zled hero, with his clinging, unquestioning,
unexacting devotion, and the dark, powerful, more widely-seeing
feminine nature of Miriam. Deeply touching is the representation of
the manner in which these two essentially different persons--the woman
intelligent, passionate, acquainted with life, and with a tragic
element in her own career; the youth ignorant, gentle, unworldly,
brightly and harmlessly natural--are equalised and bound together by
their common secret, which insulates them, morally, from the rest of
mankind. The character of Hilda has always struck me as an admirable
invention--one of those things that mark the man of genius. It needed
a man of genius and of Hawthorne's imaginative delicacy, to feel the
propriety of such a figure as Hilda's and to perceive the relief it
would both give and borrow. This pure and somewhat rigid New England
girl, following the vocation of a copyist of pictures in Rome,
unacquainted with evil and untouched by impurity, has been
accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed by
which her friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is
_her_ revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She has done
no wrong, and yet wrongdoing has become a part of her experience, and
she carries the weight of her detested knowledge upon her heart. She
carries it a long time, saddened and oppressed by it, till at last she
can bear it no longer. If I have called the whole idea of the presence
and effect of Hilda in the story a trait of genius, the purest touch
of inspiration is the episode in which the poor girl deposits her
burden. She has passed the whole lonely summer in Rome, and one day,
at the end of it, finding herself in St. Peter's, she enters a
confessional, strenuous daughter of the Puritans as she is, and pours
out her dark knowledge into the bosom of the Church--then comes away
with her conscience lightened, not a whit the less a Puritan than
before. If the book contained nothing else noteworthy but this
admirable scene, and the pages describing the murder committed by
Donatello under Miriam's eyes, and the ecstatic wandering, afterwards,
of the guilty couple, through the "blood-stained streets of Rome," it
would still deserve to rank high among the imaginative productions of
our day.

Like all of Hawthorne's things, it contains a great many light threads
of symbolism, which shimmer in the texture of the tale, but which are
apt to break and remain i