THE SERPENT IN LITERATURE 2038 
His eyes were drawn as with magnets towards the circle 
of flame. His ears rung as in the overture to the swooning 
dream of chloroform. 
And so on, until Elsie appears on the scene and 
rescues the too easily fascinated schoolmaster. 
The writing is fine, but to admire it one must 
be unconscious of its exaggeration; or, in other 
words, ignorant of the serpent as it is in Nature. 
Even worse than the exaggerations are the half- 
poetic, half-scientific tirades against the creature’s 
ugliness and malignity. 
It was surely one of destiny’s strange pranks to 
bestow such a subject on the “ Autocrat of the 
Breakfast Table,” and, it may be added, to put it 
in him to treat it from the scientific standpoint. 
I cannot but wish that this conception had been 
Hawthorne’s; for though Hawthorne wrote no 
verse, he had in large measure the poetic spirit 
to which such a subject appeals most powerfully. 
Possibly it would have inspired him to something 
beyond his greatest achievement. Certainly not 
in The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven 
Gables, nor in any of his numerous shorter tales 
did he possess a theme so admirably suited to 
his sombre and beautiful genius as the tragedy 
of Elsie Venner. Furthermore, the exaggerations 
and inaccuracies which are unpardonable in Holmes 
would not have appeared as blemishes in Haw- 
thorne; for he would have viewed the animal 
world and the peculiar facts of the case—the 
intervolved human and serpentine nature of the 
