ard symbols
and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory.
The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly
allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere
personifications of abstract qualities. Still they all have a certain
allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon,
Miriam and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as
personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the
imagination and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is
possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something
typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic
symbols to work {467} out certain problems with: they are rather more
and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in
_Twice Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old
Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus
the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur
Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held
the position of Surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface
to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials
with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave
some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of
amusement to the public. Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like
Irving's, but less genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book
last named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just before its
author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland Newport, but then an
unfashionable resort among the Berkshire hills. Whatever obscurity may
have hung over Hawthorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this
powerful tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its
title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life of the early
settlers in New England. He had always been drawn toward this part of
American history, and in _Twice Told Tales_ had given some
illustrations of it in _Endicott's Red Cross_ and _Legends of the
Province House_. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the
figures of Hester {468} Prynne, the woman taken in adultery, her
paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, her husband, old Roger
Chillingworth, and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its
grasp of the elementary passions of human nature and its deep and
subtle in