what purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory not
always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to
be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver." There are sunny
gleams upon the pages, but a strange, melancholy chill pervades the
book. In "The Wedding Knell", "The Minister's Black Veil", "The Gentle
Boy", "Wakefield", "The Prophetic Pictures", "The Hollow of the Three
Hills", "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", "The Ambitious Guest", "The
White Old Maid", "Edward Fane's Rose-bud", "The Lily's Quest"--or in
the "Legends of the Province House", where the courtly provincial
state of governors and ladies glitters across the small, sad New
England world, whose very baldness jeers it to scorn--there is the
same fateful atmosphere in which Goody Cloyse might at any moment
whisk by upon her broomstick, and in which the startled heart stands
still with unspeakable terror.

The spell of mysterious horror which kindled Hawthorne's imagination
was a test of the character of his genius. The mind of this child of
witch-haunted Salem loved to hover between the natural and the
supernatural, and sought to tread the almost imperceptible and
doubtful line of contact. He instinctively sketched the phantoms that
have the figures of men, but are not human; the elusive, shadowy
scenery which, like that of Gustave Dore's pictures, is Nature
sympathizing in her forms and aspects with the emotions of terror or
awe which the tale excites. His genius broods entranced over the
evanescent phantasmagoria of the vague debatable land in which the
realities of experience blend with ghostly doubts and wonders.

But from its poisonous flowers what a wondrous perfume he distilled!
Through his magic reed, into what penetrating melody he blew that
deathly air! His relentless fancy seemed to seek a sin that was