Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Short studies of American authors

[5] still more finely organized, and born to a destiny of sadness,--their elder daughter. I have staid at “The Wayside,” occupying a room in the small tower built by Hawthorne, and containing his lofty and then deserted study, which still bore upon its wall the Tennysonian motto, “There is no joy but calm,” --this having been inscribed, however, not by himself, but by his son. It is not my purpose to dwell upon the facts of private life; and these circumstances are mentioned only because it is well to know at what angle of incidence any critic has been touched by the personality of a great author.

Perhaps it always appears to men, as they grow older, that there was rather more of positive force and vitality in their own generation and among their immediate predecessors, than among those just coming on the stage. This may be the reason why there seems to me a perpetual sense of grasp and vigor in Hawthorne's most delicate sketches; while much of the most graceful writing now done in America makes no such impression, but either seems like dainty confectionery, or like carving minute heads on cherry-stones. In England the tendency is just now to the opposite fault,--to a distrust of all nice attention to form in writing, as being necessarily a weakness. Hawthorne happily escaped both these dangerous alternatives; and,