The story, however, which all would select as most expressive of Hawthorne’s sympathy with childhood is The Snow Image. In that the half-conventional figures which served to introduce the stories in the Wonder Book have passed, by a very slight transformation, into quaint impersonations. They have the outward likeness of boys and girls, but, by the alchemy which Hawthorne used chiefly upon men and women, they are made to have ingenuous and artless converse with a being of other than flesh and blood. It is the charm of this exquisite tale that the children create the object in which they believe so implicitly. Would it be straining a point too far to say that as Andersen managed, whether consciously or not, to write his own spiritual biography in his tale of The Ugly Duckling, so Hawthorne in The Snow Image saw himself as in a glass? At any rate, we can ourselves see him reflected in those childish figures, absorbed in the creation out of the cold snow of a sprite which cannot without peril come too near the warm life of the common world, regarded with half-pitying love and belief by one, good-naturedly scorned by crasser man. In his romances children play no unimportant part. It is Ned Higgins’s cent which does the mischief with Hepzibah, in The House of the Seven Gables, transforming her from a shrinking gentlewoman into an ignoble shopkeeper; and thus it becomes only right and proper that Ned Higgins’s portrait should be drawn at full length with a gravity and seriousness which would not be wasted on a grown man like Dixey. In The Scarlet Letter one might almost call Pearl the central figure. Certainly, as she flashes in and out of the sombre shadows, she contrives to touch with light one character after another, revealing, interpreting, compelling. In the deeper lines one reads how this child concentrates in herself the dread consequences of sin. The Puritan, uttering the wrath of God descending from the fathers to the children, never spoke in more searching accents than Hawthorne in the person of Pearl. “The child,” he says, “could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder.” When one stops to think of The Scarlet Letter without Pearl, he discovers suddenly how vital the child is to the story. The scene in the woods, that moving passage where Pearl compels her mother to replace the scarlet A, and all the capricious behavior toward the minister show how much value Hawthorne placed on this figure in his drama: and when the climax is reached, and Hester, Arthur, and Pearl stand together on the scaffold, the supreme moment may fairly be said to be that commemorated in the words, “Pearl kissed his lips.”