the fiends that haunt the
valley of the shadow of death; whereas Hawthorne's are to be encountered
in the dim regions of twilight, where realities blend inextricably with
mere phantoms, and the mind confers only a kind of provisional existence
upon the 'airy nothings' of its creation. Apollyon does not appear armed
to the teeth and throwing fiery darts, but comes as an unsubstantial
shadow threatening vague and undefined dangers, and only half-detaching
himself from the background of darkness. He is as intangible as Milton's
Death, not the vivid reality which presented itself to mediaeval
imaginations.

This special attitude of mind is probably easier to the American than to
the English imagination. The craving for something substantial, whether
in cookery or in poetry, was that which induced Hawthorne to keep John
Bull rather at arm's length. We may trace the working of similar
tendencies in other American peculiarities. Spiritualism and its
attendant superstitions are the gross and vulgar form of the same phase
of thought as it occurs in men of highly-strung nerves but defective
cultivation. Hawthorne always speaks of these modern goblins with the
contempt they deserve, for they shocked his imagination as much as his
reason; but he likes to play with fancies which are not altogether
dissimilar, though his refined taste warns him that they become
disgusting when grossly translated into tangible symbols. Mesmerism, for
example, plays an important part in the 'Blithedale Romance' and the
'House of the Seven Gables,' though judiciously softened and kept in the
background. An example of the danger of such tendencies may be found in
those works of Edgar Poe, in which he seems to have had recourse to
strong stimulants to rouse a flagging imagination. What is exquisitely
fanciful and airy in Hawthorne is too often replaced in his rival by an
attempt to overpower us by dabblings in the charnel-house and prurient
appeals to our fears of the horribly revolting. After reading some of
Poe's stories one feels a kind of shock to one's modesty. We require
some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting
images; whereas Hawthorne's pure and delightful fancies, though at times
they may have led us too far from the healthy contact of everyday
interests, never leave a stain upon the imagination, and generally
succeed in throwing a harmonious colouring upon some objects in which we
had previously failed to recognise