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A Study of Hawthorne

by George Parsons Lathrop · English · Gutenberg #8530 · 633,545 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Study of Hawthorne

Author: George Parsons Lathrop


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8530]
                Most recently updated: November 6, 2012

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Eric Eldred, Tonya Allen, Charles Franks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Tonya Allen, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team











A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE

BY

GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP.

[Illustration]







CONTENTS.

   I. POINT OF VIEW

  II. SALEM

 III. BOYHOOD.--COLLEGE DAYS.--FANSHAWE

  IV. TWILIGHT OF THE TWICE-TOLD TALES

   V. AT BOSTON AND BROOK FARM

  VI. THE OLD MANSE

 VII. THE SCARLET LETTER.

VIII. LENOX AND CONCORD: PRODUCTIVE PERIOD

  IX. ENGLAND AND ITALY

   X. THE LAST ROMANCE

  XI. PERSONALITY

 XII. POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE

XIII. THE Loss AND THE GAIN

APPENDIX I.

APPENDIX II.

APPENDIX III.

INDEX




A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE.




I.


POINT OF VIEW.

This book was not designed as a biography, but is rather a portrait.
And, to speak more carefully still, it is not so much this, as my
conception of what a portrait of Hawthorne should be. For I cannot write
with the authority of one who had known him and had been formally
intrusted with the task of describing his life. On the other hand, I do
not enter upon this attempt as a mere literary performance, but have
been assisted in it by an inward impulse, a consciousness of sympathy
with the subject, which I may perhaps consider a sort of inspiration. My
guide has been intuition, confirmed and seldom confuted by research.
Perhaps it is even a favoring fact that I should never have seen Mr.
Hawthorne; a personality so elusive as his may possibly yield its traits
more readily to one who can never obtrude actual intercourse between
himself and the mind he is meditating upon. An honest report upon
personal contact always has a value denied to the reviews of
after-comers, yet the best criticism and biography is not always that of
contemporaries.

Our first studies will have a biographical scope, because a certain
grouping of facts is essential, to give point to the view which I am
endeavoring to present; and as Hawthorne's early life has hitherto been
but little explored, much of the material used in the earlier chapters
is now for the first time made public. The latter portion of the career
may be treated more sketchily, being already better known; though
passages will be found throughout the essay which have been developed
with some fulness, in order to maintain a correct atmosphere,
compensating any errors which mere opinions might lead to. Special
emphasis, then, must not be held to show neglect of points which my
space and scope prevent my commenting on. But the first outline
requiring our attention involves a distant retrospect.

The history of Hawthorne's genius is in some sense a summary of all New
England history.

