Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/218

206 one of Love had sighed softly to their murmur, and that one of Death had threatened to crimson them with his blood: so true is it that, sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. Very significant of the author's meditative habit is his description of the interruption of the two rascals' felonious design: "They left the spot with so many jests and such laughter at their unaccomplished wickedness, that they might be said to have gone on their way rejoicing. In a few hours they had forgotten the whole affair, nor once imagined that the recording angel had written down the crime of murder against their souls, in letters as durable as eternity." This thought is illustrated more at length in the "morality" called "Fancy's Show-Box"—which discusses, as a point of vast interest, the question whether the soul may contract stains of guilt, in all their depth and flagrancy, from deeds which may have been plotted and resolved upon, but which, physically, have never had existence—whether the fleshy hand, and visible frame of man, must set its seal to the evil designs of the soul, in order to give them their entire validity against the sinner. Casuistry of this sort is "nuts" to Mr. Hawthorne.

"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," too, has the real Hawthorne odour. The quartette of withered worldlings who, by the doctor's magic art, enjoy a temporary rejuvenescence—with what cruel truth their weak points are exposed! First laughing tremulously at the ridiculous idea that, were youth restored them, they, with their experience of life, would or should or could ever go astray again—grey, decrepit, sapless, miserable creatures, without warmth enough in their souls or bodies to be animated even by the prospect of recovering their spring days. And then, when the spell began to work, lost in a delirium of levity, saddened with exuberant frolic, and disporting themselves in follies to be equalled only by their own absurdities half a century before. An apologue, styled "The Lily's Quest," relates the rambles of two lovers in search of a site for their Temple of Happiness=they, the representatives of Hope and Joy, while there dogs them a darksome figure, type of all the woful influences which life can conjure up, and interposing a gloomy forbiddal whenever they think the site is found:—a site is at last found, which he forbids not; but it is—a grave. Touchingly beautiful, however, is the inference drawn by the bridegroom, despite the taunting words of the Dark Shadow over his bride's grave; for then he knew, we are told, what was betokened by the parable in which the Lily and himself had acted; and the mystery of Life and Death was opened to him; and he could throw his arms towards heaven and cry, "Joy, joy! on a grave be the site of our temple; and now our happiness is fer eternity!" Nor must we omit allusion to "Edward Fane's Rosebud," that retrospect of a mumbling crone's girlhood, when wrinkled Nurse Toothaker (now cowering in rheumatic crabbedness over her fire, and warming her old bones too by an infusion of Geneva) was a fresh and fair young maiden—so fresh and fair, that, instead of Rose, which seemed too mature a name for her half-opened beauty, her lover called her Rosebud;—nor again, and lastly, to the legend of the mantle of Lady Eleanore—fatal handiwork of a dying woman, which, perchance, owed the fantastic grace of its design to the delirium of approaching death, and with whose golden threads the last toil of stiffening fingers had interwoven plague and