mental effort with which he can simply sympathize—all declare the sagacious honesty, the instinctive intellectual conscientiousness of original genius. Hunt him when and where you will—lay traps for him—watch the most secret haunts and cosiest corners of his meditative retirement—and you never catch him strutting about in borrowed robes, gorgeous with purple patches cut from transatlantic garments, or adroitly filching felicities from transcendental pockets. Inimitable in his own sphere, he has little temptation to be a poacher in the domains of other minds. It is evident, if what we have said be true, that the criticism to be applied to Hawthorne’s works must take its rules of judgment from the laws to which his own genius yields obedience; for if he differs from other writers, not in degree but in kind, if the process and purpose of his creations be peculiar to himself, and especially if he draws from an experience of life from which others have been shut out, and has penetrated into mysterious regions of consciousness, a pioneer in the unexplored wildernesses of thought—it is worse than ridiculous to prattle the old phrases, and apply the accredited rules of criticism to an entirely new product of the human mind. The objections to Hawthorne, if objections there be, do not relate to the exercise of his powers but to his nature itself. His works are the offspring of that; proceed as certainly from it as a deduction from a premise; and criticism can do little in detecting any break in the links of that logic of passion and imagination, any discordance in that unity of law, which presides over the organization of each product of his mind. But we are willing to admit, that criticism may advance a step beyond this, and after conceding the power and genuineness of a work of art, can still question the excellence of the spirit by which it is animated; can, in short, doubt the validity, denounce the character, and attempt to weaken the influence, of the _kind_ of genius its analysis lays open. The justice of such a criticism applied to Hawthorne would depend on the notion which the critic has of what constitutes excellence in kind. The ordinary demand of the mind in a work of art, serious as well on humorous, is for geniality—a demand which admits of the widest variety of kinds which can be included within a healthy and pleasurable directing sentiment. Now Hawthorne is undoubtedly exquisitely genial, at times, but in him geniality cannot be said to predominate. Geniality of general effect comes, in a great degree, from tenderness to persons; it implies a conception of individual character so intense and vivid, that the beings of the author’s brain become the objects of his love; and this love somewhat blinds him to the action of those spiritual laws which really control the conduct and avenge the crimes of individuals.