From amid a simple, practical, energetic community, remarkable for its
activity in affairs of state and religion, but by no means given to
dreaming, this fair flower of American genius rose up unexpectedly
enough, breaking the cold New England sod for the emission of a light
and fragrance as pure and pensive as that of the arbutus in our woods,
in spring. The flower, however, sprang from seed that rooted in the old
colonial life of the sternly imaginative pilgrims and Puritans.
Thrusting itself up into view through the drift of a later day, it must
not be confounded with other growths nourished only by that more recent
deposit; though the surface-drift had of course its own weighty
influence in the nourishment of it. The artistic results of a period of
action must sometimes be looked for at a point of time long subsequent,
and this was especially sure to be so in the first phases of New England
civilization. The settlers in this region, in addition to the burdens
and obstacles proper to pioneers, had to deal with the cares of forming
a model state and of laying out for posterity a straight and solid path
in which it might walk with due rectitude. All this was in itself an
ample enough subject to occupy their powerful imaginations. They were
enacting a kind of sacred epic, the dangers and the dignity and
exaltation of which they felt most fervently. The Bible, the Bay Psalm
Book, Bunyan, and Milton, the poems of George Wither, Baxter's Saint's
Rest, and some controversial pamphlets, would suffice to appease
whatever yearnings the immense experiment of their lives failed to
satisfy. Gradually, of course, the native press and new-comers from
England multiplied books in a community which held letters in unusual
reverence. But the continuous work of subduing a new country, the
dependence upon the mother-land for general literature, and finally the
excitements of the Revolutionary period, deferred the opportunity for
any aesthetic expression of the forces that had been at work here ever
since Winthrop stepped from the Arbella on to the shore of the New
World, with noble manliness and sturdy statesmanship enough in him to
uphold the whole future of a great people. When Hawthorne came,
therefore, his utterance was a culmination of the two preceding
centuries. An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which we
owe the high qualities of New England,--a nature which is often so
easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,--this side,
long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found
expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various
elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's genius
revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England character had
piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion and prudence
imposed; and so complete was its suppression, that all this part of
Puritan nature missed recording itself, except by chance glimpses
through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has
been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through
Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration
of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he
himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the
interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's
breasts and set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person
and his own blood the same elements, the same capabilities still
existed, however modified or differently ordered. The records of
Massachusetts Bay are full of suggestive incongruities between the
ideal, single-souled life which its founders hoped to lead, and the
jealousies, the opposing opinions, or the intervolved passions of
individuals and of parties, which sometimes unwittingly cloaked
themselves in religious tenets. Placing himself in the position of these
beings, then, and conscious of all the strong and various potencies of
emotion which his own nature, inherited from them, held in curb, it was
natural that Hawthorne should give weight to this contrast between the
intense, prisoned life of shut sensibilities and the formal outward
appearance to which it was moulded. This, indeed, is the source of
motive in much of his writing; notably so in "The Scarlet Letter." It is
thus that his figures get their tremendous and often terrible relief.
They are seen as close as we see our faces in a glass, and brought so
intimately into our consciousness that the throbbing of their passions
sounds like the mysterious, internal beating of our own hearts in our
own ears. And even when he is not dealing directly with themes or
situations closely related to that life, there may be felt in his style,
I think,--particularly in that of the "Twice-Told Tales,"--a union of
vigorous freedom, and graceful, shy restraint, a mingling of guardedness
which verges on severity with a quick and delicately thrilled
sensibility for all that is rich and beautiful and generous, which is
his by right of inheritance from the race of Non-conformist colonizers.
How subtile and various this sympathy is, between himself and the past
of his people, we shall see more clearly as we go on.

Salem was, in fact, Hawthorne's native soil, in all senses; as
intimately and perfectly so as Florence was the only soil in which Dante
and Michael Angelo could have had their growth. It is endlessly
suggestive, this way that historic cities have of expressing themselves
for all time in the persons of one or two men. Silently and with
mysterious precision, the genius comes to birth and ripens--sometimes
despite all sorts of discouragement--into a full bloom which we afterward
see could not have reached its maturity at any other time, and would
surely have missed its most peculiar and cherished qualities if reared
in any other place. The Ionian intellect of Athens culminates in Plato;
Florence runs into the mould of Dante's verse, like fluid bronze; Paris
secures remembrance of her wide curiosity in Voltaire's settled
expression; and Samuel Johnson holds fast for us that London of the
eighteenth century which has passed out of sight, in giving place to the
capital of the Anglo-Saxon race today. In like manner the sober little
New England town which has played a so much more obscure, though in its
way hardly less significant part, sits quietly enshrined and preserved
in Hawthorne's singularly imperishable prose.

Of course, Salem is not to be compared with Florence otherwise than
remotely or partially. Florence was naturally the City of Flowers, in a
figurative sense as well as in the common meaning. Its splendid,
various, and full-pulsed life found spontaneous issue in magnificent
works of art, in architecture, painting, poetry, and sculpture,--things
in which New England was quite sterile. Salem evolved the artistic
spirit indirectly, and embodied itself in Hawthorne by the force of
contrast: the weariness of unadorned life which must have oppressed many
a silent soul before him at last gathered force for a revolt in his
person, and the very dearth which had previously reigned was made to
contribute to the beauty of his achievement. The unique and delicate
perfume of surprise with which his genius issued from its crevice still
haunts his romances. A quality of homeliness dwells in their very
strangeness and rarity which endears them to us unspeakably, and
captivates the foreign sense as well; so that one of Hawthorne's chief
and most enduring charms is in a measure due to that very barrenness of
his native earth which would at first seem to offer only denial to his
development. It is in this direction that we catch sight of the analogy
between his intellectual unfolding and that of the great Florentines. It
consists in his drawing up into himself the nourishment furnished by the
ground upon which he was born, and making the more and the less
productive elements reach a climax of characteristic beauty. One marked
difference, however, is that there was no abundant and inspiriting
municipal life of his own time which could enter into his genius: it was
the consciousness of the past of the place that affected him. He himself
has expressed as much: "This old town of Salem--my native place, though
I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer
years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of
which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence
here.... And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within
me a feeling for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be
content to call affection.... But the sentiment has likewise its moral
quality. The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition
with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as
far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a kind of
home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the
present phase of the town."

