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a rara avis.

His style is clear, simple, precise and musical. His English is of the best, idiomatic and familiar. There is a lambent humor of language even in his most sombre scenes. A mystic in feeling, if not in creed, he seeks mystery, and his tendency is to make it more mysterious. His reader begins often in a thin mist and ends in a thick fog-not through the inability of the writer to throw sunlight upon the dark scenes, but because sunlight is uncongenial: he prefers the fog. Eminently true as this is of his larger romances, it is almost so of his shorter stories, which might be tame were they more practical, but are unsatisfying to the matter-of-fact reader because they are

not.

The two works by which Hawthorne will always be judged as a romancer-I do not include The Marble Faun in this categoryare The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. To the first we may apply what he calls himself in the preface to The Snow Image" one who has been burrowing to the utmost ability into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance, and who pursues his researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of sympathy as by the light of observation." The Scarlet Letter is not a novel, but a romantic dissection of the hearts of man and woman. A tale of the old colonial life in New England, powerful but repulsive, it tells how the Puritans, who came to these shores to make a home for civil and religious liberty, to establish justice guided, tempered and restrained by mercy, governed by a system of cruel intolerance and unrelaxing rigor. They disciplined an erring but loving and sorrowing woman by making her

the object of public scorn and ignominy wherever the Scarlet Letter appeared. The story tells of this woman, whose one evil deed, forgiven in heaven, was pronounced unpardonable on earth, in spite of the enduring Protestant penance enjoined upon her, beginning with the pillory and ending only with her life; of the terrible remorse and final public confession of the preacher ; of the old physican who teaches and tortures him, to lose him at last; of the impossible child, Little Pearl. It is a tragedy with scarcely a redeeming ray of light for melodramatic effect. The greatest lesson it teaches is that when intolerance and sanctimonious justice are mentioned, it becomes Christians and pagans to hold their peace. It is human nature which is intolerant, cruel, inconsistent and sanctimonious, while claiming to be just.

I am not going to say more about this curious story: it is not pleasant to talk about. Those who do not admire Dickens may not care for this little bit of unpremeditated criticism in a letter to Forster; I think it an excellent judgment. He says: "I finished The Scarlet Letter yesterday. It falls off sadly after that fine opening scene. The psychological part of the story is very much overdone, and not truly done, I think. Their suddenness of meeting and agreeing to go away together after all those years is very poor; Mr. Chillingworth, ditto; the child out of nature altogether. And Mr. Dimmsdale certainly never could have been her father.'

And what of The House of the Seven Gables, an old home at Salem? Years have passed since I have read it, but the impression which remains is like that left by

Poe's Fall of the House of Usher; and I always think, too, of Hood's poem "The Haunted House." The family secret oppresses the reader as well as the family. The curse is from generation to generation; the seven gables each the depository of one of the seven deadly sins; the house is the soul of man, an allegory teaching a sad lesson in the gloomiest fashion. Pride, avarice, anger, revenge, lust, envy and other sins appear in human guise and history and make the house of the seven gables the most uncomfortable home in the world

"A residence for woman, child and man-
A dwelling-place-and yet no habitation;
A house, but under some prodigious ban
Of excommunication.

There was so foul a rumor in the air,

The shadow of a presence so atrocious,
No human creature could have feasted there,
Even the most ferocious.

O'er all these hung a shadow and a fear-
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said as plain as whisper in the ear,
'The place is haunted.'"

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are uncanny. are uncanny. Among the Mosses are "The Birthmark,' The Birthmark," "Dr. Rappacine's Daughter," which he deceived the world into believing a translation from the French of M. de l'Aubepine: the better-educated people discovered that Aubepine" is the French for Hawthorne." M. de Miroir, Character Pictures, The Hall Fantasy, The Procession of Life, The Artist of the Beautiful and Rodger Malvin's Burial are spiritfancies; The Celestial Railroad is a satire in allegorical form, which amuses if it does not improve people, because none of us are as formal as William Stick-to-the-Right, and we do not like to find a self-likeness in Mr. Smooth-it-Away or Mr. Take-it-Easy. "As there is no royal road to learning, so the Lord of the Celestial City," says Mr. Foot-it-toHeaven, "has refused, and will ever refuse, to grant an act of incorporation for this railroad; and, unless that be obtained, no passenger can ever hope to enter his dominions. Wherefore every man who buys a ticket must lay his account with losing the purchase-money; which is the value of his own soul."

Not unfrequently, in his works and in his prefaces, Hawthorne interprets himself for the critics. In his introduction to the Mosses from an Old Manse, where he "makes the reader acquainted with his abode," he says: "The glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the door and the house and the public highway were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world." This may be applied with justice to most of his writings.

I have said little of his short sketches; but they corroborate the statement that they have not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world: a Scotchman would say they

I have spoken of his stories for children. The True Stories told from grandfather's chair are, most of them, of New England life and intolerance the story of the witches, and then the effect produced at Salem when George Fox appeared in America with his Quaker doctrines and practice. To the enthusiastic Quakers who went there, the Puritans' creed and service were as evil as the prelatical system was to the Puritans. They would preach and deliver their testimony against them. This was in 1656-only nine years after Fox proclaimed his views in England. The New England people regarded

them as dangerous, and commanded them to be silent. When they would not be, they beat them, men and women, imprisoned them, drove them into the wilderness; and finally, when William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson were hanged, Mary Dyer was reprieved only, however, to be executed a little later.

I must not forget to mention that in Our Old Home in England, which was contributed in the form of articles to the Atlantic Monthly, there is a paper of special interest, called "Recollections of a Gifted Woman.' Miss Delia Bacon, who had pursued the fancy that Shakespeare was not the writer of the plays that bear his name, became finally insane on that and other subjects, and gave Mr. Hawthorne a great deal of trouble during his consulship at Liverpool. She haunted the church at Stratford-on-Avon, and in the paper referred to you will find the singular story of her delusion, with Hawthorne's opinion concerning her and her theory.

Hawthorne was an original and quaint writer, a dreamer in the vague land of mystery and the supernatural, an almost perfect writer of English, with no dialectic vulgarisms. A kind of psychological philosopher without system, he can hardly be called a novelist, in the ordinary sense of the word; a thorough American, he constantly writes without protruding patriotic sentiments; a thorough New Englander, he gives us New England life and history; a recluse, he prefers generally not to take his scenes in the present, from which he shrinks into his cell, but finds them in the past-in local history, in fancy, which is neither, but based upon both. As an antiquarian, not the equal of Walter Scott; as a philosopher of life, infe

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Who hath not owned with rapture smitten frume,

The power of grace, the magic of a

name.

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