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- intricate, profound heart where they originated. And we see that
suffering, some time or other and in some shape or other,--this only
can enable any man to depict it in others. All over him, Hawthorne's
melancholy rests like an Indian-summer, which, though bathing a whole
country in one softness, still reveals the distinctive hue of every
towering hill and each far-winding vale.
But it is the least part of genius that attracts admiration. Where
Hawthorne is known, he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with
a pleasant style,--a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep
and weighty thing would hardly be anticipated--a man who means no
meanings. But there is no man, in whom humor and love, like mountain
peaks, soar to such a rapt height as to receive the irradiations of
the upper skies;--there is no man in whom humor and love are developed
in that high form called genius; no such man can exist without also
possessing, as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep
intellect, which drops down into the universe like a plummet. Or,
love and humor are only the eyes through which such an intellect
views this world. The great beauty in such a mind is but the product
of its strength. What, to all readers, can be more charming than the
piece entitled _Monsieur du Miroir_; and to a reader at all capable of
fully fathoming it, what, at the same time, can possess more mystical
depth of meaning?--yes, there he sits and looks at me,--this "shape
of mystery," this "identical MONSIEUR DU MIROIR!" "Methinks I should
tremble now were his wizard power of gliding through all impediments in
search of me to place him suddenly before my eyes."
How profound, nay, appalling, is the moral evolved by the _Earth's
Holocaust_; where--beginning with the hollow follies and affectations
of the world,--all vanities and empty theories and forms are, one after
another, and by an admirably graduated, growing comprehensiveness,
thrown into the allegorical fire, till, at length, nothing is left but
the all-engendering heart of man; which remaining still unconsumed, the
great conflagration is naught.
Of a piece with this, is the _Intelligence Office_, a wondrous
symbolizing of the secret workings in men's souls. There are other
sketches still more charged with ponderous import.
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