urselves again
to the fascination of the haunted twilight.

The antique gabled mansion in its quiet back street has the charm of the
still-life sketches in the early books, such as "Sights from a Steeple,"
"A Rill from the Town Pump," "Sunday at Home," and "The Toll-gatherer's
Day." All manner of quaint figures, known to childhood, pass along that
visionary street: the scissors grinder, town crier, baker's cart,
lumbering stage-coach, charcoal vender, hand-organ man and monkey, a
drove of cattle, a military parade--the "trainers," as we used to call
them. Hawthorne had no love for his fellow citizens and took little part
in the modern society of Salem. But he had struck deep roots into the
soil of the old witch town, his birthplace and the home of generations
of his ancestors. Does the reader know this ancient seaport, with its
decayed shipping and mouldering wharves, its silted up harbor and idle
custom-house, where Hawthorne served three years as surveyor of the
port? Imposing still are the great houses around the square, built by
retired merchants and shipmasters whose fortunes were made in the East
India trade: with dark old drawing-rooms smelling of sandalwood and
filled with cabinets of Oriental curiosities. Hawthorne had little to do
with the aristocracy of Salem. But something of the life of these old
families may be read in Mrs. Stoddard's novel "The Morgesons,"--a book
which I am perpetually recommending to my friends, and they as
perpetually refusing to read, returning my copy after a superficial
perusal, with uncomplimentary comments upon my taste in fiction.

Hawthorne's academic connections are of particular interest. It is
wonderful that he and Longfellow should have been classmates at Bowdoin.
Equally wonderful that Emerson's "Nature" and Hawthorne's "Mosses"
should have been written in the same little room in the Old Manse at
Concord. It gives one a sense of how small New England was then, and in
how narrow a runway genius went. Bowdoin College in those days was a
little country school on the edge of the Maine wilderness, only twenty
years old, its few buildings almost literally planted down among the
pine stumps. Hawthorne's class--1825--graduated but thirty-seven strong.
And yet Hawthorne and Longfellow were not intimate in college but
belonged to different sets. And twelve years afterward, when Longfellow
wrote a friendly review of "Twice-Told Tales" in _The North American
Review_, his quondam class