first motions of his creative genius, there was enough to fill his mind,
to provide him with active interest and occupation, and to abate the
sense of loneliness in his daily circumstances: but as youth passed and
manhood came, and yet fortune lagged with her gifts, this existence
became insufficient for him,--it grew burdensome as it showed barren,
and depression set in upon him like a chill and obscure fog over the
marshes where he walked. This, however, year dragging after year, was a
slow process; and the kind of life he led, its gray and deadening
monotone, sympathetic though it was with his temperament, was seen by
him better in retrospect than in its own time.

It is singular that Hawthorne should have undertaken to live by his pen,
or been allowed to do so by his friends, as a practical way of life, but
he was indulged at home, the young lord of the family. "We were in those
days," says Elizabeth, "almost absolutely obedient to him." Occasionally
he thought of going into his uncle's counting-room and so obtaining a
business and place in the world, but he never took this step. He
probably drifted, more or less, into authorship, partly through a
dilatory reluctance to do anything else, and partly led on by the hope
of a success with some one of his tales which would justify him.

The first attempts he made in the craft are involved in some obscurity.
He may have merely carried over from college days what he then had in
hand. At all events his sister Elizabeth, from whom the information
comes in respect to these details, remembered a little collection which
he had prepared for publication with the title "Seven Tales of my Native
Land," and she says that she read it in the summer of 1825; in that case
these stories must have been written at college, but her memory may have
erred. She gives the names of two of them as "Alice Doane" and "Susan
Grey," and adds that he told her, while the volume was still in the