Boy" in the "Token." Hawthorne assented to the publication of any of the tales, and in May, 1831, Mr. Goodrich published four of them. Although these tales and sketches, in the "Token" and elsewhere, were received without general acclamation, there were some sagacious readers who perceived the rare and subtle genius of the author, and among these were three accomplished young women of Salem, Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody and her sisters, who heard, to their surprise and pleasure, that the writer was the son of their neighbor, the widow Hathorne. The acquaintance of the families followed, and the second sister, Sophia, a woman of singular accomplishment, of the most poetic nature and charming character, afterward became Mrs. Hawthorne.
Meanwhile, in 1836, Mr. Goodrich, who evidently recognized the promise of the young author, engaged him at a salary of $500, of which he received but little, to edit the "American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge," a work that belonged to the Bewick publishing company, of which Goodrich was manager. Hawthorne also compiled for the company a "Universal History," from which sprang the famous works of Peter Parley, and for which he received $100. His gains were very small, although his modest and abundant labors were gradually winning appreciation. In 1835 the notices in the London "Athenaeum" of his tales published in the "Token" were so encouraging that he began to think of issuing them in a volume. His faithful friend Bridge warmly urged the publication, and assumed the pecuniary risk, and early in 1837 the first series of "Twice-told Tales " was published by the American stationers' company in Boston. Hawthorne sent a copy to Longfellow, whose "Outre Mer " had charmed him, regretting that they had not been more intimate in college, and Longfellow reviewed the book with enthusiasm in the "North American Review." Hawthorne afterward suggested to Longfellow the story of "Evangeline," and greeted the poem as the best of the poet's works. Longfellow was very sensible of Hawthorne's generosity, and the warm friendship of the two authors and neighbors was never disturbed. Six or seven hundred copies of "Twice-told Tales" were sold, and the book was favorably noticed, though the quality of the author's genius was not perceived. It was generally treated as a mere pleasant talent. But those tales reveal a power of imagination, a spiritual insight and knowledge of the obscurer motives of human nature, and they are told with a felicity and repose of manner that have not been surpassed in our literature. They have often, indeed, a sombre tone, a fateful sense of gloom, which is half weird, sometimes almost uncanny, but of which the fascination is irresistible. Their publication marked a distinct epoch in American literature. In 1837 Hawthorne visited his friend Bridge in Maine, and in 1838 he began to write for the "Democratic Review," which was edited by John L. O'Sullivan. He was now engaged to Miss Peabody, and began to think of a provision for marriage, and in January, 1839, George Bancroft, the historian, who was collector of customs at Boston, appointed him a weigher and ganger, with a salary of $1,200. Two years later, when the Whigs came in, he was dismissed from his place. His literary work was suspended during his official term, and he is generally supposed to have been weary of its routine. But he said that he enjoyed the society of sailors, who knew him and treated him only as a government officer, and not as an author. It released him from self-consciousness. In 1841 the first part of "Grandfather's Chair" was published in Boston and New York. It is a series of admirable sketches for children of New England history which always pleased his imagination. In April of this year, also, he joined the company of Boston scholars and educated men and women who began at Brook Farm, an estate of two hundred acres in West Roxbury, the experiment of an Arcadia, in which every member should do his share of the necessary manual labor and so secure to all the desirable mental leisure. But with the " transcendental movement" from which the enterprise sprang Hawthorne had little sympathy, and he was really out of the current of characteristic life at the farm. The association was one of the expressions of the remarkable intellectual and moral renaissance of that period in New England of which Ralph Waldo Emerson is the most striking representative, and which has deeply influenced the national life. But to Hawthorne, as his "American Note-Book" shows, the sylvan poem was very prosaic. "I went to live in Arcady," he said to a friend, "and found myself up to the chin in a barn-yard." There was indeed no stouter manual worker than he. He toiled sometimes for sixteen hours a day, and he invested $1,000, his savings from the custom-house, in the enterprise at Brook Farm, hoping to be married and to find a home there. His modesty and sincerity, and an indefinable manliness of nature, fascinated his associates. But the very genius of the place was social, and he always carried solitude with him. Like his "Miles Coverdale," he was a spectator, not a participant. Indeed, in all places and under all circumstances his native propensity toward fairyland was so strong that actual life seemed to be spectral to him. Naturally, Brook Farm was essentially uncongenial, yet his " Blithedale Romance " is the only permanent memorial in any form of art of that romantic, earnest, and humane endeavor for a higher form of human society.
Hawthorne was married in July, 1842, and went immediately to the old manse in Concord, Mass., on Concord river and close by the site of the old bridge, of which Emerson's lines, engraved upon the monument, tell the story:
"Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world."
The old manse is one of the most historic houses in the country. It is a gambrel-roofed structure of wood, erected in 1765. From the window of the little study at the back of the house, on the second floor, the Rev. William Emerson had seen the Revolutionary battle of which his narrative is the earliest and most authentic. In the same room his grandson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote "Nature," and Hawthorne many of the tales that were first published in the " Democratic Review," and were then collected in the " Mosses from an Old Manse." In this home Hawthorne devoted himself wholly to literature and happiness. " For, now being happy," he says in the delightful introduction to the "Mosses," "I felt as if there were no question to be put." The contrast with his late life, either in the custom-house or at Brook Farm, was refreshing to him. The manse was separated from the country road by a straight avenue of black ash-trees, and as he entered it with his bride, "the wheel-track leading to the door, as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass," as befitted the path to Hawthorne's door. He resumed his old solitary habits, and was seen by his neighbors only upon his daily walks to the village post-office, about a mile away.
