thirsts and languishes to be there, away from the hot sun, and the coal-dust, and the steaming docl.s, and the thick-pated, stubborn, contentious men, with whom I brawl from morning till night, and all the weary toil that quite engrosses me, and yet occupies only a small part of my being, which I did not know existed before I became a measurer, (at the Custom House). I do think I should sink down quite disheartened and inanimate if you were not happy, and gathering from earth and sky enjoyment for both of us; but this makes me feel that my real, innermost soul is apart from all these unlovely circumstances, and that it has not ceased to exist, as I might sometimes suspect, but is nourished and kept alive through you. You know not what comfort I have in thinking of you amid those beautiful scenes and amid those sympathising hearts. If you are well and happy, if your step is light and joyous there, and your cheek is becoming rosier, and if your heart makes pleasant music, then is it not better for you to stay there a little longer? And if better for you, is it not so for me likewise? Now, I do not press you to stay, but leave it all to your wisdom; and if you feel it is now time to come home, then let it be so.

HAWTHORNE AS A HUSBAND

[From his Journal, June, 1843.]

Having made up my bunch of flowers, I return home with them to my wife,

of whom what is loveliest among them are to me the imperfect emblems. My imagination twines her and the flowers into one wreath; and when I offer them to her, it seems as if I were introducing her to beings that have somewhat of her own nature in them. "My lily, here are your sisters; cherish them!"- this is what my fancy says, while my heart smiles, and rejoices at the conceit. Then my dearest wife rejoices in the flowers, and hastens to give them water, and arranges them so beautifully that they are glad to have been gathered, from the muddy bottom of the river, and its wet, tangled margin from among plants of evil smell and uncouth aspect, where the slimy eel and the frog and the black mud-turtle hide themselves, · glad of being rescued from this unworthy life, and made the ornaments of our parlour. What more could the loveliest of flowers desire? It is its earthly triumph, which it will remember with joy when it blooms in the paradise of flowers. The chief event of the afternoon, and the happiest one of the day, is our walk. She must describe these walks; for where she and I have enjoyed anything together, I always deem my pen unworthy and inadequate to record it.

My wife is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion, and I need no other; there is no vacancy in my mind, any more than in my heart. In truth, I have spent so many years in total seclusion from all human society, that it is no wonder

if now I feel all my desires satisfied by this sole intercourse. But she has come to me from the midst of many friends and a large circle of acquaintance; yet she lives from day to day in this solitude, seeing nobody but myself and our Molly, while the snow of our avenue is untrodden for weeks by any footstep save mine; yet she is always cheerful. Thank God that I suffice for

her boundless heart!

Dear little wife, after finishing my record in the journal, I sat a long time in grandmother's chair, thinking of many things; but the thought of thee, the great thought of thee, was among all other thoughts, like the pervading sunshine falling through the boughs and branches of a tree and tingeing every separate leaf. And surely thou shouldst not have deserted me without manufacturing a sufficient quantity of sunshine to last till thy return. Art thou not

ashamed?

Methinks my little wife is twin-sister to the Spring; so they should greet one another tenderly -for they both are fresh and dewy, both full of hope and cheerfulness; both have bird-voices, always singing out of their hearts; both are sometimes overcast with flitting mists, which only make the flowers bloom brighter; and both have power to renew and re-create the weary spirit, I have married the Spring! I am husband to the month of May!

CHARLES DICKENS

[Throughout the English-speaking world, Dickens maintains great popularity. This he owes to his abounding vitality, his prodigal invention, his fun, his humanity. Forster tells us in his Life that Dickens was a capital actor. His readers can well believe it. With a slight turn of fortune's wheel he would have been a great playwright, too. As he wrote his novels he seemed to have the stage always before him, never losing sight of the means by which its effects are produced and heightened. Hence he passed, all too easily, from the dramatic to the theatrical, from sentiment to sentimentality, from portraiture to burlesque. He paints a Cheeryble, a Heep, a Pecksniff, in a single hue. These surely are not men but personified virtues or vices, recalling the Great Heart, the Mr. Facing-both-ways, the Mr. Ready-to-halt of John Bunyan.

The novels of Dickens, "David Copperfield" in particular, are largely written out of his own sufferings, struggles, and victories. His hardships as a child left a stamp of pain which he never outgrew. His limitations in training and discipline narrowed his field as a writer, but gave him a master-key to the hearts and minds of men and women born, like himself, to poverty and affliction. - ED.]

HARDSHIPS AS A BOY

[John Forster, the life-long friend and biographer of Dickens, gives in his Life the fragment of an autobiography by Dickens, here presented in its main paragraphs. They show how much the great novelist learned human nature in the school of misery as a child.

When Dickens was a boy of ten years of age, an inmate of his father's household was James Lamert. A kinsman George Lamert, had furnished capital to Josiah Warren for the establishment of a blacking factory in London, at 30 Hungerford Stairs, near the Strand. Dickens says:]

IN AN evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought, its chief manager, James Lamert, who had lived with us in Bayham Street, seeing how I was employed from day to day, and knowing what our domestic circumstances then were, proposed that I should go into the blacking warehouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary, I think, of six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six at first, and seven afterward. At any rate the offer was accepted very willingly by my father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down to the blacking warehouse to begin my business life.

me

It is wonderful to me how I could have been

so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on - a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally - to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar school, and going to Cambridge.

Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the dinner-hour, from twelve