after nightfall, stealing out from his room into the silent streets of
Salem, and shadowy as the ghosts with which to his susceptible
imagination the dusky town was thronged, he glided beneath the house
in which the witch-trials were held, or across the moonlit hill upon
which the witches were hung, until the spell was complete. Nor can we
help fancying that, after the murder of old Mr. White in Salem, which
happened within a few years after his return from college, which drew
from Mr. Webster his most famous criminal plea, and filled a shadowy
corner of every museum in New England, as every shivering little man
of that time remembers, with an awful reproduction of the scene in
wax-figures, with real sheets on the bed, and the murderer, in a
glazed cap, stooping over to deal the fatal blow--we cannot help
fancying that the young recluse who walked by night, the wizard whom
as yet none knew, hovered about the house, gazing at the windows of
the fatal chamber, and listening in horror for the faint whistle of
the confederate in another street.

Three years after he graduated, in 1828, he published anonymously a
slight romance with the motto from Southey, "Wilt thou go with me?"
Hawthorne never acknowledged the book, and it is now seldom found; but
it shows plainly the natural bent of his mind. It is a dim, dreamy
tale, such as a Byron-struck youth of the time might have written,
except for that startling self-possession of style and cold analysis
of passion, rather than sympathy with it, which showed no imitation,
but remarkable original power. The same lurid gloom overhangs it that
shadows all his works. It is uncanny; the figures of the romance are
not persons, they are passions, emotions, spiritual speculations. So
the _Twice-told Tales_ that seem at first but the pleasant fancies of
a mild recluse, gradually hold the mind with a Lamia-like fascination;
and the author says truly of them, in the Preface of 1851, "Even in