ining all the touchstones of life, living in a land of
eyrie where there is no moral law. He would no more than Lamb
indict his very dreams. In the case of Hawthorne there is
allegorical meaning, the lesson is never far to seek: a basis of
common spiritual responsibility is always below one's feet. And
this is quite as true of the long romances as of the tales. The
result is that there is spiritual tonic in Hawthorne's fiction,
while something almost miasmatic rises from Poe, dropping a kind
of veil between us and the salutary realities of existence. If
Poe be fully as gifted, he is, for this reason, less sanely
endowed. It may be conceded that he is not always as
shudderingly sardonic and removed from human sympathy as in "The
Cask of Amontillado" or "The Black Cat"; yet it is no
exaggeration to affirm that he is nowhere more typical, more
himself. On the contrary, in a tale like "The Birth Mark," what
were otherwise the horror and ultra-realism of it, is tempered
by and merged in the suggestion that no man shall with impunity
tamper with Nature nor set the delight of the eyes above the
treasures of the soul. The poor wife dies, because her husband
cares more to remove a slight physical defect than he does for
her health and life. So it cannot be said of the somber work in
the tale of these two sons of genius that,

"A common grayness silvers everything,"

since the gifts are so differently exercised and the artistic
product of totally dissimilar texture. Moreover, Poe is quite
incapable of the lovely naivete of "The Snow Image," or the
sun-kissed atmosphere of the wonder-book. Humor, except in the
satiric vein, is hardly more germane to the genius of Hawthorne
than to that of Poe; its occasional exercise is seldom if ever
happy.

Although most literary comparisons are futile because of the
disparateness of the things compared, the present one seems
legitimate in the cases of Poe and Hawthorne, superficially so
alike in their short-story work.

IV

In the romances in which he is, by common consent, our greatest
practitioner, to be placed first indeed of all who have written
fiction of whatever kind on American soil, Hawthorne never
forsakes--subtle, spiritual, elusive, even intangible as he may
seem--the firm underfooting of mother earth. His themes are
richly human, his psychologic truth (the most modern note of
realism) unerring in its accuracy and insight. As part of his
romantic endowment, he prefers to