from other men; there may have been no very perilous stuff in his breast, nothing to confess or record peculiar to himself in act or experience, no intensity of self-life, but there was this temperament of the solitary brooder upon life. In that common fund of human nature which he said was the basis of sympathy between himself and the world, there was also some specialization, which is rightly ascribed to his race qualities. He took practically no interest in life except as seen under its moral aspects as a life of the soul; and this absorption in the moral sphere was due to his being a child of New England. It was his inheritance from Puritanism. What distinguished Puritan life and the people who grew up under its influences was an intense self-consciousness of life in the soul,—in a word, spirituality of life; and Hawthorne, as he came to find himself in his growth, disclosed one form of this spirituality both reflectively and imaginatively in his writings, the form that lived in him. The moral world, the supremacy of the soul's interests, how life fared in the soul, was his region; he thought about nothing else. He desired to present what he saw through the medium of romantic art, but he was never able to be wholly content with this medium; he desired to make assurance doubly sure by expressing it in its abstract moral terms also, either explicitly in an idea which shows through the story, or else imperfectly in an allegory or symbol where the moral element should be definitely felt
