hopeless, a cruel despair that no faith could throw off. Yet his naive
and well-poised genius hung over the gulf of blackness, and peered
into the pit with the steady nerve and simple face of a boy. The mind
of the reader follows him with an aching wonder and admiration, as the
bewildered old mother forester watched Undine's gambols. As Hawthorne
describes Miriam in _The Marble Faun_, so may the character of his
genius be most truly indicated. Miriam, the reader will remember,
turns to Hilda and Kenyon for sympathy. "Yet it was to little purpose
that she approached the edge of the voiceless gulf between herself and
them. Standing on the utmost verge of that dark chasm, she might
stretch out her hand and never clasp a hand of theirs; she might
strive to call out 'Help, friends! help!' but, as with dreamers when
they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in the remoteness that
seemed such a little way. This perception of an infinite, shivering
solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings to be
warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is
one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, or
peculiarity of character, that puts an individual ajar with the world."

Thus it was because the early New England life made so much larger
account of the supernatural element than any other modern civilized
society, that the man whose blood had run in its veins instinctively
turned to it. But beyond this alluring spell of its darker and
obscurer individual experience, it seems neither to have touched his
imagination nor even to have aroused his interest. To Walter Scott the
romance of feudalism was precious for the sake of feudalism itself, in
which he believed with all his soul, and for that of the heroic old
feudal figures which he honored. He was a Tory in every particle of
his frame, and his genius made him the poet of Toryism. But Hawthorne
had apparently no especial political, religious, or patriotic affinity