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sanctity over a reality of weakness. The deeper moral is not only indicated, but in so many words pointed by the author himself

"To the untrue man, the whole universe is false-it is impalpable -it shrinks to nothing in his grasp." "Crime is for the ironnerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once." "Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence-Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred."

In the concluding chapter of this, the most profound, the boldest, the most riveting analytical romance of our tongue, in our century-followed, I think, at an interval by Wuthering Heights, and by Silas Marner-the author goes farther, and trenches on the ground of George Sand's Lelia and Goethe's Elective Affinities. In these words he ventures, with Milton, to question the finality of some of our present domestic relations, commonly regarded as above or beyond dispute

“Women . . . wasted, wronged, or erring . came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what was the remedy. Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might. She assured them too of her firm belief that, at some brighter period when the earth should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness."

It has been generally admitted that Puritanism was never so refined; less generally, that it has seldom been so assailed. Macaulay has no satire, on its asceticism, equal to the following:

"Into this festal season of the year the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity ; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction."

The commonly exaggerated conception of Hawthorne's

Puritanism is due partly to his own loyalty to his ancestors, and to his high moral tone: the impression has perhaps been confirmed by his fierce rebuke to the "poor desecrated" Doctor of Divinity, recorded in the chapter of The Old Home entitled "Consular Experiences;" but, in the same chapter, he also records his regret for the severity of the rebuke. An English reviewer, whose artistic tastes are benumbed by infallible sermonising, says that our romancer "spends his strength on an adulterous mixture of emotions," "strung like a cobweb in front of a New England parlour." The characteristic criticism ignores the fact that the apparent inconsistency is due to the breadth of Hawthorne's mind. His work everywhere shows traces of a conflict between the Calvinism in which, with all its dismal features, he had been reared, and a strong revolutionary undercurrent fed by his modern culture and surroundings. Rich "spiritual blood" flowed in his veins to the last; but he had torn asunder the parchments of his fathers, ceased to wear the Tephalim, and so far emancipated himself from the belief in "the large comprehensiveness of the divine damnation,” as to breathe a hope that even Roger Chillingworth's "stock of hatred and antipathy" might be hereafter "transmuted into golden love." The House of the Seven Gables is partly on the same lines the life it brings before us is, still, New England life, though of a later date: it is the present, overcast by shadows of the past. The dogma of predestination is, by a moral Darwin, transmuted into the belief that "the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones." The story, turning partially on the relations of two hostile families, relies most on the marked individuality1 of the characters, who cease to be metaphysical, and become national, types. It is conspicuous by its subtle humour, breadth of design, and

1 Mr. James directs special attention to Uncle Venner as a genuine Yankee type.

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the aerial atmosphere in which it is steeped. Its beauty is as real, but as incapable of seizure, as that of the soap-bubbles blown by Clifford from the arched window of the old house

"Little impalpable worlds were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface. It was curious to see how the passers-by regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the street corner; some looked angrily upward, as if poor Clifford wronged them by setting an image of beauty afloat so near their dusty pathway. A great many put out their fingers or their walking-sticks to touch withal, and were perversely gratified, no doubt, when the bubble, with all its pictured earth and sky scene, vanished as if it had never been."

The House of the Seven Gables cannot vanish as if it had never been, for any critical contact; but it may be dimmed and dulled to its lovers, as to those who have yet to know it, by being dragged from the mellowed twilight, which steeps it, into the cold light of analytical day. Little else can, therefore, be done than to point to some of the separate flawless pieces of workmanship that go to complete the perfect artistic whole of Hawthorne's second great romance. "Romance" he is careful to call this, as all his other longer works, in order that he may claim that "latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a novel;" and nowhere does Hawthorne avail himself of this latitude with more consummate skill, or "mingle the marvellous . ... as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour," with greater felicity. The materialist and the supernaturalist may, each as he pleases, interpret the most striking events of the story: only once-in acknowledging the mesmeric influence of Holgrave on Phoebe-does the author make any demand on his readers' credulity. The strains of Alice's harpsichord, prophesying death in the family, are heard before the sudden end of Judge Pyncheon;

