Of collective life, frankly so treated, Hawthorne wrote frequently,--the group is an important one. The crowd attracted him by its polarity to his own solitude, and it is curious to observe how fond he was of the processional in his work. The simple illustration of this sort is "The Procession of Life;" here he marshals mankind, as with the power of a magician's rod, in hordes. In "The New Adam and Eve" he reviews society in its institutions and its garniture of civilization; and the conception is a happy device by which to obtain the requisite distance and wholeness for a single point of view. "Earth's Holocaust," though superficially different, is a variant of the same theme, presenting the product of life in masses; its inclusion of the indestructibility of the good is noticeable as a philosophical idea such as he rarely introduced in an explicit way. The felicitous allegory of "The Celestial Railroad" satirizes human nature without bitterness; but, while the universality of Bunyan's emblems is strikingly shown by the ease with which they are adapted to the new age of steam, the tale is, as it were, music transposed; the cleverness is Hawthorne's, but Bunyan wrote the piece. These four tales, admirable as they are in breadth, are nevertheless essentially reflective. The imaginative group of the same scope is of a higher rank. In it the general life is set forth with more individuality, though life in the abstract still occupies the foreground. To set aside such a moral parable as "The Lily's Quest," or such an illustration of the power of love to raise a man above himself temporarily as "Drowne's Wooden Image," or such a study of isolation as "The Man of Adamant," in all of which the didacticism is rather nakedly felt, there are two tales that equally exemplify this class, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" and "The Christmas Banquet." In the first the ghastliness of the reversal of the course of life backward, as the guests drink the elixir of youth, while it suggests the paltriness of our pleasures, is a powerful lesson in the beneficence of that daily death whereby we resign the past; this rejuvenation violates nature, and so shocks us, and by the very shock we are reconciled with nature, from which we had parted in thought. "The Christmas Banquet" is one of the most artistically conceived of all the tales, though its subject repels us; the wretchedness of life is shown in the persons of numerous guests through a succession of years, with the effect of a multiplicity of instances; yet at the end it is found that the worst wretch of all is the constant guest with the cold, unfeeling heart,--the climax of misery is not to have lived at all. The tale is carefully composed, especially in those points of keeping, balance, and contrast in which Hawthorne was expert, yet by some misadventure it fails to interpret itself clearly. In proportion, however, as imagination enters into these stories under