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  His mother, who was early widowed, had withdrawn entirely from the world.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 or along the sea-side.  Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its associations.  It had been the scene of the witch trials in the seventeenth century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of retired whalers and India merchants.  Hawthorne’s father had been a ship captain, and many of his ancestors had followed the sea.  One of his forefathers, moreover, had been a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in 1691 had sentenced several of the witches to death.  The thought of this affected Hawthorne’s imagination with a pleasing horror, and he utilized it afterward in his House of the Seven Gables.  Many of the old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, with now and then the hint of some obscure crime or dark misfortune which haunted posterity with its curse till all the stock died out or fell into poverty and evil ways, as in the Pyncheon family of Hawthorne’s romance.  In the preface to the Marble Faun Hawthorne wrote:  “No author without a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight.”  And yet it may be doubted whether any environment could have been found more fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his native town, or any preparation better calculated to ripen the faculty that was in him than these long, lonely years of waiting and brooding thought.  From time to time he contributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S. G. Goodrich’s annual, the Token, or the Knickerbocker Magazine.  Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious; but they were anonymous and signed by various noms de plume, and their author was at this time—­to use his own words—­“the obscurest man of letters in America.”  In 1828 he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a short romance,