"O plead With famine or wind-walking pestilence, Blind lightning or the deaf sea, not with man!" And on the side of the moral question, he leaves us with Beatrice's characterization of the parricide, "Which is, or is not, what men call a crime." Hawthorne, on the contrary, starts from this latter doubt. "The foremost result of a broken law," he says, "is ever an ecstatic freedom." But instead of pausing to give this his whole weight, as Shelley does, he distinctly pronounces the murder of Miriam's degraded father to be crime, and proceeds to inquire how Miriam and Donatello may work out their purification. So that if the first part of the romance is the Fall of Man repeated, the second part is the proem to a new Paradise Regained; and the seclusion of the sculptor and the Faun, and their journey together to Perugia, seasoned with Kenyon's noble and pure-hearted advice, compose a sort of seven-times-refined Pilgrim's Progress. Apt culmination of a genius whose relations to Milton and Bunyan we found to be so suggestive! The chief means which Kenyon offers for regeneration is that Miriam and the Faun shall abandon any hope of mutual joy, and consecrate themselves to the alleviation of misery in the world. Having by violence and crime thrust one evil out of life, they are now by patience and benevolence to endeavor to exorcise others. At the same time, remarking that Providence has infinitely varied ways of dealing with any deed, Hawthorne leaves a possibility of happiness for the two penitents, which may become theirs as "a wayside flower, springing along a path that leads to higher ends." But he also shows, in Donatello's final delivering of himself up to justice, the wisdom of some definite judgment and perhaps punishment bestowed by society. Thus, avenues of thought are opened to us on every side, which we are at liberty to follow out; but we are not forced, as a mere theorist would compel us, to pursue any particular one to the exclusion of the others. In all we may find our way to some mystic monument of eternal law, or pluck garlands from some new-budded bough of moral truth. The romance is like a portal of ebony inlaid with ivory,--another gate of dreams,--swinging softly open into regions of illimitable wisdom. But some pause on the threshold, unused to such large liberty; and these cry out, in the words of a well-known critic, "It begins in mystery, and ends in mist."