The London _Athenæum_, of the 15th June, has the following remarks
upon the last work of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE:

"This is a most powerful and painful story. Mr. Hawthorne must be well
known to our readers as a favorite of the _Athenæum_. We rate him
as among the most original and peculiar writers of American fiction.
There in his works a mixture of Puritan reserve and wild imagination,
of passion and description, of the allegorical and the real, which
some will fail to understand, and which others will positively
reject,--but which, to ourselves, is fascinating, and which entitles
him to be placed on a level with Brockden Brown and the author of 'Rip
Van Winkle.' 'The Scarlet Letter' will increase his reputation with
all who do not shrink from the invention of the tale; but this, as
we have said, is more than ordinarily painful. When we have announced
that the three characters are a guilty wife, openly punished for her
guilt,--her tempter, whom she refuses to unmask, and who during the
entire story carries a fair front and an unblemished name among his
congregation,--and her husband, who, returning from a long absence at
the moment of her sentence, sits himself down betwixt the two in the
midst of a small and severe community to work out his slow vengeance
on both under the pretext of magnanimous forgiveness,--when we have
explained that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of Hester Prynne's
shame, we ought to add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime
so sad and revenge so subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so
clear of fever and of prurient excitement. The misery of the woman
is as present in every page as the heading which in the title of
the romance symbolizes her punishment. Her terrors concerning her
strange elvish child present retribution in a form which is new and
natural:--her slow and painful purification through repentance is
crowned by no perfect happiness, such as awaits the decline of those