Hawthorne came into my consciousness when I was a boy of ten at school near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse.  The big gambrel-roofed building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road.  All the world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant.  It is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest.  The ancient wainscoting, the ample low-studded rooms, the quaint fireplace, and at the rear toward the west the windows with their small panes on some of which Hawthorne made inscriptions.  “Every leaf and twig is outlined against the sky,” or words to that effect, “scratched with my wife’s diamond ring”; here the sunset pours in gorgeously but there is more of shadow than sunlight about the Old Manse, and that is befitting for a dwelling with associations somewhat sombre.  In later years Hawthorne occupied a house on the Lexington Road, new and modern, writing there some famous books in an upper study said to be accessible only through a trap-door, but the Old Manse was the appropriate home for him.  It was there that his young genius produced its earlier fruit and it deserves to be particularly cherished.  As a little child I went once with my father and mother to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, at the time when the community was most interesting.  The famous disciples of Fourier were then, I suppose, for the most part present, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, George Ripley, George William Curtis, Charles A. Dana and the rest, but I was too young to take note of them.  I recall only George Ripley, the head of the enterprise, in a rough working-blouse who welcomed us at the gate.  My father and he were old friends and as supper-time came and the community gathered singly and in groups in the dining-hall from the fields and groves outside, he said to my father:  “Your seat at the table will be next to Hawthorne, but I shall not introduce you, Mr. Hawthorne prefers not to be introduced to people.”  It was a cropping out of the strange aloofness for which Hawthorne was marked.  He could do his part in the day’s work, be a man among men, dicker with the importers at the Salem Custom House and as Consul at Liverpool, rub effectively with the traders, but his choice was always for solitude, he liked to go for days without speaking to a human being and to live withdrawn from the contacts of the world, even from his neighbours and family.  Probably it was because he was so thoroughly a recluse that I recall seeing Hawthorne only once, although he was in the village in whose streets I was constantly passing.  Driving one day on the road near his home a companion exclaimed, “There goes Mr. Hawthorne on the sidewalk!” I put my head forward quickly to get a glimpse from the cover of the carriage of so famous a personage, and at the roadside was a fine, tall, athletic person