1. Preface
_ To Franklin Pierce,
As a Slight Memorial of a College Friendship, prolonged through Manhood, and retaining all its Vitality in our Autumnal Years,
This Volume is inscribed by NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
TO A FRIEND.
I have not asked your consent, my dear General, to the foregoing inscription, because it would have been no inconsiderable disappointment to me had you withheld it； for I have long desired to connect your name with some book of mine, in commemoration of an early friendship that has grown old between two individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits and fortunes. I only wish that the offering were a worthier one than this volume of sketches, which certainly are not of a kind likely to prove interesting to a statesman in retirement, inasmuch as they meddle with no matters of policy or government, and have very little to say about the deeper traits of national character. In their humble way, they belong entirely to aesthetic literature, and can achieve no higher

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