he only atonement in his power, is a singularly striking figure,
powerfully conceived and most delicately described. He yields under
terrible pressure to the temptation of escaping from the scene of his
prolonged torture with the partner of his guilt. And then, as he is
returning homewards after yielding a reluctant consent to the flight, we
are invited to contemplate the agony of his soul. The form which it
takes is curiously characteristic. No vehement pangs of remorse, or
desperate hopes of escape, overpower his faculties in any simple and
straightforward fashion. The poor minister is seized with a strange
hallucination. He meets a venerable deacon, and can scarcely restrain
himself from uttering blasphemies about the Communion-supper. Next
appears an aged widow, and he longs to assail her with what appears to
him to be an unanswerable argument against the immortality of the soul.
Then follows an impulse to whisper impure suggestions to a fair young
maiden, whom he has recently converted. And, finally, he longs to greet
a rough sailor with a 'volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and
heaven-defying oaths.' The minister, in short, is in that state of mind
which gives birth in its victim to a belief in diabolical possession;
and the meaning is pointed by an encounter with an old lady, who, in the
popular belief, was one of Satan's miserable slaves and dupes, the
witches, and is said--for Hawthorne never introduces the supernatural
without toning it down by a supposed legendary transmission--to have
invited him to meet her at the blasphemous Sabbath in the forest. The
sin of endeavouring to escape from the punishment of his sins had
brought him into sympathy with wicked mortals and perverted spirits.

This mode of setting forth the agony of a pure mind, tainted by one
irremovable blot, is undoubtedly impressive to the imagination in a high
degree; far more impressive, we may safely say, than any quantity of
such rant as very inferior writers could have poured out with the
utmost facility on such an occasion. Yet it might possibly be mentioned
that a poet of the highest order would have produced the effect by more
direct means. Remorse overpowering and absorbing does not embody itself
in these recondite and, one may almost say, over-ingenious fancies.
Hawthorne does not give us so much the pure passion as some of its
collateral effects. He is still more interested in the curious
psychological problem than moved by s