The whole situation is summarized in Hawthorne's introduction of Septimius Felton, hero of the last work of his pen. "I am dissevered from it," he says in the opening scene. "It is my doom to be only a spectator of life; to look on as one apart from it. Is it not well, therefore, that, sharing none of its pleasures and happiness, I should be free of its fatalities, its brevity? How cold I am now, while this whirlpool is eddying all around me." Yet, a moment later he snatches a gun and rushes out of the house to where he can see the British redcoats passing the Concord house. He refrains from shooting, only to be seen by a flanking party, and against his will is forced to fire a deadly bullet. "I have seen and done such things," he says an hour later, "as change a man in a moment.... I have done a terrible thing for once ... one that might well trace a dark line through all my future life." To this degree, then, Hawthorne's surroundings and his own unfolding experience had supplied him with themes and materials. Much of the remainder of his work had its source in his Puritan inheritance. To this the already quoted passage on old Salem (p. 237) bears witness. To this heritage is due in large measure the essential gravity of his nature, which has been unfairly but suggestively described as a compound of "seven eighths conscience and the rest remorse"; and to this is partly attributable his absorption with the presence and the problem of sin in the world. "The Scarlet Letter" deals with its immediate effect on the transgressor; "The House of the Seven Gables," with its effect on succeeding generations; "The Blithedale Romance," with its blighting effect on the reformer, who is selfish and heartless even in his fight against social wrong; "The Marble Faun," with the basic reasons for the existence of evil. Yet though the Puritan strain in him could determine the direction of his thoughts, it could not determine their goal, for Hawthorne recoiled from the Puritan acceptance of sin as a devil's wile to be atoned for only through the sufferings of a mediator or the tortures of the damned. He rejected the Calvinistic fear of eternal punishment for the Miltonic conclusion that the mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell; at which point he was at one with the Transcendentalists in substituting "for a dogmatic dread, an illimitable hope." His indictment of the Puritans themselves was more insistent than his charges against their theology. He condemned them for their cruel intolerance and for the arid bleakness of their lives. So he was at once a product of his ancestry and a living protest against it.