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 humour 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 humour 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 humour 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 symbolising of the secret workings in men’s souls. There are other sketches still more charged with ponderous import.