among more familiar scenes and within reach of the sea; he regarded the new move as a makeshift, and settled in West Newton, a suburb of Boston, where his wife's family lived, until he should purchase a place of his own. The change from the winter picturesqueness of Berkshire was marked, but the village was of the usual New England type and his surroundings were not essentially different from those he was accustomed to at Concord and Salem.
West Newton was near to Roxbury and the scenes of his rural experience at Brook Farm; but he hardly needed to refresh his memory of the places and persons that had been so much a part of his life ten years before. Brook Farm, as an experiment in the regeneration of society, had run its course, and was gone; but much that was characteristic of it externally was now to be transferred to the novel Hawthorne had in hand as his next work. "The Blithedale Romance" [Footnote: The Blithedale Romance, By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. 12mo, cloth. Pp. viii, 288.] was written during the winter, and was finished as early as May, 1852, when it was at once issued. It is the least substantial of any of his longer works. It lacks the intensity of power that distinguishes "The Scarlet Letter," and the accumulated richness of surface that belongs to "The House of the Seven Gables," due to the overlaying of story on story in that epitome of a New England family history. "The Blithedale Romance," on the contrary,
