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eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the Western wilderness; other faces than 325 were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeplecrowned hats. Reminiscences the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever 330 was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another, as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly it was an instinctive device of her spirit, to relieve itself, by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.

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21. Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in old England, and her paternal home-a decayed house of gray 340 stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half-obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father's face, with its bald brow, and reverend white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which 345 it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she be- 350 held another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale,

LITERARY ANALYSIS.—323. was. Justify the use of the singular verb. 327-331. Substitute synonyms for the following italicized words: “Reminiscences the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life."

339. miserable eminence. 345. heedful and anxious.

Explain.

Discriminate between these synonyms.

thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamplight that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul. 355 This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her, in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall gray houses, the huge cathedrals, and the 360 public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a Continental city, where a new life had awaited her, still in connection with the misshapen scholar-a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude 365 market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prynneyes, at herself, who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread upon her bosom !

22. Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes!-these were her realities; all else had vanished!

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Longfellow

CHARACTERIZATION BY GEORGE W. CURTIS.

1. If we care to explain the eager and affectionate welcome which always hails Longfellow's writings, it is easy to see to what general quality that greeting must be ascribed. As with Walter Scott, or Victor Hugo, or Béranger, or Dickens, or Addi

son in the Spectator, or Washington Irving, it is a genial humanity. It is a quality, in all these instances, independent of literary art and of genius, but which is made known to others, and therefore becomes possible to be recognized, only through literary forms.

2. The creative imagination, the airy fancy, the exquisite grace, harmony, and simplicity, the rhetorical brilliancy, the incisive force, all the intellectual powers and charms of style with which that feeling may be expressed, are informed and vitalized by the sympathy itself. But whether a man who writes verse has genius, whether he be a poet according to arbitrary canons, whether some of his lines resemble the lines of other writers, and whether he be original, are questions which may be answered in every way of every poet in history. Who is a poet but he whom the heart of man permanently accepts as a singer of its own hopes, emotions, and thoughts? And what is poetry but that song? If words have a uniform meaning, it is useless to declare that Pope cannot be a poet if Lord Byron is, or that Moore is counterfeit if Wordsworth be genuine. For the art of poetry is like all other arts. The casket that Cellini worked is not less genuine and excellent than the dome of Michael Angelo. Is nobody but Shakespeare a poet? Is there no music but Beethoven's? Is No cataract but

there no mountain-peak but Dhawalaghiri? Niagara ?

3. While the magnetism of Longfellow's touch lies in the broad humanity of his sympathy, which leads him neither to mysticism nor cynicism, and which commends his poetry to the universal heart, his artistic sense is so exquisite that each of his poems is a valuable literary study. In these he has now reached a perfection quite unrivalled among living poets, except, sometimes by Tennyson. His literary career has been contemporary with the sensational school, but he has been entirely untainted by it. The literary style of an intellectually introverted age or author will always be somewhat obscure, however gorgeous; but Longfellow's mind takes a simple, childlike hold of life, and his style never betrays the inadequate effort to describe thoughts or emotions that are but vaguely perceived, which is the characteristic of the best sensational writing. Indeed, there is little poetry by the eminent contemporary masters which is so ripe

and racy as his. He does not make rhetoric stand for passion, nor vagueness for profundity; nor, on the other hand, is he such a voluntary and malicious "Bohemian" as to conceive that either in life or letters a man is released from the plain rules of morality. Indeed, he used to be accused of preaching in his poetry by gentle critics who held that Elysium was to be found in an oyster-cellar, and that intemperance was the royal prerogative of genius.

4. His literary scholarship, also, his delightful familiarity with the pure literature of all languages and times, must rank Longfellow among the learned poets. Yet he wears this various knowledge like a shining suit of chain-mail to adorn and strengthen his gait, like Milton, instead of tripping and clumsily stumbling in it, as Ben Jonson sometimes did. He whips out an exquisitely pointed allusion that flashes like a Damascus rapier, aud strikes nimbly home; or he recounts some weird tradition, or enriches his line with some gorgeous illustration from hidden stores; or merely unrolls, as Milton loved to do, the vast perspective of romantic association by recounting, in measured order, names which themselves make music in the mind-names not musical only, but fragrant :

"Sabean odors from the spicy shore

Of Araby the Blest."

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