This is the sudden culmination of the passion of Holgrave for
Phoebe, just at the moment when he has admitted her to the house where
Death and himself were keeping vigil. The revulsion, here, is too
violent, and seems to throw a dank and deathly exhalation into the midst
of the sweetness which the mutual disclosure of love should have spread
around itself. There is need of an enharmonic change, at this point; and
it might have been effected, perhaps, by a slower passage from gloom to
gladness just here, and a more frequent play of the brighter mood
throughout the book. But the tragic predilection seems ultimately to
gain the day over the comic, in every great creative mind, and it was so
strong with Hawthorne, that instead of giving greater play to humor in
later fictions, it curtailed it more and more, from the production of
the "Seven Gables" onward.
Mr. Curtis has shown me a letter written soon after the publication of
the new book, which, as it gives another instance of the writer's keen
enjoyment of other men's work, and ends with a glimpse of the life at
Lenox, I will copy at length:--
LENOX, April 29,1851.
MY DEAR HOWADJI:--I ought to be ashamed (and so I really am) of not
having sooner responded to your note of more than a month ago,
accompanied as it was by the admirable "Nile Notes." The fact is, I have
been waiting to find myself in an eminently epistolary mood, so that I
might pay my thanks and compliments in a style not unworthy of the
occasion.
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