cial passion for the beautiful.

The passion of the ingenious mechanist we all understand; the passion
of the artist, sculptor, or painter, is equally intelligible; but the
confusion of the two in which Mr Hawthorne would vainly interest us,
is beyond all power of comprehension. These are the improbabilities
against which we contend. Moreover, when this wonderful butterfly is
made--which he says truly was "a gem of art that a monarch would have
purchased with honours and abundant wealth, and have treasured among
the jewels of his kingdom, as the most unique and wondrous of them
all,"--the artist sees it crushed in the hands of a child and looks
"placidly" on. So never did any human mechanist who at length had
succeeded in the dream and toil of his life. And at the conclusion of
the story we are told, in not very intelligible language,--"When the
artist rose high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which
he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value to his
eyes, while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the
reality."

It is not, perhaps, to the _stories_ we should be disposed to refer
for the happier specimens of Mr Hawthorne's writing, but rather to
those papers which we cannot better describe than as so many American
_Spectators_ of the year 1846--so much do they call to mind the style
of essay in the days of Steele and Addison.

We may observe here, that American writers frequently remind us of
models of composition somewhat antiquated with ourselves. While, on
the one hand, there is a wild tendency to snatch at originality at any
cost--to coin new phrases--new _probabilities_--to "_intensify_" our
language with strange "_impulsive_" energy--to break loose, in short,
from all those restraints which have been thought to render style both
perspicuous and agreeable; there is, on the other hand--produced
partly by a very intelligible reaction--an effort somewhat too
apparent to be classical and correct. It is a very laudable effort,
and we should be justly accused of fastidiousness did we mention it as
in the least blameworthy. We would merely observe that an effect is
sometimes produced upon an English ear as if the writer belonged to a
previous era of our literature, to an epoch when to produce smooth and
well modulated sentences was something rarer and more valued than it
is now. It will be a proof how little of censure we attach to the
characteristic we are noticing, when we