To make sketches so slight as these interesting, much more to embalm them in literature, requires some magical touch either in the hand of the author or the heart of the reader. They are the thistledown of literature, creatures of a contemplative idleness as pure as childhood's own, the sun's impartial photography on the film of a rambler's eye; yet in these few pages are condensed some thousands, probably, of Hawthorne's days. The life they depict has been called barren, and the literary product has been described as thin. "What triviality, what monotony, what emptiness!" the critics exclaim. It is, indeed, provincial; rusticity is its element. Hawthorne, however, did not choose it, as a topic, for that reason, with a conscious intention to exploit it. He could not have been aware, he could not have half known even, how provincial it was, for he had never gone out of this countryside in which he was bred, or become acquainted with a different world; even on his journeys in stage-coaches he had not got free of it. The sketches made no artificial appeal; they have the true flavor of the soil, and are written for those who sprang from it and dwelt upon it and would be buried in it. This is the charm that still clings to them, and indeed pervades them like an aromatic odor in East Indian wood. They are true transcripts of life, though vanished now from its place at least in that region, which then enjoyed the seclusion of a nest of villages uninvaded by railroads, and was nearer perhaps to Calcutta and Sumatra and the Gold Coast than to New York. He was not so solitary and alone in this life, after all. That part of New England was not far from being a Forest of Arden, when Emerson might be met any day with a pail berrying in the pastures, or Margaret Fuller reclining by a brook, or Hawthorne on a high rock throwing stones at his own shadow in the water. There was a Thoreau--there still is--in every New England village, usually inglorious. The lone fisherman of the Isaak Walton type had become, in the New World, the wood-walker, the flower-hunter, the bird-fancier, the berry-picker, and many another variety of the modern ruralist. Hawthorne might easily have found a companion or two of similar wandering habits and half hermit-like intellectual life, though seldom so fortunate as to be able to give themselves entirely up to vagrancy of mind, like himself. Thoreau is, perhaps, the type, on the nature side; and Hawthorne was to the village what Thoreau was to the wild wood.