Higginson and
F. B. Sanborn, two of the latest survivors of the ferment, loved to
emphasize in their talk and in their books; and it was shadowed also by
tragedy and the pathos of unfulfilled desires. But as one looks back at
it, in the perspective of three-quarters of a century, it seems chiefly
something touchingly fine. For all these men and women tried to hitch
their wagon to a star.

CHAPTER VII. ROMANCE, POETRY, AND HISTORY

Moving in and out of the Transcendentalist circles, in that
great generation preceding the Civil War, were a company of other
men--romancers, poets, essayists, historians--who shared in the
intellectual liberalism of the age, but who were more purely artists
in prose and verse than they were seekers after the unattainable.
Hawthorne, for example, sojourned at Concord and at Brook Farm with some
of the most extreme types of transcendental extravagance. The movement
interested him artistically and he utilized it in his romances, but
personally he maintained an attitude of cool detachment from it.
Longfellow was too much of an artist to lose his head over philosophical
abstractions; Whittier, at his best, had a too genuine poetic instinct
for the concrete; and Lowell and Holmes had the saving gift of humor.
Cultivated Boston gentlemen like Prescott, Motley, and Parkman preferred
to keep their feet on the solid earth and write admirable histories. So
the mellow years went by. Most of the widely-read American books were
being produced within twenty miles of the Boston State House. The
slavery issue kept growling, far away, but it was only now and then,
as in the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that it was
brought sharply home to the North. The "golden forties" were as truly
golden for New England as for idle California. There was wealth,
leisure, books, a glow of harvest-time in the air, though the spirit of
the writers is the spirit of youth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, our greatest writer of pure romance, was Puritan by
inheritance and temperament, though not in doctrine or in sympathy. His
literary affiliations were with the English and German Romanticists,
and he possessed, for professional use, the ideas and vocabulary of his
transcendental friends. Born in Salem in 1804, he was descended from
Judge Hawthorne of Salem Witchcraft fame, and from a long line of
sea-faring ancestors. He inherited a morbid solitariness, redeemed in
some measure by a physical endowment of rare streng