is just sufficiently dipped in the shadow of
the marvellous to be heightened without becoming offensive--sounds, like
other things, tolerably easy when it is explained; and yet the
difficulty is enormous, as may appear on reflection as well as from the
extreme rarity of any satisfactory work in the same style by other
artists. With the exception of a touch or two in Scott's stories, such
as the impressive Bodach Glas, in 'Waverley,' and the apparition in the
exquisite 'Bride of Lammermoor,' it would be difficult to discover any
parallel.

In fact Hawthorne was able to tread in that magic circle only by an
exquisite refinement of taste, and by a delicate sense of humour, which
is the best preservative against all extravagance. Both qualities
combine in that tender delineation of character which is, after all, one
of his greatest charms. His Puritan blood shows itself in sympathy, not
with the stern side of the ancestral creed, but with the feebler
characters upon whom it weighed as an oppressive terror. He resembles,
in some degree, poor Clifford Pyncheon, whose love of the beautiful
makes him suffer under the stronger will of his relatives and the prim
stiffness of their home. He exhibits the suffering of such a character
all the more effectively because, with his kindly compassion there is
mixed a delicate flavour of irony. The more tragic scenes affect us,
perhaps, with less sense of power; the playful, though melancholy, fancy
seems to be less at home when the more powerful emotions are to be
excited; and yet once, at least, he draws one of those pictures which
engrave themselves instantaneously on the memory. The grimmest or most
passionate of writers could hardly have improved the scene where the
body of the magnificent Zenobia is discovered in the river. Every touch
goes straight to the mark. The narrator of the story, accompanied by the
man whose coolness has caused the suicide, and the shrewd, unimaginative
Yankee farmer, who interprets into coarse, downright language the
suspicions which they fear to confess to themselves, are sounding the
depths of the river by night in a leaky punt with a long pole. Silas
Foster represents the brutal, commonplace comments of the outside world,
which jar so terribly on the more sensitive and closely interested
actors in the tragedy. 'Heigho!' he soliloquises, with offensive
loudness, 'life and death together make sad work for us all. Then I was
a boy, bobbing for fish; and no