And did not Hawthorne write to his betrothed wife?--"Lights and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know not whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I inquire too closely into them. It is dangerous to look too minutely into such phenomena." What we may collect and set down of mere fact about his surroundings and his acts relates itself, therefore, mainly to his outwardly real existence, to the mere shell or mask of him, which was all that anybody could behold with the eyes; and as for the interior and ideal existence, it is not likely that we shall securely penetrate very far, where his own impartial and introverted gaze stopped short. It is but a rough method to infer with brusque self-confidence that we may judge from a few words here and there the whole of his thought and feeling. A fair enough notion may be formed as to the status of his post-collegiate life in Salem, from the data we have, but we can do no more than guess at its formative influence upon his genius. And I should be sorry to give an impression that because his courtship went on in the old house by the graveyard, of which he has written so soberly, there was any shadow of melancholy upon that initiatory period of a new happiness. His reflections concerning the spot had to do with his imaginative, or if one choose, his "supernatural," existence; what actually passed there had to do with the real and the personal, and with the life of the affections. We may be sure that the meeting of two such perfected spirits, so in harmony one with another, was attended with no qualified degree of joy. If it was calm and reticent, without rush of excitement or exuberant utterance, this was because movement at its acme becomes akin to rest. Let us leave his love in that sanctity which, in his own mind, it shared with his genius.
Picturesquely considered, however,--and the picturesque never goes very deep,--it is certainly interesting to observe that Hawthorne and his wife, both of Salem families, should have been born on opposite sides of the same street, within the sound of a voice; should have gone in separate directions, remaining unaware of each other's existence; and then should finally have met, when well beyond their first youth, in an old house on the borders of the ancient burial-ground in which the ancestors of both reposed, within hail of the spot where both had first seen the light.