To the poetic mind, which is after all the highest form of intellect, the grand fact of existence is a sufficient miracle. The rising of the sun, the changes of the seasons, the blooming of flowers and the ripening of the grain, were all miracles to Hawthorne, and none the less so because they are continually being repeated. The scientists tell us that all these happen according to natural laws: perfectly true, but WHO was it that made those laws? WHO is it that keeps the universe running? Laws made for the regulation of human affairs by the wisest of men often prove ineffective, and inadequate to the purpose for which they were intended; but the laws of Nature work with unfailing accuracy. The boy solves his problem in algebra, finding out the unknown quantity by those values which are given him; and can we not also infer something of the _unknown_ from the great panorama that passes unceasingly before us? The one thing that Hawthorne could not have understood was, how gifted minds like Lucretius and Auguste Comte could recognize only the evidence of their senses, and deliberately blind themselves to the evidence of their intellects. He who denies the existence of mind as a reality resembles a person looking for his spectacles when they are on his nose; but it is the imagination of the poet that leads civilization onward to its goal. College life is rather generally followed by a period of scepticism, partly owing in former times to the enforced attendance at morning prayers, and still more perhaps to the study of Greek and Latin authors. During what might be called Hawthorne’s period of despair, he could not very well have obtained consolation from the traditional forms of divine worship; at least, such has been the experience of all those who have passed through the Wertherian stage, so far as we know of them. It is a time when every man has to strike the fountain of spiritual life out of the hard rock of his own existence; and those are fortunate who, like Moses and Hawthorne, strike forcibly enough to accomplish this. It is the “new birth from above,” in the light of which religious forms seem of least importance.