the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very different story. I frankly confess that it has never seemed to me a first-rate literary form. It is apt to spoil two good things--a story and a moral." Except in that capital satire, "The Celestial Railroad," an ironical application of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to modern religion, Hawthorne seldom uses out-and-out allegory; but rather a more or less definite symbolism. Even in his full-length romances, this mental habit persists in the typical and, so to speak, algebraic nature of his figures and incidents. George Woodberry and others have drawn attention to the way in which his fancy clings to the physical image that represents the moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every human heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "The Birthmark," a sign of earthly imperfection which only death can eradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful," for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied his thought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-house flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in her hair or the bosom of her gown, where it seems to express her exotic beauty. It is characteristic of the romancer that he does not specify whether this symbolic blossom was a gardenia, an orchid, a tuberose, a japonica, or what it was. Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, would have added the botanical name.