From the Easy Chair, Vol III of III

IN his preface to the Marble Faun, as before in that to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne complained that there was no romantic element in American life; or, as he expressed it, "There is as yet no such Faery-land so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own."