" Sober and
weighty the penumbrous atmosphere in which the young creator sits; but
how calm, thoughtful, and beautiful the dim vision of his face, lit by
the sheltered radiance of ethereal fancies! Behind his own form we catch
the movement of mysterious shapes,--men and women wearing aspects of joy
or anger, calm or passionate, gentle and pitiable, or stern, splendid,
and forbidding. It is not quite a natural twilight in which we behold
these things; rather the awesome shadowiness of a partial eclipse; but
gleams of the healthiest sunshine withal mingle in the prevailing tint,
bringing reassurance, and receiving again a rarer value from the
contrast. There are but few among the stories of this series afterward
brought together by the author which are open to the charge of
morbidness. In "The White Old Maid" an indefinable horror, giving the
tale a certain shapelessness, crowds out the compensating brightness
which in most cases is not wanting; perhaps, too, "The Ambitious Guest"
leaves one with too hopeless a downfall at the end; and "The Wedding
Knell" cannot escape a suspicion of disagreeable gloom. But these
extremes are not frequent. The wonder is that Hawthorne's mind could so
often and so airily soar above the shadows that at this time hung about
him; that he should nearly always suggest a philosophy so complete, so
gently wholesome, and so penetrating as that which he mixes with even
the bitterest distillations of his dreams. Nor is the sadness of his
tone disordered or destructive, more than it is selfish; he does not
inculcate despair, nor protest against life and fate, nor indulge in
gloomy or weak self-pity.
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