different types. (1) There is the story which presents chiefly allegorical or symbolic truth, such as _Rappacini's Daughter, The Great Stone Face, The Birthmark, The Artist of the Beautiful, and The Snow Image._ The last story, one of the greatest of this class, relates how two children make a companion out of a snow image, how Jack Frost and the pure west wind endow this image with life and give them a little "snow sister." She grows more vigorous with every life-giving breath inhaled from the west wind. She extends her hands to the snow-birds, and they joyously flock to her. The father of these children is a deadly literal man. No tale of fairy, no story of dryad, of Aladdin's lamp, or of winged sandal had ever carried magical meaning to his unimaginative literal mind, and he proceeds to disenchant the children. Like Nathan the prophet, Hawthorne wished to say, "Thou art the man," to some tens of thousands of stupid destroyers of those ideals which bring something of Eden back to our everyday lives. This story, like so many of the others, was written with a moral purpose. There are to-day people who measure their acquaintances by their estimates of this allegorical story.