disaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and
this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it
was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an
Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of
his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was
thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His
childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old
and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his
grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the
primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820,
the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was
graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one
year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States.
After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the
seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had
withdrawn entirely from the world. For months {464} at a time
Hawthorne kept his room, seeing no other society than that of his
mother and sisters, reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales,
most of which he destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight
he would emerge from the house for a solitary ramble through the
streets of the town or along the sea-side. Old Salem had much that was
picturesque in its associations. It had been the scene of the witch
trials in the seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions,
the homes of retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father
had been a ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the
sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge
Hawthorne, who in 1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death.
The thought of this affected Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing
horror and he utilized it afterward in his _House of the Seven Gables_.
Many of the old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now
and then the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which
haunted posterity with its curse till all the stock died out, or fell
into poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's
romance. In the preface to the _Marble Faun_ Hawthorne wrote: "No
author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a
romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquit