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 lacked the stimulus of fellow-workers in his own kind, and he labored in a romantic vein which even in his own day was on the point of appearing old-fashioned. Associated with an intellectual movement animated by an hereditary passion for righteousness, he was interested in the moral significance of his narratives; and his moral sympathies are said to have been at least deeply tinged with what the impatient young people of our day impatiently, not to say wrathfully, designate as Puritanism.

It should follow that his treatment of forbidden love has been quite overshadowed by the masterpieces of successors working with so many superiorities of circumstance and method. But as a matter of fact The Scarlet Letter appears to be as safe from competitors as Pilgrim's Progress or Robinson Crusoe. It is recognized as the classical treatment of its particular theme. Its symbols and scenes of guilt and penitence—the red letter on the breast of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale on the scaffold—have fixed themselves in the memory of men like the figure of Crusoe bending over the footprint in the sand, and have become a part of the common stock of images like Christian facing the lions in the way. When a book has achieved this sort of celebrity, it needs ask for nothing more; it has entered into immortal life, and passes through all changes of fashion unscathed. But Hawthorne and this book have won the critical as well as the popular tribute. Nearly thirty years after the publica-