south and bounded it east and bounded it west. Perhaps that accounts for the characteristic you observe in my speeches, though I never put the two things together before."" But to the speech itself.

FOURSCORE and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, -that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

Ir was Hawthorne's wont to keep note-books, in which he recorded his observations and reflections; sometimes he spoke in them of himself, his plans, and his prospects. He began the practice early, and continued it through life; and after his death selections from these note-books were published in six volumes, under the titles: Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In these books, and in prefaces which appear in the front of the volumes containing his collected stories, one finds many frank expressions of the interest which Hawthorne took in his work, and the author appeals very ingenuously to the reader, speaking with an almost confidential closeness of his stories and sketches. Then the Note-Books contain the unwrought material of the books which the writer put out in his lifetime. One finds there the suggestions of stories, and frequently pages of observation and reflection, which were afterward transferred, almost as they stood, into the author's works. It is very interesting labor to trace Hawthorne's stories and sketches back to these records in his note-books, and to compare the finished work with the rough material. It seems, also, as if each reader was admitted into the privacy of the author's mind. That is the first impression, but a closer study reveals two

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facts very clearly. One is stated by Hawthorne himself in his preface to The Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales: "I have been especially careful [in my Introductions] to make no disclosures respecting myself which the most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and which I was not perfectly willing that my worst enemy should know. I have taken facts which relate to myself [when telling stories] because they chance to be nearest at hand, and likewise are my own property. And, as for egotism, a person who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance and who pursues his researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as by the light of observation will smile at incurring such an imputation in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits, his abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the surface. These things hide the man instead of displaying him. You must make quite another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits."

There has rarely been a writer of fiction, then, whose personality has been so absolutely separate from that of each character created by him, and at the same time has so intimately penetrated the whole body of his writing. Of no one of his characters, male or female, is one ever tempted to say, This is Hawthorne, except in the case of Miles Coverdale in The Blithedale Romance, where the circumstances of the story tempt one into an identification; yet all Hawthorne's work is stamped emphatically with his mark. Hawthorne wrote it, is very simple and easy to say of all but the merest trifle in his collected works; but the world has yet to learn who Hawthorne was, and even if he had not forbidden a biography of himself, it is scarcely likely that any Life could have disclosed more than he has chosen himself to reveal.