osed his eyes in endless night.

To represent the Puritan from within was not, indeed, a task suitable to
Hawthorne's powers. Carlyle has done that for us with more congenial
sentiment than could have been well felt by the gentle romancer.
Hawthorne fancies the grey shadow of a stern old forefather wondering at
his degenerate son. 'A writer of story-books! What kind of business in
life, what mode 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!' And yet the old strain remains, though
strangely modified by time and circumstance. In Hawthorne it would seem
that the peddling element of the old Puritans had been reduced to its
lowest point; the more spiritual element had been refined till it is
probable enough that the ancestral shadow would have refused to
recognise the connection. The old dogmatical framework to which he
attached such vast importance had dropped out of his descendant's mind,
and had been replaced by dreamy speculation, obeying no laws save those
imposed by its own sense of artistic propriety. But we may often
recognise, even where we cannot express in words, the strange family
likeness which exists in characteristics which are superficially
antagonistic. The man of action may be bound by subtle ties to the
speculative metaphysician; and Hawthorne's mind, amidst the most obvious
differences, had still an affinity to his remote forefathers. Their
bugbears had become his playthings; but the witches, though they have no
reality, have still a fascination for him. The interest which he feels
in them, even in their now shadowy state, is a proof that he would have
believed in them in good earnest a century and a half earlier. The
imagination, working in a different intellectual atmosphere, is unable
to project its images upon the external world; but it still forms them
in the old shape. His solitary musings necessarily employ a modern
dialect, but they often turn on the same topics which occurred to
Jonathan Edwards in the woods of Connecticut. Instead of the old Puritan
speculations about predestination and free-will, he dwells upon the
transmission by natural laws of an hereditary curse, and upon the
strange blending of good and evil, which may cause sin to be an
awakening impulse in a human soul. The change which takes place in
Donatello in consequence of his crime is a modern symbol of the fall of
man and t