Produced by Mark Zinthefer, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
In "The Dolliver Romance," only three chapters of which the authorlived to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been theultimate form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, forwhich "Septimius Felton" was the preliminary study. Having abandonedthis study, and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthornewas moved to renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and asthe plan of the romance had now seemingly developed to hissatisfaction, he listened to the publisher's proposal that it shouldbegin its course as a serial story in the "Atlantic Monthly" forJanuary, 1864—the first instance in which he had attempted such a modeof publication.
But the change from England to Massachusetts had been marked by, andhad perhaps in part caused, a decline in his health. Illness in hisfamily, the depressing and harrowing effect of the Civil War upon hissensibilities, and anxiety with regard to pecuniary affairs, allcombined to make still further inroads upon his vitality; and so earlyas the autumn of 1862 Mrs. Hawthorne noted in her private diary thather husband was looking "miserably ill." At no time since boyhood hadhe suffered any serious sickness, and his strong constitution enabledhim to rally from this first attack; but the gradual decline continued.After sending forth "Our Old Home," he had little strength for anyemployment more arduous than reading, or than walking his accustomedpath among the pines and sweetfern on the hill behind The Wayside,known to his family as the Mount of Vision. The projected work,therefore, advanced but slowly. He wrote to Mr. Fields:—
"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of theRomance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chaptersready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and Ifeel as if I should never carry it through."
The presentiment proved to be only too well founded. He had previouslywritten:—
"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I lingerat the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasmsto be encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty ofwriting a sunshiny book."
And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is littleprobability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, althoughI have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He didindeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in Januarythat he could not go on.
"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present,lost its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I hadbetter keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I waitquietly for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say tothe public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well whatthe case will be. I shall never finish it…. I cannot finish it unlessa great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to doso, it will be my death