It is by briefly reviewing that past, then trying to reproduce in
imagination the immediate atmosphere of Hawthorne's youth, and comparing
the two, that we shall best arrive at the completion of our proposed
portrait. We have first to study the dim perspective and the suggestive
coloring of that historic background from which the author emerges, and
then to define clearly his own individual traits as they appear in his
published works and Note-Books.

The eagerness which admirers of such a genius show, to learn all
permissible details of his personal history, is, when freed from the
vulgar and imbecile curiosity which often mars it, a sort of homage that
it is right to satisfy. It is a respect apt to be paid only to men whose
winning personal qualities have reached through their writing, and
touched a number of grateful and appreciative hearts. But two objections
may be urged against giving such details here: one is, that Hawthorne
especially disapproved the writing of a Life of himself; the other, that
the history of Salem and the works of Hawthorne are easily accessible to
any one, without intervention.

Of the first it may frankly be said, indeed, that Hawthorne alone could
have adequately portrayed his life for us; though in the same breath it
should be added that the idea of his undertaking to do it is almost
preposterous. To such a spirit as his, the plan would have had an
exquisite absurdity about it, that might even have savored of
imposition. The mass of trivial details essential to the accurate and
consecutive account of an entire life could never have gained his
serious attention: his modesty would have made as little of them as of
boyish slate-scribblings, full of significance, fun, and character to
observers, but subjected to the sponge without a pang by their producer.
There is something natural and fine in this. I confess that to me the
spectacle presented by Goethe when dwelling on the minutest incidents of
his childhood with senile vanity and persistence, and fashioning with
avaricious care the silver shrine and crystal case in which--like a very
different sort of Saint Charles Borromeo--he hopes to have the reverent
ages view him, is one which increases my sense of his defective though
splendid personality. And yet I cannot suppress the opposite feeling,
that the man of note who lets his riches of reminiscence be buried with
him inflicts a loss on the world which it is hard to take resignedly. In
the Note-Books of Hawthorne this want is to a large extent made good.
His shrinking sensitiveness in regard to the embalming process of
biography is in these somewhat abated, so that they have been of
incalculable use in assisting the popular eye to see him as he really
was. Other material for illustration of his daily life is somewhat
meagre; and yet, on one account, this is perhaps a cause for rejoicing.
There is a halo about every man of large poetic genius which it is
difficult for the world to wholly miss seeing, while he is alive.
Afterward, when the biographer comes, we find the actual dimensions, the
physical outline, more insisted upon. That is the biographer's business;
and it is not altogether his fault, though partly so, that the public
regard is thus turned away from the peculiar but impalpable sign that
floats above the poet's actual stature. But, under this subtile
influence, forgetting that old, luminous hallucination (if it be one),
we suddenly feel the want of it, are dissatisfied; and, not perceiving
that the cause lies largely with us, we fall to detracting from the
subject. Thus it is fortunate that we have no regular biography of
Shakespere authoritative enough to fade our own private conceptions of
him; and it is not an unmixed ill that some degree of similar mystery
should soften and give tone to the life of Hawthorne. Not that Hawthorne
could ever be seriously disadvantaged by a complete record; for behind
the greatness of the writer, in this case, there stands a person eminent
for strength and loveliness as few men are eminent in their private
lives. But it is with dead authors somewhat as it proved with those
Etruscan warriors, who, seen through an eyehole lying in perfect state
within their tombs, crumbled to a powder when the sepulchres were
opened. The contact of life and death is too unsympathetic. Whatever
stuff the writer be made of, it seems inevitable that he should suffer
injury from exposure to the busy and prying light of subsequent life,
after his so deep repose in death.

