h moment." The suggestion of this tale we find in a quotation from
Sir Thomas Browne in "The American Note Books" for 1837: "A story there
passeth of an Indian King that sent unto Alexander a fair woman fed
with aconite and other poisons, with this intent complexionally to
destroy him." Here was one of those morbid situations, with a hint of
psychological possibilities and moral applications, that never failed to
fascinate Hawthorne. He let his imagination dwell upon it, and gradually
evolved the story of a physician who made his own daughter the victim of
a scientific experiment. In this tale, Mr. Brownell thinks, the
narrative has no significance apart from the moral; and yet the moral is
quite lost sight of in the development of the narrative, which might
have been more attractive if told simply as a fairy tale. This is quite
representative of Hawthorne's usual method. There is no explicit moral
to "Rappacini's Daughter." But there are a number of parallels and
applications open to the reader. He may make them, or he may abstain
from making them as he chooses. Thus we are vaguely reminded of
Mithridates, the Pontic King, who made himself immune to poisons by
their daily employment. The doctor's theory, that every disease can be
cured by the use of the appropriate poison, suggests the aconite and
belladonna of the homeopathists and their motto, _similia similibus
curantur_. Again we think of Holmes's novel "Elsie Venner," of the girl
impregnated with the venom of the rattlesnake, whose life ended when the
serpent nature died out of her; just as Beatrice, in Hawthorne's story,
is killed by the powerful antidote which slays the poison. A very
obvious incidental reflection is the cruelty of science, sacrificing its
best loved object to its curiosity. And may we not turn the whole tale
into a parable of the isolation produced by a peculiar and unnatural
rearing, say in heterodox beliefs, or unconventional habits, unfitting
the victim for society, making her to be shunned as dangerous?

The lure of the symbolic and the marvelous tempted Hawthorne constantly
to the brink of the supernatural. But here his art is delicate. The
old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition for modern credulity.
The modern ghost is a "clot on the brain." Recall the ghosts in Henry
James's "The Turn of the Screw"--just a suspicion of evil presences. The
true interpretation of that story I have sometimes thought to be, that
the woman who saw the