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  ...and the American world on the other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem to the author of _The Scarlet Letter_ and the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions with those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.   that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth are the sum of what the world usually recognises, and in this modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest and sweetest fragrance.
His very...   James, Henry

Source: Green Hills of Africa and also reported as The Odyssey (bk. III, l. 142), (Pope's translation) · Excerpt from Hawthorne (English Men of Letters Series) · This quote is about literature · Search on Google Books to find all references and sources for this quotation.

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