When Hawthorne was 33, both Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody were in love with him; although this wasn't admitted by either sister as they were getting to know him. Elizabeth was also 33 and the dominant force in the Peabody household. After Twice Told Tales were published she believed greatness lay ahead for Hawthorne and did her best to encourage him. Sophia was only 28 and sickly. We learn from her letters that she was very effusive and emotionally exuberant. She was very different from her older sister. Since Hawthorne wasn't officially courting either sister, he spent time talking to and walking with both of them and as often as not his own sister accompanied them. Their association was based upon his writings. Literature, music, art were what they talked about and since Elizabeth was the most knowledgeable and forceful, he spent more time with Elizabeth than Sophia. Hawthorne was very shy and had not Elizabeth was very persuasive, and yet it was Sophia that he fell in love with and eventually married. So what of Elizabeth's reaction? "When Sophia and Hawthorne were dead and Julian Hawthorne [Hawthorne's son] had published his two-volume biography, Elizabeth Peabody commented with touching candor, 'It is because I believe marriage is a sacrament, and nothing less, that I am dying an old Maid, -- I have had too much respect for marriage to make a conventional one in my own case, -- I am free to say that had Hawthorne wanted to marry me he would probably not have found much difficulty in getting my consent; -- but it is very clear to me now, that I was not the person to make him happy, or to be made happy by him, and Sophia was. -- If there was ever a 'match made in Heaven' it was that. . . .'" And then the biographer Miller concludes his chapter by writing "In youth as in age -- fortunately in view of her fragilities -- Elizabeth Peabody lived more or less securely inside the shelter provided by fantasies of innate goodness which reduced human complexities to a comforting symmetry." Miller's comment struck me in part as very perceptive or at least very clever. Who today could say what Elizabeth Peabody did back in the 19th century? What person in the year 2006 could be satisfied with such a "comforting symmetry"? And this question is perhaps what inspired Miller's last sentence -- the assumption that this symmetry was "provided by fantasies of innate goodness." He assumes that human complexities trump the fantasy of "innate goodness." I suspect Miller here of an anachronism. In our post-Freudian age we are inundated with human complexities, but will such complexities be upheld by future psychologists and philosophers? Will Freud, Foucault, Lacan et al be vindicated, or will something more symmetrical and less complex eventually replace their theories? My doubts about Miller's conclusion sympathize with the criticisms such cultures as the Chinese have of the American. Is our complexity, our lack of innate goodness truly the standard for all mankind, or is there another way of looking at these matters -- a way we've forgotten? Lawrence