above the surface, like the topmost portion of a coral island slowly
rising from the depths of a solitary ocean.

When he left college, his friends Cilley and Pierce entered into law,
the gateway to politics; Bridge returned to his father's estate at
Bridgton, to engage later in a large enterprise there; and other
classmates took up various activities in the midst of other men; but for
Hawthorne no very clear path presented itself. Literature had not yet
attained, in the United States, the rank of a distinct and powerful
profession. Fifteen years before, Brockden Brown had died prematurely
after a hapless struggle, worn out with overwork,--the first man who had
undertaken to live by writing in this country since its colonization.
"The North American Review," indeed, in Boston, was laying the
corner-stone of a vigorous periodical literature; and in this year of
1825 William Cullen Bryant had gone to New York to edit "The New York
Review," after publishing at Cambridge his first volume of poetry, "The
Ages." Irving was an author of recent but established fame, who was
drawing chiefly from the rich supplies of European manners, legend, and
history; while Cooper, in his pleasant Pioneer-land beside Otsego Lake,
had begun to make clear his claim to a wide domain of native and
national fiction. But to a young man of reserved temper, having few or
no friends directly connected with publication, and living in a sombre,
old-fashioned town, isolated as all like towns were before the era of
railroads, the avenue to publicity and a definite literary career was
dark and devious enough.

I suppose it was after his venture of "Fanshawe," that he set about the
composition of some shorter stories which he called "Seven Tales of my
Native Land." [Footnote: The motto prefixed to these was, "We are
seven."] His sister, to whom he read these, has told me that they were