ound on Cranberry
Island," and "get as good a freezing there as anywhere on the
North-west coast." He said that most of the phenomena described in
Kane's voyages could be observed in Concord.

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of the stars in
a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had the pale cast of
thought, and was almost too spiritual and remote to "hit the sense of
mortal sight." But it was at least indigenous. If not an American
literature--not national and not inclusive of all sides of American
life--it was, at all events, a genuine New England literature and true
to the spirit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last put
forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust growths of English
soil even as the delicate wind flower of the northern spring compares
with the cowslips and daisies of old England.

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest American romancer,
came to Concord. He had recently left Brook Farm, had just been
married, and with his bride he settled down in the "Old Manse" for
three paradisaical years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and
this sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose banks it
was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to his _Mosses from an
Old Manse_, 1846, and in the more personal and confidential records of
his _American Note Books_, posthumously published. Hawthorne was
thirty-eight when he took his place among the Concord literati. His
childhood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the old
and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, and partly at his
grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, in Maine, then on the edge of the
primitive forest. Maine did not become a State, indeed, until 1820,
the year before Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was
graduated in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and one
year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States.
After leaving college Hawthorne buried himself for years in the
seclusion of his home at Salem. His mother, who was early widowed, had
withdrawn entirely from the world. For months at a time Hawthorne kept
his room, seeing no other society than that of his mother and sisters,
reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most of which he
destroyed as soon as he had written them. At twilight he would emerge
from the house for a solitary ramble through the streets of the town o