reduce all fiction to the pattern of the religious tract. Certain men
have certain things before them to do; they cannot devote a lifetime to
proving in their published works that they appreciate the excellence of
other things which they have no time and no supreme command to do.
Nothing, then, is more unsafe, than to imply from their silence that
they are deficient in particular phases of sympathy. The exposition of
the merits of the New England founders has been steadily in progress
from their own time to the present; and they have found a worthy
monument in the profound and detailed history of Palfrey. All the more
reason, why the only man yet born who could fill the darker spaces of
our early history with palpitating light of that wide-eyed truth and
eternal human consciousness which cast their deep blaze through
Hawthorne's books, should not forego his immortal privilege! The eulogy
is the least many-sided and perpetual of literary forms, and unless
Hawthorne had made himself the eulogist of the Puritans, he would still
have had to turn to our gaze the wrongs that, for good or ill, were
worked into the tissue of their infant state. But as it is, he has been
able to suggest a profounder view than is permitted either to the race
of historians or that of philosophers. It does not profess to be a
satisfactory statement of the whole, nor is there the least ground for
assuming that it does so. Its very absorption in certain phases
constitutes its value,--a value unspeakably greater than that of any
other presentation of the Puritan life, because it rests upon the
insight of a poet who has sounded the darkest depths of human nature.
Had Hawthorne passed mutely through life, these gloomy-grounded pictures
of Puritanism might have faded from the air like the spectres of things
seen in dazzling light, which flit vividly before the eye for a time,
then vanish forever.

But in order to his distinctive coloring, no distortion had to be