When Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on our most patriotic holiday in 1804, his ancestral roots were already deeply planted in New England. Writing in The Scarlet Letter (1850) of his sentimental affection for the town of his birth, Hawthorne ascribed his feeling "to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil." Nearly two centuries after the appearance of his first ancestor "in the wild and forest-bordered settlement," where over time they "mingled their earthly substance with the soil," Hawthorne felt the New England earth itself "must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets," And, though he acknowledges that this affinity might seem to be merely the "sensuous sympathy of dust for dust," he also perceived a "moral quality" in the feeling engendered by "the figure of that first ancestor," which had been present in his imagination from boyhood and which, he wrote, "still haunts me and induces a sort of home feeling with the past."
It is this rich combination of love of his ancestral soil, a strong sense of the richness of the American past, and that "moral quality" which translates into a concern for the secrets of the human heart that gives Hawthorne's work its unique flavor.
