The publicity into which Hawthorne's duties as consul brought him was very disagreeable to one of his retiring disposition. He could feel at ease only among those whose gentle and sensitive natures responded to his own; hence attendance at formal dinners, speech making and other social obligations that forced him often into the company of more or less uncongenial people, seemed scarcely bearable to him. It was with relief then, that he resigned the consulate in 1857 and went to live in southern Europe. The greater part of his time until his return to America in 1860 was passed in Italy, and near Florence was written the last of his celebrated romances, _The Marble Faun_. During the four remaining years of his life, spent at the Wayside, in Concord, Hawthorne's strength gradually ebbed away. Nevertheless, he was able to produce _Our Old Home,_ in which he described scenes from English life, as well as _Septimus Felton_ and parts of two other romances. In 1864, while traveling for his health through southern New Hampshire with his friend Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne died in the quiet, sudden way in which he had hoped that he should pass from earth. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where a simple headstone marks his grave. As the cheerfulness and simple beauty of Hawthorne's stories for children are as light among the gloom and sadness that overshadowed his works for older people, so his love for children and his delight in their companionship illumine his character and bring into view his rare gentleness and purity of nature. In recalling the days when she was a little girl, his daughter Rose has told us: "My father's enjoyment of frolicking fun was as hilarious as that accorded by some of us to wildest comic opera. He had a delicate way of throwing himself into the scrimmage of laughter, and I do not for an instant attempt to explain how he managed it. I can say that he lowered his eyelids when he laughed hardest, and drew in his breath half a dozen times with dulcet sounds and a murmur of mirth between. Before and after this performance he would look at you straight from under his black brows, and his eyes seemed dazzling. I think the hilarity was revealed in them, although his cheeks rounded in ecstasy. I was a little roguish child, but he was the youngest and merriest person in the room when he was amused." Though the suffering and wrong that he saw in the world deeply perplexed and saddened him, yet he found so much of happier meaning in life and expressed this with such marvelous power and grace that no one to-day holds a worthier place in American literature. That no successor can take this place nor imitate the subtle beauty of his style, we feel to be true as we read the lines written by the poet Longfellow, just after the death of Hawthorne: "Now I look back, and meadow, manse and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see--a dream within a dream-- The hill-top hearsed with pines.