This is an older work but may still have helpful points. Check out Fifty Years of Hawthorne, beginning on page 33 and A Pilgrim in Concord, beginning on page 59.
One comment the author makes is this:
“Hawthorne s academic connections are of
particular interest. It is wonderful that he
and Longfellow should have been classmates
at Bowdoin. Equally wonderful that Emer-
son’s “Nature” and Hawthorne’s “Mosses”
should have been written in the same little
room in the Old Manse at Concord. It gives
one a sense of how small New England was
then, and in how narrow a runway genius
went.”
There is also this:
“Emerson and Hawthorne were fellow
townsmen for some years at Concord, and
held each other in high regard. One was a
philosophical idealist : the other, an artist of
the ideal, who sometimes doubted whether
the tree on the bank, or its image in the
stream was the more real. But they took
no impress from one another s minds. Emer-
son could not read his neighbor s romances.
Their morbid absorption in the problem of
evil repelled the resolute optimist. He
thought the best thing Hawthorne ever wrote
was his “Recollections of a Gifted Woman,”
the chapter in “Our Old Home” concerning
Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the Baconian
theory of Shakespeare, whom Hawthorne be
friended with unfailing patience and courtesy
during his Liverpool consulship.
Hawthorne paid a fine tribute to Emer-
son in the introduction to “Mosses from an
Old Manse,” and even paid him the honor of
quotation, contrary to his almost invariable
practice. I cannot recall a half dozen quo
tations in all his works. I think he must
have been principled against them. But he
said he had come too late to Concord to fall
under Emerson s influence. No risk of that,
had he come earlier. There was a jealous
independence in Hawthorne which resented
the too close approach of an alien mind: a
species of perversity even, that set him in
contradiction to his environment. He
always fought shy of literary people. Dur
ing his Liverpool consulship, he did not
make apparently did not care to make
acquaintance with his intellectual equals.
He did not meet Carlyle, Dickens, Thack
eray, Tennyson, Mill, Grote, Charles Reade,
George Eliot, or any other first-class minds.
He barely met the Brownings, but did not
really come to know them till afterwards in
Italy. Surrounded by reformers, abolition
ists, vegetarians, comeouters and radicals of
all gospels, he remained stubbornly conserva
tive. He held office under three Democratic
administrations, and wrote a campaign life
of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when
he ran for President. Commenting on
Emerson’s sentence that John Brown had
made the gallows sacred like the cross, Haw-
thorne said that Brown was a blood-stained
fanatic and justly hanged.”
There is also this article on jstor and this one that discusses some of the differences between the two men. You might also see if this book
is in your school library.
That should give you a start.
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