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 throng in still and shadowed places, preserving with a kind of virginal jealousy its own internal vision of beauty, its own internal scale of values. If we value him in proportion as he approaches the interests and methods of contemporary realism, we miss what is most precious in him, namely, his power of reducing the insolent pretensions of circumstance to insignificance, and of giving to the moral and ideal world reality, importance, and supreme interest.

Hawthorne was at times a close and shrewd observer of external fact, but he did not dwell habitually in the world of external fact, and other men have far surpassed him in their notation of manners and the visible aspects of nature. External nature he tended to regard as hieroglyphic and symbolical. It engaged his attention chiefly for the correspondences which he could discern between it and the forms and relations of his ideas. His notebooks are full of brief jottings of apparently trivial scenes and incidents intended to serve as starting points for his interpretive imagination: "A cloud in the shape of an old woman kneeling, with arms extended towards the moon." "An old looking-glass. Somebody finds out the secret of making all the images that have been reflected in it pass back again across its surface." "A person to catch fireflies, and try to kindle his household fire with them. It would be symbolical of something." Underlying this search for ulterior meanings and spiritual signifcances there was doubtless in Hawthorne a certain