It would be uncharitable to say this first and oddly most famous collection of Hawthorne's is the master tuning his instrument, though Melville was correct, by and large, to call these stories slight. Hawthorne was always seductive, offering an always charming and warm direct address to the reader, a light but genuine friendliness while beguiling the reader to almost back into considering fates, consequences and a darkness as deep as Dante, but too many of these stories hum too quickly and agreeably over the surface of these depths for me to call this collection a major work overall.

It's not apprenticeship nor juvenalia, but like a half-unassuming, beautifully wrought prelude, a stirring offering tantalizing flashes of his depth and greatness to come. Answering Longfellow's call for more homegrown American literature, Hawthorne veers from charming though perilously slight and hokey Americana to the searing, doubting, troubling territory of his best work that offers stark glimpses of the evil endemic to the American project, though 1.) the former unfortunately outnumbers the latter and 2.) Hawthorne would likely see the latter as the evil of human nature rather than as the specific evil of whiteness and manifest destiny.

I count one masterpiece for the ages here, the enigmatic, singularly strange Wakefield, though there are a number of solid stories in between the more trivial ones--it's just that the ratio of great to mediocre is just a step below Mosses or The Snow Image and the overall depth is also comparatively lacking.