g to the dim and chastened image of Hester Prynne.
But I am going too far; I am comparing simplicity with subtlety, the
usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn of mind impelled
him, but each expressed something more than himself. Lockhart was a
dense, substantial Briton, with a taste for the concrete, and
Hawthorne was a thin New Englander, with a miasmatic conscience.

In _The Scarlet Letter_ there is a great deal of symbolism; there is,
I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and becomes mechanical; it
ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality. The idea of the mystic
_A_ which the young minister finds imprinted upon his breast and
eating into his flesh, in sympathy with the embroidered badge that
Hester is condemned to wear, appears to me to be a case in point. This
suggestion should, I think, have been just made and dropped; to insist
upon it and return to it, is to exaggerate the weak side of the
subject. Hawthorne returns to it constantly, plays with it, and seems
charmed by it; until at last the reader feels tempted to declare that
his enjoyment of it is puerile. In the admirable scene, so superbly
conceived and beautifully executed, in which Mr. Dimmesdale, in the
stillness of the night, in the middle of the sleeping town, feels
impelled to go and stand upon the scaffold where his mistress had
formerly enacted her dreadful penance, and then, seeing Hester pass
along the street, from watching at a sick-bed, with little Pearl at
her side, calls them both to come and stand there beside him--in this
masterly episode the effect is almost spoiled by the introduction of
one of these superficial conceits. What leads up to it is very
fine--so fine that I cannot do better than quote it as a specimen of
one of the striking pages of the book.

"But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light
gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was
doubtless caused by one of those meteors which the
night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste in
the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its
radiance that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of
cloud, betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault
brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the
familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
midday, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted
to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden