He has also in the management of the story confined himself, as was his wont, to a few characters, Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon, each strictly isolated in peculiar individuality, and offering the opportunity for powerful contrasts; and he has allowed his imagination to find its spring in the symbolism of a physical object, here the marble statue of the faun, and let his moral scheme evolve out of the brooding of his thought upon the spiritual thing thus suggested for the play of meditation. The plot itself, though more definitely disclosed in its main incident of crime, which is made central in the narrative, is of the simplest sort, and no more than enough to provide corporal fact sufficient to give the body of event and situation; and, for the rest, the story both before and after is left wholly vague, the mystery of Donatello's fate repeating the mystery of Miriam's past. In this he showed again his indifference to what became of his characters when they had fulfilled their function artistically; he had no human sympathy with their personal fortunes. This peculiarity is only another phase of the fact that crime itself did not interest him in its mortal career. The use he found in crime was only as the means by which sin was generated in the soul; and his concern was with the latter, not the former. He has projected on such a background and out of such a group of characters an analytic study of the nature of evil, and this is his main theme, overlaid as it is with all the decorative beauty of his interpretation of Italy. He had formerly set forth the history of sin in the heart, taking the evil for granted and reflecting upon it as a thing given; he now looks backward and is engaged with the genesis of sin in a natural man, the coming of sin into the world of nature; and yet this is not all, but he endeavors to think about the meaning of evil, the reason for sin's existence, the old problem fundamental in thought about the spiritual life. It cannot be regarded as a matter on which he came to any satisfactory conclusion or even uttered any novel reflections; and it is this that gives its lack of firmness to the work on the ethical side. Donatello is made into a living soul of a higher capacity by his experience of crime; but Hawthorne suggests that evil serves a good purpose in this only with much reluctance, and indeed he may almost be said to reject this explanation. Donatello became "a sadder and a wiser man," and with that old phrase the issue for him seems to be summed. It is noticeable that, as in "The Scarlet Letter," there is no question of how this soul that has come into a miserable consciousness is to be healed; and it is remarkable that the only consolation the Church can give is vouchsafed by Hawthorne to the heretic Hilda, but not to the child of its own bosom. Hawthorne, if he indicates through Kenyon his ideas, seems to advise, as elsewhere, letting the dead past bury its