THE SERPENT IN LITERATURE 208 



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 



