Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman
preferred to keep their feet on the solid earth and write
admirable histories. So the mellow years went by. Most of the
widely-read American books were being produced within twenty
miles of the Boston State House. The slavery issue kept growling,
far away, but it was only now and then, as in the enforcement of
the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was brought sharply home
to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly golden for New
England as for idle California. There was wealth, leisure, books,
a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of the
writers is the spirit of youth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was
Puritan by inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or
in sympathy. His literary affiliations were with the English and
German Romanticists, and he possessed, for professional use, the
ideas and vocabulary of his transcendental friends. Born in Salem
in 1804, he was descended from Judge Hawthorne of Salem
Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of sea-faring ancestors. He
inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in some measure by a
physical endowment of rare strength and beauty. He read Spenser,
Rousseau, and the "Newgate Calendar," was graduated at Bowdoin,
with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem for
thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself
the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are
essays in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a
setting for a preconceived "moral"; he is in love with allegory
and parable. His own words about his first collection of stories,
"Twice-Told Tales," have often been quoted: "They have the pale
tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." Yet they