ok, but was capriciously fated
to live ever in the twilight, haunted by spectres and by "dark
ideas." He fashions his tales of terror delicately and
reluctantly, not riotously and shamelessly like Lewis and
Maturin.

An innate reticence and shyness of temper held Hawthorne, as if
by a spell, somewhat aloof from life, and no one realised more
clearly than he the limitations that his detachment from humanity
imposed upon his art.

Of _Twice-Told Tales_ he writes regretfully:

"They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in
too retired a shade... Instead of passion there is
sentiment and even in what purport to be pictures of
actual life we have allegory, not always so warmly
dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be
taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether
from lack of power or an inconquerable reserve, the
author's touches have often an effect of tameness. The
book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be
read in the clear, brown twilight atmosphere in which
it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to
look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages";

and in his _Notebook_ (1840) he confesses:

"I used to think I could imagine all the passions, all
feelings and states of the heart and mind, but how
little did I know! Indeed we are but shadows, we are
not endowed with real life, and all that seems most
real about us is but the thinnest shadow of a
dream--till the heart be touched."

Whether he is threading the labyrinths of his imagination or
watching the human shadows come and go, Hawthorne lingers longer
in the shadow than in the sunshine. He was not a man of morose
and gloomy temper, disenchanted with life and driven by distress
or thwarted passion to brood in solitude. An irresistible,
inexplicable impulse drives him towards the sombre and the
gloomy. The delicacy and wistful charm of the words in which
Hawthorne criticises his own work and character reveal how
impossible it would have been for him to force his wayward
genius. His imagination hovers with curious persistence round
eerie, fantastic themes:

"An old looking-glass. Somebody finds out the secret of making
all the images reflected in it pass again across its surface"--a
hint skilfully introduced into the history of old Esther Dudley
in _The Legends of the Province House_, or:

"A dreadful secret to