And then Mr. Hawthorne has a skill in constructing allegories which no one of his contemporaries, either English or American, possesses.  These allegorical papers may be read with pleasure for their ingenuity, their grace, their poetical feeling; but just as, gazing on the surface of a stream, admiring the ripples and eddies, and the widening rings made by the butterfly falling into it, you begin to be conscious that there is something at the bottom, and gradually a dead face wavers upwards from the oozy weeds, becoming every moment more clearly defined, so through Mr. Hawthorne’s graceful sentences, if read attentively, begins to flash the hidden meaning, a meaning, perhaps, the writer did not care to express formally and in set terms, and which he merely suggests and leaves the reader to make out for himself.  If you have the book I am writing about, turn up “David Swan,” “The Great Carbuncle,” “The Fancy Show-box,” and after you have read these, you will understand what I mean.

The next two books on my shelf—­books at this moment leaning on the “Twice-Told Tales”—­are Professor Aytoun’s “Ballads of Scotland,” and the “Lyra Germanica.”  These books I keep side by side with a purpose.  The forms of existence with which they deal seem widely separated; but a strong kinship exists between them, for all that.  I open Professor Aytoun’s book, and all this modern life—­with its railways, its newspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates in Parliament—­fades into nothingness and silence.  Scotland, from Edinburgh rock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest.  The wind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns.  That which lives now has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling and ivied ruins, are warm with household fires, and filled with human activities.  Every Border keep is a home:  brides are taken there in their blushes; children are born there; gray men, the crucifix held over them, die there.  The moon dances on a plump of spears, as the moss-troopers, by secret and desert paths, ride over into England to lift a prey, and the bale-fire on the hill gives the alarm to Cumberland.  Men live and marry, and support wife and little ones by steel-jacket and spear; and the Flower of Yarrow, when her larder is empty, claps a pair of spurs in her husband’s platter.  A time of strife and foray, of plundering and burning, of stealing and reaving; when hate waits half a lifetime for revenge, and where difficulties are solved by the slash of a sword-blade.  I open the German book, and find a warfare conducted in a different manner.  Here the Devil rides about wasting and destroying.  Here temptations lie in wait for the soul; here pleasures, like glittering meteors, lure it into marshes and abysses.  Watch and ward are kept here, and to sleep at the post is death.  Fortresses are built on the rock of God’s promises—­inaccessible to the arrows of the wicked,—­and therein dwell many trembling