h imagination.

"Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only
dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so, if you
will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young
Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a
distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the
night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the
congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen,
because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and
drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from
the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and with his
hand on the open Bible of the sacred truth of our religion,
and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future
bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown grow
pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the
gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at
midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning
or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he
scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his
wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was
borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an
aged woman, and children, and grandchildren, a goodly
procession, besides neighbours not a few, they carved no
hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was
gloom."

There is imagination in that, and in many another passage that I might
quote; but as a general thing I should characterise the more
metaphysical of our author's short stories as graceful and felicitous
conceits. They seem to me to be qualified in this manner by the very
fact that they belong to the province of allegory. Hawthorne, in his
metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my
sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many
excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in
symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were
another and a very different story. I frankly confess that I have as a
general thing but little enjoyment of it and that it has never seemed
to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. It has produced
assuredly some first-rate works; and Hawthorne in his younger years
had been a great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great
masters of allegory.