and who during the
entire story carries a fair front and an unblemished name among his
congregation,--and her husband, who, returning from a long absence at
the moment of her sentence, sits himself down betwixt the two in the
midst of a small and severe community to work out his slow vengeance
on both under the pretext of magnanimous forgiveness,--when we have
explained that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of Hester Prynne's
shame, we ought to add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime
so sad and revenge so subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so
clear of fever and of prurient excitement. The misery of the woman
is as present in every page as the heading which in the title of
the romance symbolizes her punishment. Her terrors concerning her
strange elvish child present retribution in a form which is new and
natural:--her slow and painful purification through repentance is
crowned by no perfect happiness, such as awaits the decline of those
who have no dark and bitter past to remember. Then, the gradual
corrosion of heart of Dimmesdale, the faithless priest, under the
insidious care of the husband, (whose relationship to Hester is
a secret known only to themselves,) is appalling; and his final
confession and expiation are merely a relief, not a reconciliation.
We are by no means satisfied that passions and tragedies like these
are the legitimate subjects for fiction: we are satisfied that
novels such as 'Adam Blair,' and plays such as 'The Stranger,' maybe
justly charged with attracting more persons than they warn by their
excitement. But if Sin and Sorrow in their most fearful forms are to
be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with
a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than in Mr. Hawthorne's
'Scarlet Letter.' The touch of the fantastic befitting a period of
society in which ignorant and excitable human creatures conceived each
other and themselves to be under the direct 'rule and governance' of
the Wicked One, is most skillfully administered. The supernatural here
never becomes grossly palpable:--the thrill is all the deeper for its
action being indefinite, and its source vague and distant."

[Footnote 2: The Scarlet Letter: a Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Boston: Ticknor & Co.]

* * * * *

The Emperor Nicholas has just published an ordonnance, which regulates
the pensions to which Russian and foreign actors at the imperial
theaters at St.