m. It is a pity,
perhaps, to have represented him as having begun life as a blacksmith,
for one grudges him the advantage of so logical a reason for his
roughness and hardness.

"Hollingsworth scarcely said a word, unless when repeatedly
and pertinaciously addressed. Then indeed he would glare
upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations, like a
tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and
betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and
mind.... His heart, I imagine, was never really interested
in our socialist scheme, but was for ever busy with his
strange, and as most people thought, impracticable plan for
the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their
higher instincts. Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me
many a groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have
commenced his investigation of the subject by committing
some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the
condition of his-higher instincts afterwards."

The most touching element in the novel is the history of the grasp
that this barbarous fanatic has laid upon the fastidious and
high-tempered Zenobia, who, disliking him and shrinking, from him at a
hundred points, is drawn into the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The
portion of the story that strikes me as least felicitous is that which
deals with Priscilla and with her mysterious relation to Zenobia--with
her mesmeric gifts, her clairvoyance, her identity with the Veiled
Lady, her divided subjection to Hollingsworth and Westervelt, and her
numerous other graceful but fantastic properties--her Sibylline
attributes, as the author calls them. Hawthorne is rather too fond of
Sibylline attributes--a taste of the same order as his disposition, to
which I have already alluded, to talk about spheres and sympathies. As
the action advances, in _The Blithdale Romance_, we get too much out
of reality, and cease to feel beneath our feet the firm ground of an
appeal to our own vision of the world, our observation. I should have
liked to see the story concern itself more with the little community
in which its earlier scenes are laid, and avail itself of so excellent
an opportunity for describing unhackneyed specimens of human nature. I
have already spoken of the absence of satire in the novel, of its not
aiming in the least at satire, and of its offering no grounds for
complaint as an invidious pic