rich warm nature to regain a place of usefulness and happiness in society. In the conclusion, furthermore, he intimates pointedly enough that the Puritans of the seventeenth century had not received the final word on the regulation of human relationships; that, when the world is ripe for it, there will be a "higher law" declared, a new revelation, "showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!"
In his preface to The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne deprecates attempts to "impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod." "A high truth," he declares, "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 truer, and seldom more evident, at the last page than at the first." In the face of this caution it would be imprudent to speak directly of the moral intentions wrought into the fabric of The Scarlet Letter. It may be permissible, however, to call attention to the singular union of judgment with compassion which characterizes Hawthorne's treatment of his principal personages, and which he also solicits for them from the reader. He solicits compassion in this romance, as in the little tale of "The Minister with the Black Veil," by perpetually suggesting to the reader that search in his own heart would discover at least the seeds and latent possibilities of kindred
