ho tried to solve a great problem
by leading the lives of Arcadian shepherds, at length dispersed,
each one going back to the world and working on as bravely as if the
experiment had been a great success. The experiences of Brook Farm
were shadowed forth in _The Blithedale Romance_, although it was not a
literal narrative.

Immediately after this Hawthorne was married and went to live in
Concord, near Boston, in a quaint old dwelling called The Manse. And
as all his work partakes of the personal flavor of his own life, so
his existence here is recorded in a delightful series of essays called
_Mosses from an Old Manse_. Here we have a description of the old
house itself, and of the author's family life, of the kitchen-garden
and apple-orchards, of the meadows and woods, and of his friendship
with that lover of nature, Henry Thoreau, whose writings form a
valuable contribution to American literature. The _Mosses from an Old
Manse_ must ever be famous as the history of the quiet hours of one of
the greatest American men of letters. They are full of Hawthorne's own
personality, and reveal more than any other of his books the depth and
purity of his poetic and rarely gifted nature.

In 1853 his old friend and schoolmate, President Pierce, appointed
Hawthorne American Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroad seven
years, spending the last four on the Continent, some transcriptions
of his experience being found in the celebrated _Marble Faun_ and
in several volumes of _Note-Books_. _The Marble Faun_, published in
Europe under the title _Transformation_, was written in Rome, and was
partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa which he occupied near
Florence. This old villa possessed a moss-covered tower, "haunted," as
Hawthorne said in a letter to a friend, "by owls and by the ghost of
a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century previous to
being burnt at the stake in the principal square in Florence." He also
states in the same letter that he meant to put the old castle bodily
in a romance that was then in his head, which he did by making the
villa the old family castle of Donatello, although the scene of the
story is laid in Rome.

After Hawthorne's return to America he began two other novels, one
founded upon the old legend of the elixir of life. This story was
probably suggested to him by Thoreau, who spoke of a house in which
Hawthorne once lived at Concord having been, a century or two before,
the abode o