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earth. Then a silence! Poor Hilda had looked into the courtyard, and saw the whole quick passage of a deed, which took but that little time to grave itself in the eternal adamant.

THE FAUN'S* TRANSFORMATION.

THE door of the courtyard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped her hands, and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have dilated, and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly inspired him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him an intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom we have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was gone forever.

"What have you done?” said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper.

The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello's face, and now flashed out again from his eyes. "I did what ought to be done to a traitor!" he replied. "I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice!"

These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it. But, alas! looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she could not deny-she was not sure whether it might be so, or no-that a wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in his mortal peril. Was it horror?—or ecstasy?—or both in one? Be the emotion what it might, it had blazed up more madly, when Donatello flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more, while his shriek went quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below, had come an unutterable horror.

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And my eyes bade you do it!" repeated she.

They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if some inestimable treasure had fallen over, and were yet recoverable. On the pavement, below, was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched out, as if they might have clutched, for a moment, at the small square stones. But there was no motion in them, now. Miriam watched the heap of

* Donatello's fanciful name.

mortality while she could count a hundred, which she took pains to do. No stir; not a finger moved!

"You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!" said she. 'Stone dead! Would I were so too!"

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"Did you not mean that he should die?" sternly asked Donatello, still in the glow of that intelligence which passion had developed in him. "There was short time to weigh the matter; but he had his trial in that breath or two while I held him over the cliff, and his sentence in that one glance, when your eyes responded to mine! Say that I have slain him against your will say that he died without your whole consent-and, in another breath, you shall see me lying beside him.”

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Oh, never!" cried Mirian. "My one, own friend! Never, never, never!"

She turned to him-the guilty, blood-stained, lonely woman-she turned to her fellow-criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror and agony of each was com`bined into one emotion, and that a kind of rapture.

"Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!" said she; “my heart consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!"

Hawthorne died in the town of Plymouth, New Hampshire, on the 19th of May, 1864, when on the point of undertaking a journey for improving his health. Since his death there have been published several volumes of Note Books, both American and European, and Italian Journals. They consist of scraps of daily experience and observation, and of sketches and hints of stories for future elaborationy Though, evidently, they were never intended by their author for the public eye, yet they exhibit all the charm of style and peculiarity of thought of the master. Their chief importance consists in the light they throw upon Hawthorne's method of procedure as a writer.

Hawthorne stands out in American literature as the apostle of morbid psychological romance. His characters are, for the most part, personifications of individual sin

He seizes on some abnormal phase of spirit, and makes a man or woman out of it; subordinating every other affec tion, passion, and aim, to its despotic rule. For proof of this one need only consider such characters as the Leech, Judge Pyncheon, Clifford, Donatello, Miriam, Hilda, and numerous heroes and heroines of his tales.

He seldom seeks to impress a moral, but, like a true preRaphaelite, aims only to delineate nature. This he him. self virtually confesses in his preface to the The House of the Seven Gables. He says: "The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod, or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first."

The result of this unique treatment is that his favorite and chief creations, in the main, strike one as being unnatu rally and repulsively sombre. Speaking of The Scarlet Letter, he himself says: "It wears to my eye a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life, and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. . . . It is no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the writer's mind; for he was happier, while straying through the gloom of these sunless fantasies, than at any time since he had quitted the Old Manse."

The touches of simplicity, gayety, and humor, which here and there appear-for Hawthorne resembles Shakspeare in his wealth of episode-are charming and restful, but too delicate to constitute a contrast with the abounding dark pigment of his canvas. So delicately drawn are his characrs that they may hardly be said to be well-defined; and

there is a mysterious, suggestive life in them that transcends the description.

This passion for portraying the distempers of human nature has not, however, prevented Hawthorne from enriching us with some of the tenderest, purest, and cheeriest touches in the language. His mind was equally capable of revolving the mystery of sin and retribution, or of rambling with a prattling, spotless child in search of toys and sights.

"Every one, whether cultivated or uncultivated, acknow ledges the charm of Hawthorne's style; but the most cultivated best appreciate the wonder of that power by which he wakens into clear consciousness shades of feeling and delicacies of thought, that perhaps have been experienced by us all, but were never embodied in words before. . . . Judging by this standard-the power of creating understanding within those whom he addresses-Hawthorne takes rank with the highest order of artists."*

"Hawthorne not only writes English, but the sweetest, simplest, and clearest English that ever has been made the vehicle of equal depth, variety, and subtilty of thought and emotion."†

* Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1868.

† Ibid., May, 1860.

STOWE.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE was born in Litchfield, Con necticut, June 14, 1812. From her fifteenth until her twenty-first year she was associated with an older sister in the conduct of a female seminary at Hartford. She then married the Rev. Calvin E. Stowe, and removed to the West, locating at Cincinnati. Early in life she began, in spirited and pithy articles and pamphlets, a war against the great national curse-Slavery; and a large proportion of her entire writings is directed in one form or another against her first enemy.

Without attempting to sketch the history of her numerous literary ventures, we shall simply enumerate the principal ones of them. They are, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854), Dred: a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), House and Home Papers (1864), The Chimney Corner (1868), Oldtown Folks (1869), Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871).*

Of all Mrs. Stowe's works, Uncle Tom's Cabin is by far the most elaborate, and the most meritorious of its kind; and it has doubtless become the most popular work ever published, its circulation being estimated by millions of copies. It has been translated into all the languages of Europe and into many of those of Asia: moreover, it has been dramatized in some thirty different forms, and acted in every capital in Europe, not to speak of its favor on the American stage.

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There never was a fairer nor a kinder book than Uncle Tom's Cabin; for the entire odium of the revelation fell upon the Thing (Slavery), not upon the unhappy mortals who were born and reared under its shadow. The reader felt that Legree was not less but far more the victim of slavery than Uncle Tom, and the effect of the book was to * Poganuc People (1878).

in the British Shiseum there are 35 Editions in glish, and 19 was many Uncle Tour's Cabins. I"

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& different hunguages of

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