fiction." From this sylvan university Hawthorne came home to Salem;
"as if," he wrote later, "Salem were for me the inevitable centre of
the universe."

The old witch-hanging city had no weirder product than this
dark-haired son. He has certainly given it an interest which it must
otherwise have lacked; but he speaks of it with small affection,
considering that his family had lived there for two centuries. "An
unjoyous attachment," he calls it. And, to tell the truth, there was
evidently little love lost between the little city and its most famous
citizen. Stories still float in the social gossip of the town, which
represent the shy author as inaccessible to all invitations to dinner
and tea; and while the pleasant circle awaited his coming in the
drawing-room, the impracticable man was--at least so runs the
tale--quietly hobnobbing with companions to whom his fame was unknown.
Those who coveted him as a phoenix could never get him, while he gave
himself freely to those who saw in him only a placid barn-door fowl.
The sensitive youth was a recluse, upon whose imagination had fallen
the gloomy mystery of Puritan life and character. Salem was the
inevitable centre of his universe more truly than he thought. The mind
of Justice Hathorn's descendant was bewitched by the fascination of a
certain devilish subtlety working under the comeliest aspects in human
affairs. It overcame him with strange sympathy. It colored and
controlled his intellectual life.

Devoted all day to lonely reverie and musing upon the obscurer
spiritual passages of the life whose monuments he constantly
encountered, that musing became inevitably morbid. With the creative
instinct of the artist, he wrote the wild fancies into form as
stories, many of which, when written, he threw into the fire. Then,