The "French and Italian Note-Books" are more prolific in literary hints than the English. At Rome and Florence the practical self, which was necessarily brought forward in the daily round at the consulate and left its impress on the letters to Lieutenant Bridge, retired into the background under the influence of scenes more purely picturesque and poetic than those of England; and the idealizing, imaginative faculty of Hawthorne, being freed from the restraint which had so long cramped it, gained in elasticity from day to day. Four years of confinement to business, broken only at intervals by short episodes of travel, had done no more than impede the current of fancy; had not dried it, nor choked the source. Mr. Fields assures us that, in England, Hawthorne told him he had no less than five romances in his mind, so well planned that he could write any one of them at short notice. But it is significant that, however favorable Italy might be for drawing out and giving free course to this current, he could do little there in the way of embodying his conceptions. He wrote out an extensive first draft of "The Marble Faun" while moving from place to place on the actual ground where the story is laid; but the work itself was written at Redcar, and in the communication last quoted from he had said: "I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable to the close toil of composition, although it is a very good air to dream in. I must breathe the fogs of old England, or the east-winds of Massachusetts, in order to put me into working-trim." Conditions other than physical were most probably responsible, in part, for this state of things. Strong as Hawthorne's nature was on the side of the real, the ideal force within him was so much more puissant, that when circumstances were all propitious--as they were in Italy--it obtained too commanding a sway over him. His dreams, in such case, would be apt to overcome him, to exist simply for their own sake instead of being subordinated to his will; and, in fine, to expend their witchery upon the air, instead of being imprisoned in the enduring form of a book. Being compounded in such singular wise of opposing qualities: the customary, prudential, common sensible ones, and the wise and visionary ones--the outward reticence, and (if we may say so) the inward eloquence--of which we now have a clearer view; being so compounded, he positively needed something stern and adverse in his surroundings, it should seem, both as a satisfaction to the sturdier part of him, and as a healthful check which, by exciting reaction, would stimulate his imaginative mood. He must have precisely the right proportion between these counter influences, or else creation could not proceed. In the Salem Custom House and at the Liverpool consulate there had been too much of the hard commonplace: instead of serving as a convenient foil to the more expansive and lightsome tendencies of his genius, it had weighed them down.