but we are allowed to believe that Clifford had touched the keys, and similarly, when the old colonel is found sitting dead in his chair, there is a hint of a skeleton hand seen on his throat, and an allusion to the rumoured avenging voice of the ghostly wizard Maule. There is little action in the story, which resembles rather one of Holgrave's daguerreotypes-a ray of sunshine that beats for a moment on the gloomy old house in the bye-street and is withdrawn again-than a succession of shifting kaleidoscopic views; but the chapters “Clifford and Phoebe," "The Pyncheon Garden," etc., detailing the quiet life of the three last Pyncheons in their mouldering ancestral home, are worth many sensational scenes. Clifford Pyncheon, "partly crazy and partly imbecile,—a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is, though some in less degree, or less perceptibly than their fellows," passing his time, partly in the garden, gazing into the, to him, face-haunted waters of Maule's Well, or amusing himself with the proceedings of the wizened hens ("their crest was of lamentably scanty growth, in these latter days, but so oddly and wickedly analogous to Hepzibah's turban, that Phoebe, to the poignant distress of her conscience, but inevitably, was led to fancy a general resemblance betwixt these forlorn bipeds and her respectable relative"), partly at an arched window looking on to the street,-Clifford Pyncheon, seated one day at the last, is delighted by the appearance of an Italian barrel-organ boy, whose instrument is furnished with a case of mechanical figures that move to the music.

"The Italian turned a crank; and, behold! every one of these small individuals started into the most curious vivacity. The cobbler wrought upon a shoe; the blacksmith hammered his iron; the soldier waved his glittering blade; the lady raised a tiny breeze with her fan ; the jolly toper swigged lustily at his bottle; a scholar opened his book, with eager thirst for knowledge, and turned his head to and fro; the milkmaid energetically drained her cow; and a miser counted gold into his strong box-all at the same turning of a crank. Yes; and, moved by the selfsame impulse, a lover saluted his mistress on her lips!

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Possibly some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement-however serious, however trifling-all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass. For the most ridiculous aspect of the affair was that at the cessation of the music everybody was petrified, at once, from the most extravagant life into a dead torpor. Neither was the cobbler's shoe finished, nor the blacksmith's iron shaped out; nor was there a drop less of brandy in the toper's bottle, nor a drop more of milk in the milkmaid's pail, nor one additional coin in the miser's strong box, nor was the scholar a page deeper in his book. All were precisely in the same condition as before they made themselves so ridiculous by their haste to toil, to enjoy, to accumulate gold, and to become wise. Saddest of all, moreover, the lover was none the happier for the maiden's granted kiss! But rather than swallow this last too acrid ingredient, we reject the whole moral of the show."

This little episode exhibits conspicuously the mingling of pathos and humour which is, in a peculiar degree, the portion of the House of the Seven Gables. Sometimes the humour is uppermost, as in the references to the family of fowls before alluded to, or in the relation of Hepzibah's struggles towards the arranging of her shop window "to tempt little boys into her premises;" while the balance is surely the other way when the author affirms of the Sybarite Clifford that "In his last extremity . . . he would doubtless press Hepzibah's hand, in fervent recognition of all her lavished love, and close his eyes; but not so much to die, as to be constrained to look no longer on her face!" Along with this exquisite handling of different but nearly-connected qualities, there is shown at various points of the story a weird and wonderful force; as in the relation by Holgrave to Phoebe of the legend of the bewitched Alice; or where Hepzibah, after wildly searching for him, discovers her brother at the door of the room, within which is his cousin's corpse. This scene, especially the account of Clifford's pale features, "so white through the glimmering passage" that it seemed as if a light fell on them alone; and his "gusty mirth," half heartless, half childish-"As for us we can dance now! we can sing, play,