Grown in the same New England sod

And that sense of a remarkable coincidence and the subsequent intertwining is heightened and illuminated by the appearance of two masterful biographies, both of them warm and vivid in the portrayal of the two men and equally solid in placing them in the context of their times.

It is difficult to consider Philip McFarland's "Hawthorne in Concord" apart from Charles C. Calhoun's "Longfellow, " and had this reader thought about it, it would have been interesting to skip back and forth between the two.

At Bowdoin, the two were not close. Their paths only came together in 1837 when Hawthorne, apologizing for not having been "so well acquainted at college," sent Longfellow, by then professor of modern languages at Harvard, a copy of his newly published "Twice-Told Tales" -- which Longfellow praised in the North American Review.

And while Longfellow never visited Hawthorne in Concord, Hawthorne was several times a guest at Longfellow's home on Brattle Street in Cambridge. And they met frequently at Ticknor & Fields, their mutual publisher on Boston's Washington Street.

Calhoun and McFarland have followed separate tracks in crafting these biographies, with Calhoun giving more attention to Longfellow's literary career and writings than McFarland does to Hawthorne's.

Of "Evangeline," Calhoun writes that "recent scholarship on gender relations in nineteenth-century American culture has revealed [it] as a much more fruitful and complex achievement than it had seemed in the heyday of purely formalist criticism."

Of "Hiawatha," Calhoun notes that it is "still capable of exciting controversy," even for its failure to fully understand Native American oral literature "and its dismissal of the full extent of that people's tragedy."

But, he notes in its defense, in depicting the blessing of the cornfields, Longfellow "seems to have instinctively grasped what later anthropologists would record -- the prevalence across cultures of female fertility rites."