are an emblem
of the decay of the Pyncheon family. The people are apt to be
merged into the dense shadows that lurk in the gloomy passages,
but when the sun shines on them they stand out with arresting
distinctness. The heroic figure of Hepzibah Pyncheon, a little
ridiculous and a little forbidding of aspect, but cherishing
through weary years a passionate devotion to her brother, is
described with a gentle blending of humour and pathos. Clifford
Pyncheon--the sybarite made for happiness and hideously cheated
of his destiny--is delineated with curious insight and sympathy.
It is Judge Jaffery Pyncheon, with his "sultry" smile of
"elaborate benevolence"--unrelenting and crafty as his infamous
ancestor--who lends to _The House of Seven Gables_ the element of
terror. Hour after hour, Hawthorne, with grim and bitter irony,
mocks and taunts the dead body of the hypocritical judge until
the ghostly pageantry of dead Pyncheons--including at last Judge
Jaffery himself with the fatal crimson stain on his
neckcloth--fades away with the oncoming of daylight.

Hawthorne's mind was richly stored with "wild chimney-corner
legends," many of them no doubt gleaned from an old woman
mentioned in one of his _Tales and Sketches_. He takes over the
fantastic superstitions in which his ancestors had believed, and
uses them as the playthings of his fancy, picturing with
malicious mirth the grey shadows of his stern, dark-browed
forefathers sadly lamenting his lapse from grace and saying one
to the other:

"A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in
life, what manner of glorifying God, or being
serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may
that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have
been a fiddler."

The story of Alice Pyncheon, the maiden under the dreadful power
of a wizard, who, to wreak his revenge, compelled her to
surrender her will to his and to do whatsoever he list, the
legends of ghosts and spectres in the _Twice-Told Tales_, the
allusions to the elixir of life in his _Notebooks_, the
introduction of witches into _The Scarlet Letter_, of mesmerism
into _The Blithedale Romance_, show how often Hawthorne was
pre-occupied with the terrors of magic and of the invisible
world. He handles the supernatural in a half-credulous,
half-sportive spirit, neither affirming nor denying his belief.
One of his artful devices is wilfully to cast doubt upon his
fancies, and so to pique us int