General Pierce the last. Very likely Hawthorne shared in both of them;
but he never explained himself, and what he thought on the subject will
always remain a mystery. The political element seems almost to have been
left out of his composition; and in one of his books he speaks of the
Concord fight with a certain kind of indifference.

Alcott was almost the only man in Concord who had the courage to call on
Hawthorne. Sometimes they even went to walk together. How much
satisfaction Hawthorne found in these visits it would be difficult to
say, for the very philosophic breadth and extension of Alcott's interest
were enough to make Hawthorne feel rather shy of him. Alcott's
conversation about books and literature was often very fine, but even
this could not have given Hawthorne much entertainment. His own library,
as he states himself somewhere, was of a miscellaneous character, and
contained the works of scarcely any author of repute except Shakespeare.
Alcott's sense of humor and keen knowledge of human nature may have been
a sort of common ground between them.

Meanwhile Hawthorne, as afterwards appeared, was making a study of
Alcott to see whether he would serve his purpose as the mainspring for a
new work of fiction. The manuscript plot of a romance was found among
Hawthorne's papers in which he describes a personage in general outline
like his neighbor Alcott, but without his ideality and good-humor. This
imaginary character was supposed to live in a retired manner, together
with an old housekeeper, a boy of whom he is the legal guardian, and a
huge spider in which his interest and solicitude are more especially
centred. What the catastrophe of this strange story was to have been, we
are not informed, but it naturally would have arisen from the unhealthy
and oppressive social position in which the boy must have found himself
as he advanced towards manhood. At the close of his memoranda Hawthorne