with the spirit which inspired him. It was solely a fascination of the
intellect. And although he is distinctively the poet of the Puritans,
although it is to his genius that we shall always owe that image of
them which the power of The Scarlet Letter has imprinted upon
literature, and doubtless henceforth upon historical interpretation,
yet what an imperfect picture of that life it is! All its stern and
melancholy romance is there--its picturesque gloom and intense
passion; but upon those quivering pages, as in every passage of his
stories drawn from that spirit, there seems to be wanting a deep,
complete, sympathetic appreciation of the fine moral heroism, the
spiritual grandeur, which overhung that gloomy life, as a delicate
purple mist suffuses in summer twilights the bald crags of the crystal
hills. It is the glare of the scarlet letter itself, and all that it
luridly reveals and weirdly implies, which produced the tale. It was
not beauty in itself nor deformity, not virtue nor vice, which engaged
the author's deepest sympathy. It was the occult relation between the
two. Thus while the Puritans were of all men pious, it was the
instinct of Hawthorne's genius to search out and trace with terrible
tenacity the dark and devious thread of sin in their lives.

Human life and character, whether in New England two hundred years ago
or in Italy to-day, interested him only as they were touched by this
glamour of sombre spiritual mystery; and the attraction pursued him in
every form in which it appeared. It is as apparent in the most perfect
of his smaller tales, _Rappaccini's Daughter_, as in _The Scarlet
Letter, The Blithedale Romance, The House of the Seven Gables_, and
_The Marble Faun_. You may open almost at random, and you are as sure
to find it as to hear the ripple in Mozart's music, or the pathetic
minor in a Neapolitan melody. Take, for instance, The _Birth-Mark_,
which we might call the best of the smaller stories, if we had not