entitled Fanshawe.  It had little success, and copies of the first edition are now exceedingly rare.  In 1837 he published a collection of his magazine pieces under the title, Twice-Told Tales.  The book was generously praised in the North American Review by his former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genuine romance.  Poe compared Hawthorne’s work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of the American Note Books, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over Tieck with a German dictionary.  The Twice-Told Tales are the work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact with men.  Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and unwholesome.  But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the physically horrible of Poe.  It arose from weird psychological situations like that of Ethan Brand in his search for the unpardonable sin.  Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable sequences of his crime.  Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols and types, and never quite followed Poe’s advice to abandon allegory.  The Scarlet Letter and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere personifications of abstract qualities.  Still, they all have a certain allegorical tinge.  In the Marble Faun, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the imagination, and the senses.  Without going so far as this, it is possible to see in these and in Hawthorne’s other creations something typical and representative.  He uses his characters like algebraic symbols to work out certain problems with; they are rather more and yet rather less than flesh and blood individuals.  The stories in Twice-Told Tales and in the second collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work.  Thus the Minister’s Black Veil is a sort of anticipation of Arthur Dimmesdale in the Scarlet Letter.  From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem.  In the preface to the Scarlet Letter he sketched some of the government officials with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal