and rising ground and was just ready to die in the air...  Stronger it grew, and sadder, and deepened into the tone of a death-bell, knolling dolefully from some ivy-mantled tower, and bearing tidings of mortality and woe to the cottage, to the hall and to the solitary wayfarer that all might weep for the doom appointed in turn to them.  Then came a measured tread, passing slowly, slowly on as of mourners with a coffin, their garments trailing the ground so that the ear could measure the length of their melancholy array.  Before them went the priest reading the burial-service, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the breeze.  And though no voice but his was heard to speak aloud, still here were revilings and anathemas whispered, but distinct, from women and from men...  The sweeping sound of the funeral train faded away like a thin vapour and the wind that just before had seemed to shake the coffin-pall moaned sadly round the verge of the hollow between three hills.”

In a later collection of Hawthorne’s short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, the grave and the gay, the terrific and the sportive, are once more intermingled.  Side by side with a forlorn attempt at humorous allegory, Mrs. Bullfrog, we find the serious moral allegories of The Birthmark and The Bosom-Serpent, the wild, mysterious forest-revels in Goodman Brown, and the evil, sinister beauty of Dr. Rappacini’s Daughter, a modern rehandling of the ancient legend of the poison-maiden, who was perhaps the prototype of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ heroine in Elsie Venner (1861).  The quiet grace and natural ease of Hawthorne’s style lend even to his least ambitious tales a distinctive charm.  If he chooses a slight and simple theme, his touch is deft and sure. Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, in which Hawthorne’s delicate, whimsical fancy plays round the idea of the elixir of life, is almost like a series of miniature pictures, distinct and lifelike in form and colour, seen through the medium of an old-fashioned magic-lantern.  Yet even in this fantastic trifle we can discern the feeling for words and the sense of proportion that characterise Hawthorne’s longer works.

The Scarlet Letter (1850) was originally intended to be one of several short stories, but Hawthorne was persuaded to expand it into a novel.  He felt some misgivings as to the success of the work: 

“Keeping so close to the point as the tale does, and diversified in no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader’s eye, it will weary very many people and disgust some.”

The plot bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Lockhart’s striking novel, Adam Blair.  The “dark idea” that fascinates Hawthorne is the psychological state of Hester Prynne and her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, in the long years that follow their lawless passion.  Their love story hardly concerns him at all.  The interest of the novel