Hawthorne's mind was richly stored with "wild chimney-corner legends," many of them no doubt gleaned from an old woman mentioned in one of his Tales and Sketches. He takes over the fantastic superstitions in which his ancestors had believed, and uses them as the playthings of his fancy, picturing with malicious mirth the grey shadows of his stern, dark-browed forefathers sadly lamenting his lapse from grace and saying one to the other:
"A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler."
The story of Alice Pyncheon, the maiden under the dreadful power of a wizard, who, to wreak his revenge, compelled her to surrender her will to his and to do whatsoever he list, the legends of ghosts and spectres in the Twice-Told Tales, the allusions to the elixir of life in his Notebooks, the introduction of witches into The Scarlet Letter, of mesmerism into The Blithedale Romance, show how often Hawthorne was pre-occupied with the terrors of magic and of the invisible world. He handles the supernatural in a half-credulous, half-sportive spirit, neither affirming nor denying his belief. One of his artful devices is wilfully to cast doubt upon his fancies, and so to pique us into the desire to be momentarily at least one of the foolish and imaginative.
After writing The Blithedale Romance, in which he embodied his experiences at Brook Farm, and his Italian romance, Transformation, or The Marble Faun, Hawthorne, when his health was failing, strove to find expression for the theme of immortality, which had always exercised a strange fascination upon him. In August, 1855, during his consulate in Liverpool, he visited Smithell's Hall, near Bolton, and heard the legend of the Bloody Footstep. He thought of uniting this story with that of the elixir of life, but ultimately decided to treat the story of the footstep in Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, of which only a fragment was written, and to embody the elixir idea in a separate work, Septimius Felton, of which two unfinished versions exist. Septimius Felton, a young man living in Concord at the time of the war of the Revolution, tries to brew the potion of eternity by adding to a recipe, which his aunt has derived from the Indians, the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom he has slain. In Dr. Dolliver's Romance, Hawthorne, so far as we may judge from the fragment which remains, seems to be working out an idea jotted down in his notebook several years earlier:
"A man arriving at the extreme point of old age grows young again at the same pace at which he had grown old, returning upon his path throughout the whole of life, and thus taking the reverse view of matters. Methinks it would give rise to some odd concatenations."
The story, which opens with a charming description of Dr. Dolliver and his great-grandchild, Pansie, breaks off so abruptly that it is impossible to forecast the "odd concatenations" that had flashed through Hawthorne's mind.
Although Hawthorne is preoccupied continually with the thought of death, his outlook is melancholy, not morbid. He recoils fastidiously from the fleshly and loses himself in the spiritual. He is concerned with mournful reflections, not frightful events. It is the mystery of death, not its terror, that fascinates him. Sensitive and susceptible himself, he never startles us with physical horrors. He does not search with curious ingenuity for recondite terrors. He was compelled as if by some wizard's strange power, to linger in earth's shadowed places; but the scenes that throng his memory are reflected in quiet, subdued tones. His pictures are never marred by harsh lines or crude colours.
While Hawthorne in his Twice-Told Tales was toying pensively with spectral forms and "dark ideas," Edgar Allan Poe was penetrating intrepidly into trackless regions of terror. Where Hawthorne would have shrunk back, repelled and disgusted, Poe, wildly exhilarated by the anticipation of a new and excruciating thrill, forced his way onwards. He sought untiringly for unusual situations, inordinately gloomy or terrible, and made them the starting point for excursions into abnormal psychology. Just as Hawthorne harps with plaintive insistence on the word "sombre," Poe again and again uses the epithet "novel." His tales are never, as Hawthorne's often are, pathetic. His instinct is always towards the dramatic. Sometimes he rises to tragic heights, sometimes he is merely melodramatic. He rejoices in theatrical effects, like the death-throes of William Wilson, the return of the lady Ligeia, or the entry, awaited with torturing suspense, of the "lofty" and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. Like Hawthorne, Poe was fascinated by the thought of death, "the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed him night and day," but he describes death accompanied by its direst physical and mental agonies. Hawthorne broods over the idea of sin, but Poe probes curiously into the psychology of crime. The one is detached and remote, the other inhuman and passionless. The contrast in style between Hawthorne and Poe reflects clearly their difference in temper. Hawthorne writes always with easy, finished perfection, choosing the right word unerringly, Poe experiments with language, painfully acquiring a conscious, studied form of expression which is often remarkably effective, but which almost invariably suggests a sense of artifice. In reading The Scarlet Letter we do not think of the style; in reading The Masque of the Red Death we are forcibly impressed by the skilful arrangement of words, the alternation of long and short sentences, the device of repetition and the deliberate choice of epithets. Hawthorne uses his own natural form of expression. Poe, with laborious art, fashions an instrument admirably adapted to his purposes.
Poe's earliest published story, A Manuscript Found in a Bottle—the prize tale for the Baltimore Saturday Visitor, 1833—proves that he soon recognised his peculiar vein of talent. He straightway takes the tale of terror for his own. The experiences of a sailor, shipwrecked in the Simoom and hurled on the crest of a towering billow into a gigantic ship manned by a hoary crew who glide uneasily to and fro "like the ghosts of buried centuries," forecast the more frightful horrors of A Descent into the Maelstrom (1841). Poe's method in both stories is to induce belief by beginning with a circumstantial narrative of every-day events, and by proceeding to relate the most startling phenomena in the same calm, matter-of-fact manner. The whirling abyss of the Maelstrom in which the tiny boat is engulfed, and the sensations of the fishermen—awe, wonder, horror, curiosity, hope, alternating or intermingled—are described with the same quiet precision as the trivial preliminary adventures. The man's dreary expectation of incredulity seals our conviction of the truth of his story. In The Manuscript Found in a Bottle, too, we may trace the first suggestion of that idea which finds its most complete and memorable expression in Ligeia (1837). The antique ship, with its preternaturally aged crew "doomed to hover continually upon the brink of eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss," is an early foreshadowing of the fulfilment of Joseph Glanvill's declaration so strikingly illustrated in the return of Ligeia: "Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." In Ligeia, Poe concentrates on this idea with singleness of purpose. He had striven to embody it in his earlier sketches, in Morella, where the beloved is reincarnated in the form of her own child, in the musical, artificial Eleonora and in the gruesome Berenice. In Ligeia, at last, it finds its appropriate setting in the ebony bridal-chamber, hung with gold tapestries grotesquely embroidered with fearful shapes and constantly wafted to and fro, like those in one of the Episodes of Vathek. In The Fall of the House of Usher he adapts the theme which he had approached in the sketch entitled Premature Burial, and unites with it a subtler conception, the sentience of the vegetable world. Like the guest of Roderick Usher, as we enter the house we fall immediately beneath the overmastering sway of its irredeemable, insufferable gloom. The melancholy building, Usher's wild musical improvisations, his vague but awful paintings, his mystical reading and his eerie verses with the last haunting stanza:
"And travellers now within that valley
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid, ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever
And laugh—but smile no more,"