y, no
mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a
commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And yet it may
{465} be doubted whether any environment could have been found more
fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any
preparation better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than
these long, lonely years of waiting and brooding thought. From time to
time he contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S.
G. Goodrich's Annual, the _Token_, or the _Knickerbocker Magazine_.
Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were
anonymous and signed by various _noms de plume_, and their author was
at this time--to use his own words--"the obscurest man of letters in
America." In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a
short romance, entitled _Fanshawe_. It had little success, and copies
of the first edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he published a
collection of his magazine pieces under the title, _Twice Told Tales_.
The book was generously praised in the _North American Review_ by his
former classmate, Longfellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical
perception by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at
the head of imaginative literature in America if he would discard
allegory, drop short stories and compose a genuine romance. Poe
compared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and
it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of
the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over
Tieck with a German dictionary. The {466} _Twice Told Tales_ are the
work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his
own heart, acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little
contact with men. Many of them were shadowy and others were morbid and
unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the
physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological
situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the
unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of
Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early
tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways
in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or
necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable
sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn tow