nded brother is released from prison at the
same moment, and returns to the ancestral roof to deepen her
perplexities. But, on the other hand, to alleviate them, and to
introduce a breath of the air of the outer world into this long
unventilated interior, the little country cousin also arrives, and
proves the good angel of the feebly distracted household. All this
episode is exquisite--admirably conceived, and executed with a kind of
humorous tenderness, an equal sense of everything in it that is
picturesque, touching, ridiculous, worthy of the highest praise.
Hephzibah Pyncheon, with her near-sighted scowl, her rusty joints, her
antique turban, her map of a great territory to the eastward which
ought to have belonged to her family, her vain terrors and scruples
and resentments, the inaptitude and repugnance of an ancient
gentlewoman to the vulgar little commerce which a cruel fate has
compelled her to engage in--Hephzibah Pyncheon is a masterly picture.
I repeat that she is a picture, as her companions are pictures; she is
a charming piece of descriptive writing, rather than a dramatic
exhibition. But she is described, like her companions too, so subtly
and lovingly that we enter into her virginal old heart and stand with
her behind her abominable little counter. Clifford Pyncheon is a still
more remarkable conception, though he is perhaps not so vividly
depicted. It was a figure needing a much more subtle touch, however,
and it was of the essence of his character to be vague and
unemphasised. Nothing can be more charming than the manner in which
the soft, bright, active presence of Phoebe Pyncheon is indicated,
or than the account of her relations with the poor dimly sentient
kinsman for whom her light-handed sisterly offices, in the evening of
a melancholy life, are a revelation of lost possibilities of
happiness. "In her aspect," Hawthorne says of the young girl, "there
was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and
yet reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer offered up in
the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe,
moreover, and airy, and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing that she
wore--neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little
kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings--had ever been put on
before; or if worn, were all the fresher for it, and with a fragrance
as if they had lain among the rose-buds." Of the influence of her
maidenly salubr