After writing The Blithedale Romance, in which he embodied his experiences at Brook Farm, and his Italian romance, Transformation, or The Marble Faun, Hawthorne, when his health was failing, strove to find expression for the theme of immortality, which had always exercised a strange fascination upon him.  In August, 1855, during his consulate in Liverpool, he visited Smithell’s Hall, near Bolton, and heard the legend of the Bloody Footstep.  He thought of uniting this story with that of the elixir of life, but ultimately decided to treat the story of the footstep in Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret, of which only a fragment was written, and to embody the elixir idea in a separate work, Septimius Felton, of which two unfinished versions exist.  Septimius Felton, a young man living in Concord at the time of the war of the Revolution, tries to brew the potion of eternity by adding to a recipe, which his aunt has derived from the Indians, the flowers which spring from the grave of a man whom he has slain.  In Dr. Dolliver’s Romance, Hawthorne, so far as we may judge from the fragment which remains, seems to be working out an idea jotted down in his notebook several years earlier: 

“A man arriving at the extreme point of old age grows young again at the same pace at which he had grown old, returning upon his path throughout the whole of life, and thus taking the reverse view of matters.  Methinks it would give rise to some odd concatenations.”

The story, which opens with a charming description of Dr. Dolliver and his great-grandchild, Pansie, breaks off so abruptly that it is impossible to forecast the “odd concatenations” that had flashed through Hawthorne’s mind.

Although Hawthorne is preoccupied continually with the thought of death, his outlook is melancholy, not morbid.  He recoils fastidiously from the fleshly and loses himself in the spiritual.  He is concerned with mournful reflections, not frightful events.  It is the mystery of death, not its terror, that fascinates him.  Sensitive and susceptible himself, he never startles us with physical horrors.  He does not search with curious ingenuity for recondite terrors.  He was compelled as if by some wizard’s strange power, to linger in earth’s shadowed places; but the scenes that throng his memory are reflected in quiet, subdued tones.  His pictures are never marred by harsh lines or crude colours.

While Hawthorne in his Twice-Told Tales was toying pensively with spectral forms and “dark ideas,” Edgar Allan Poe was penetrating intrepidly into trackless regions of terror.  Where Hawthorne would have shrunk back, repelled and disgusted, Poe, wildly exhilarated by the anticipation of a new and excruciating thrill, forced his way onwards.  He sought untiringly for unusual situations, inordinately gloomy or terrible, and made them the starting point for excursions into abnormal psychology.  Just as Hawthorne harps with plaintive insistence on the