of the untrodden wilderness, and lures
old and young, the worldly and the romantic, to waste their lives in the
vain effort to discover it--for the carbuncle is the ideal which mocks
our pursuit, and may be our curse or our blessing. Then perhaps we have
a domestic piece--a quiet description of a New England country scene
touched with a grace which reminds us of the creators of Sir Roger de
Coverley or the Vicar of Wakefield. Occasionally there is a fragment of
pure _diablerie_, as in the story of the lady who consults the witch in
the hollow of the three hills; and more frequently he tries to work out
one of those strange psychological problems which he afterwards treated
with more fulness of power. The minister who, for an unexplained reason,
puts on a black veil one morning in his youth, and wears it until he is
laid with it in his grave--a kind of symbolical prophecy of Dimmesdale;
the eccentric Wakefield (whose original, if I remember rightly, is to be
found in 'King's Anecdotes'), who leaves his house one morning for no
particular reason, and though living in the next street, does not reveal
his existence to his wife for twenty years; and the hero of the 'Wedding
Knell,' the elderly bridegroom whose early love has jilted him, but
agrees to marry him when she is an elderly widow and he an old bachelor,
and who appals the marriage party by coming to the church in his
shroud, with the bell tolling as for a funeral--all these bear the
unmistakable stamp of Hawthorne's mint, and each is a study of his
favourite subject, the border-land between reason and insanity. In many
of these stories appears the element of interest, to which Hawthorne
clung the more closely both from early associations and because it is
the one undeniably poetical element in the American character.
Shallow-minded people fancy Puritanism to be prosaic, because the laces
and ruffles of the Cavaliers are a more picturesque costume at a masked
ball than the dress of the Roundheads. The Puritan has become a grim and
ugly scarecrow, on whom every buffoon may break his jest. But the
genuine old Puritan spirit ceases to be picturesque only because of its
sublimity: its poetry is sublimed into religion. The great poet of the
Puritans fails, as far as he fails, when he tries to transcend the
limits of mortal imagination--

The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
Where angels tremble as they gaze,
He saw: but blasted with excess of light,
Cl