soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares
with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer,
came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been
married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for
three paradisaical 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withdrawn entirely from the world.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 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