Any comprehensive conception of Hawthorne, either in words or
music, must have for its basic theme something that has to do
with the influence of sin upon the conscience--something more
than the Puritan conscience, but something which is permeated by
it. In this relation he is wont to use what Hazlitt calls the
"moral power of imagination." Hawthorne would try to spiritualize
a guilty conscience. He would sing of the relentlessness of
guilt, the inheritance of guilt, the shadow of guilt darkening
innocent posterity. All of its sins and morbid horrors, its
specters, its phantasmas, and even its hellish hopelessness play
around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less
guilty Elves of the Concord Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man
Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne.
There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet
says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but
penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the
ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in
its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound
waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them
rather than explain them--and here, some may say that he is wiser
in a more practical way and so more artistic than Emerson.
Perhaps so, but no greater in the deeper ranges and profound
mysteries of the interrelated worlds of human and spiritual life.

This fundamental part of Hawthorne is not attempted in our music
(the 2nd movement of the series) which is but an "extended
fragment" trying to suggest some of his wilder, fantastical
adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal
realms. It may have something to do with the children's