from an Abortive Romance," from "Holden's Dollar Magazine," May, 1851; they were all published with the author's name. These stories require no comment, as the types to which they belong are well marked. They were, in reality, his last trials of his art as a teller of tales. Late in November, the family again removed to a new dwelling-place. The inland air had proved, it was thought, less favorable to health than was expected, and except in the bracing months of mid-winter Hawthorne found it enervating. He had been, however, very happy in Berkshire, as happy probably as it was in his nature to be, and the distant beauty and near wildness of the country had been attractive; the house, nevertheless, was very small, and he fretted at its inconveniences, not in a disagreeable way, but desiring to have a house and home of his own among more familiar scenes and within reach of the sea; he regarded the new move as a makeshift, and settled in West Newton, a suburb of Boston, where his wife's family lived, until he should purchase a place of his own. The change from the winter picturesqueness of Berkshire was marked, but the village was of the usual New England type and his surroundings were not essentially different from those he was accustomed to at Concord and Salem. West Newton was near to Roxbury and the scenes of his rural experience at Brook Farm; but he hardly needed to refresh his memory of the places and persons that had been so much a part of his life ten years before. Brook Farm, as an experiment in the regeneration of society, had run its course, and was gone; but much that was characteristic of it externally was now to be transferred to the novel Hawthorne had in hand as his next work. "The Blithedale Romance" [Footnote: The Blithedale Romance, By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo, cloth. Pp. viii, 288.] was written during the winter, and was finished as early as May, 1852, when it was at once issued. It is the least substantial of any of his longer works. It lacks the intensity of power that distinguishes "The Scarlet Letter," and the accumulated richness of surface that belongs to "The House of the Seven Gables," due to the overlaying of story on story in that epitome of a New England family history. "The Blithedale Romance," on the contrary, has both less depth and less inclusiveness; and much of its vogue springs from the fact of its being a reflection of the life of Brook Farm, which possesses an interest in its own right. Hawthorne used his material in the direct way that was his custom, and transferred bodily to his novel, to make its background and atmosphere, what he had preserved in his note-books or memory from the period of his residence with the reformers. The April snowstorm in which he arrived at the farm, his illness there, the vine-hung tree that he made his autumnal arbor, the costume and habits, the fancy-dress party, the Dutch realism of the figure of Silas Foster,