between his intellectual unfolding and that of the great Florentines. It
consists in his drawing up into himself the nourishment furnished by the
ground upon which he was born, and making the more and the less
productive elements reach a climax of characteristic beauty. One marked
difference, however, is that there was no abundant and inspiriting
municipal life of his own time which could enter into his genius: it was
the consciousness of the past of the place that affected him. He himself
has expressed as much: "This old town of Salem--my native place, though
I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer
years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of
which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence
here.... And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within
me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be
content to call affection.... But the sentiment has likewise its moral
quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition
with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as
far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a kind of
home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the
present phase of the town."

It is by briefly reviewing that past, then trying to reproduce in
imagination the immediate atmosphere of Hawthorne's youth, and comparing
the two, that we shall best arrive at the completion of our proposed
portrait. We have first to study the dim perspective and the suggestive
coloring of that historic background from which the author emerges, and
then to define clearly his own individual traits as they appear in his
published works and Note-Books.

The eagerness which admirers of such a genius show, to learn all
permissible details of his personal history, is, when freed from the