Hawthorne isn't to me a prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an enjoying person.... But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn't take my eyes off him all dinner, nor my rapt attention.... It was heavenly to see him persist in ignoring the spectral smiles--in eating his dinner and doing nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn't remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a canary! And in the postscript of the same: What a world, what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and the new earth will swim into reality. Which shows how much in earnest the Abolitionists really were--it was a tenet of faith with them. Sad and strange and illuminating to us of a later generation, who are now struggling for other abolitions of slavery, and still hoping for a new world. I wish I could quote from the delightful letters of William James, but they must be read entire, with the author's comments, to place them correctly. Pending a biography of the man, these letters will be to many readers the most interesting feature of the book. One of the most magnificent things about the book, however,--if I may use a large word for a large concept--is the spirit running through it of filial and fraternal love, never expressed in so many words, but apparent throughout, which makes, as I said before, the James family unique in the history of American letters. De Morgan's Latest When Ghost Meets Ghost, by William De Morgan. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.] Whatever else I may say about De Morgan's new book, I absolutely refuse to tell the number of its pages. Every other criticism begins or ends with this uninteresting fact, and usually adds that it makes no difference how long it is, since the writer's charm pervades it all. But it does make a difference, and it is too trite to say we are so hurried and nervous and given over to frivolity nowadays that we are unable to read Dickens and Thackeray and Scott and De Morgan. There is a great deal more to read, and a great deal more to do and to think about, than ever there was in Thackeray's day. And if we are going to spend our time reading countless pages (I very nearly told how many, after all!) we want to be sure it is more worth while than anything else we can be doing, or thinking, or reading.