sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our
responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster--these
things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had
straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them--to
judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and æsthetic point of
view, the point of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of
conviction makes the difference; but the difference is great.

Hawthorne was a man of fancy, and I suppose that in speaking of him it
is inevitable that we should feel ourselves confronted with the
familiar problem of the difference between the fancy and the
imagination. Of the larger and more potent faculty he certainly
possessed a liberal share; no one can read _The House of the Seven
Gables_ without feeling it to be a deeply imaginative work. But I am
often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of which I am now
chiefly speaking, with a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for
conceits and analogies, which bears more particularly what is called
the fanciful stamp. The finer of the shorter tales are redolent of a
rich imagination.

"Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only
dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so, if you
will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young
Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a
distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the
night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the
congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen,
because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and
drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from
the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and with his