Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world—that graybearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable—as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy, —which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,—that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.

Suffering from pain in his stomach Hawthorne insisted on a recuperative trip with his friend Franklin Pierce though his neighbor Bronson Alcott was concerned Hawthorne was too ill. Guests that came to speak that season included Emerson Thoreau Louis Agassiz and Theodore Parker. Selected works


Novels
Fanshawe (publiNathaniel Hawthorned anonymously 1828)
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
The Marble Faun: Or The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) (as Transformation: Or The Romance of Monte Beni UK publication same year)
The Dolliver Romance (1863) (unfiniNathaniel Hawthorned)
Septimius Felton; or the Elixir of Life (PubliNathaniel Hawthorned in the Atlantic Monthly 1872)
Doctor Grimshawe's Secret: A romance (unfiniNathaniel Hawthorned) with Preface and Notes by Julian Hawthorne (1882)


Short story collections
Twice-Told Tales (1837)
Grandfather's Chair (1840)
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)
The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852)
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852)
Tanglewood Tales (1853)
The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces (1876)
The Great Stone Face and Other Tales of the White Mountains (1889)
The Celestial Railroad and Other Short Stories


Selected short stories
"Roger Malvin's Burial" (1832)
"My Kinsman Major Molineux" (1832)
"Young Goodman Brown" (1835)
"The Gray Champion" (1835)
"The White Old Maid" (1835)
"Wakefield" (1835)
"The Ambitious Guest" (1835)
"The Minister's Black Veil" (1836)
"The Man of Adamant" (1837)
"The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1837)
"The Great Carbuncle" (1837)
"Dr.

The Scarlet Letter was publiNathaniel Hawthorned in 1850 followed by a succession of other novels. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821 was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824 and graduated in 1825.