catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam.'

'A person to be writing a tale and to find it shapes itself against
his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought,
and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It
might shadow forth his own fate - he having made himself one of the
personages.'

'Two persons to be expecting some occurrence and watching for the
two principal actors in it, and to find that the occurrence is even
then passing, and that they themselves are the two actors.'

'A satire on ambition and fame from a statue of snow.'


Hawthorne used this idea in one of his sketches.


'A moral philosopher to buy a slave, or otherwise get possession of
a human being, and to use him for the sake of experiment by trying
the operation of a certain vice on him.'


M. Bourget, the French romancer, has made use of this idea in his
novel called LE DISCIPLE. Only it is not a slave, but a young girl
whom he pretends to love, that is the subject of the moral
philosopher's experiment; and a noisy war has been waged round the
book in France. Hawthorne would plainly have seized the romantic
essence of the idea and would have avoided the boneyard of 'problem
morality.'