"Would you have me a damned author?" exclaims Oberon, in "The Devil in
Manuscript," [Footnote: See the Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.]
"to undergo sneers, taunts, abuse, and cold neglect, and faint praise
bestowed against the giver's conscience!... An outlaw from the
protection of the grave,--one whose ashes every careless foot might
spurn, unhonored in life, and remembered scornfully in death!" This, to
be sure, is a heated statement, in the mouth of a young author who is
about to cast his unpublished works into the fire; but the dread
expressed here is by no means unfounded. Even the publication of
Hawthorne's Note-Books has put it in the power of various writers of the
day to assume an omniscience not altogether just, and far from
acceptable. Why, then, should further risk of this be incurred, by
issuing the present work?

It is precisely to put a limit to misconstructions, as well as to
meet--however imperfectly--the desire of genuine appreciators, that it
has been written. If this study for a portrait fulfils its aim, it will
at least furnish an outline, fix a definite shape, within which whatever
is observed by others may find its place with a truer effect and more
fitting relation. The mistakes that have been made, indeed, are in no
wise alarming ones; and it would be difficult to find any author who has
been more carefully considered, on the whole, or with such generally
fair conclusions, as Hawthorne. Still, if one sees even minor
distortions current, it can do no harm to correct them. Besides, there
has as yet been no thorough attempt at a consistent synthetic
portraiture; and the differences of different critics' estimates need
some common ground to meet and be harmonized upon. If this can be
supplied, there will be less waste of time in future studies of the same
subject.

It will be seen, therefore, that my book makes no pretension to the
character of a Life. The wish of Hawthorne on this point would alone be
enough, to prevent that. If such a work is to be undertaken, it should
be by another hand, in which the right to set aside this wish is much
more certainly vested than in mine. But I have thought that an earnest
sympathy with the subject might sanction the present essay. Sympathy,
after all, is the talisman which may preserve even the formal biographer
from giving that injury to his theme just spoken of. And if the insight
which guides me has any worth, it will present whatever material has
already been made public with a selection and shaping which all
researchers might not have time to bestow.

Still, I am quite alive to the difficulties of my task; and I am
conscious that the work may to some appear supererogatory. Stricture and
praise are, it will perhaps be said, equally impertinent to a fame so
well established. Neither have I any rash hope of adding a single ray to
the light of Hawthorne's high standing. But I do not fear the charge of
presumption. Time, if not the present reader, will supply the right
perspective and proportion.

On the ground of critical duty there is surely defence enough for such
an attempt as the one now offered; the relative rank of Hawthorne, and
other distinctions touching him, seem to call for a fuller discussion
than has been given them. I hope to prove, however, that my aim is in no
wise a partisan one. Criticism is appreciative estimation. It is
inevitable that the judgments of competent and cultivated persons should
flatly contradict each other, as well as those of incompetent persons;
and this whether they are coeval or of different dates. At the last, it
is in many respects matter of simple individual impression; and there
will always be persons of high intelligence whom it will be impossible
to make coincide with us entirely, touching even a single author. So
that the best we can do is to set about giving rational explanation of
our diverse admirations. Others will explain theirs; and in this way,
everything good having a fit showing, taste finds it easier to become
catholic.

Whoever reverences something has a meaning. Shall he not record it? But
there are two ways in which he may express himself,--through speech and
through silence,--both of them sacred alike. Which of these we will use
on any given occasion is a question much too subtle, too surely fraught
with intuitions that cannot be formulated, to admit of arbitrary
prescription. In preferring, here, the form of speech, I feel that I
have adopted only another kind of silence.

[Illustration]




II.


SALEM.

Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand
Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once
transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different
kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers,
that an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a
man who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he
died,--little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years
before, which places his boyhood and early youth in the first quarter of
the century. The lapse since then has been a long one in its effects;
almost portentously so. The alterations in manners, relations,
opportunities, have been great. Restless and rapid in their action,
these changes have multiplied the mystery of distance a hundred-fold
between us and that earlier time; so that there is really a considerable
space to be traversed before we can stand in thought where Hawthorne
then stood in fact. Goldsmith says, in that passage of the Life of
Parnell which Irving so aptly quotes in his biography of the writer: "A
poet while living is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much
attention.... When his fame is increased by time, it is then too late to
investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of morning
are past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian
splendor." The bustle of American life certainly does away with "the
dews of morning" very promptly; and it is not quite a simple matter to
reproduce the first growth of a life which began almost with the
century. But there are resources for doing so. To begin with, we shall
view Salem as it is. Vigorous and thriving still, the place has
fortunately not drifted so far from its moorings of seventy years since
as to take us out of our bearings, in considering its present aspect.
Pace its quiet, thoroughfares awhile, and you will find them leading
softly and easily into the past.

You arrive in the ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place
wears a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem
impressively venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the
streets, people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due
understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote
themselves to falling into effective groups posed in vistas of historic
events. Is antiquity, then, afraid to assert itself, even here in this
stronghold, so far as to appear upon the street? No. But one must
approach these old towns with reverence, to get at their secrets. They
will not yield inspiration or meaning save to an imaginative effort.
Under the influence of that, the faded past, traced in sympathetic ink,
as it were, revives and starts into distinctness. Passing down Essex
Street, or striking off from its modest bustle a little way, we come
upon shy, ungainly relics of other times. Gray gambrel-roofed houses
stand out here and there, with thick-throated chimneys that seem to hold
the whole together. Again you pass buildings of a statelier cast, with
carved pilasters on the front and arched doorways bordered with some
simple, dainty line of carving; old plaster-covered urns, perhaps, stand
on the brick garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that
hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint
gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron
gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and always
with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass that keeps
rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret of growth
caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have the right
magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient pumps
like to the Town Pump from which Hawthorne drew that clear and sparkling
little stream of revery and picture which has flowed into so many and
such distant nooks, though the pump itself has now disappeared, having
been directly in the line of the railroad. But, best of all, by
ascending Witch Hill you may get a good historic outlook over the past
and the present of the place. Looking down from here you behold the
ancient city spread before you, rich in chimneys and overshadowed by
soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts itself like a huge
gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating in a square top or
a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its look, rising
slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating pauses, to reach
a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is lighted at
intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, and wears a probable
aspect of being the one which the young dreamer would have chosen for
the standpoint of his "Sights from a Steeple"; and the two kinds of
spire seem to typify well the Puritan gloom and the Puritan aspiration
that alike found expression on this soil. Off beyond the gray and
sober-tinted town is the sea, which in this perspective seems to rise
above it and to dominate the place with its dim, half-threatening blue;
as indeed it has always ruled its destinies in great measure, bringing
first the persecuted hither and then inviting so many successive
generations forth to warlike expedition, or Revolutionary privateering
or distant commercial enterprise. With the sea, too, Hawthorne's name
again is connected, as we shall presently notice. Then, quitting the
brimming blue, our eyes return over the "flat, unvaried surface covered
chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to
architectural beauty," with its "irregularity which is neither
picturesque nor quaint, but only tame"; and retracing the line upon
which Hawthorne has crowded the whole history of Salem, in "Main
Street," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] we
fall to pondering upon the deeds that gave this hill its name. At its
foot a number of tanneries and mills are grouped, from which there are
exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that once
overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind it the
land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest
period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete
as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs
from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine trees that grow
upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars for a world
full of witches. But here on the hill there is no special suggestion of
the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history. An obliging
Irish population has relieved the descendants of both the witches and
their exterminators from an awkward task, by covering with their own
barren little dwellings the three sides of the height facing the town.
Still, they have not ventured beyond a certain line. One small area at
the summit is wholly unencroached upon. Whether or not through fear of
some evil influence resting upon the spot, no house as yet disturbs this
space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory
sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to
commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here
endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful
vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from
this, upon the bleak boundary-hills of the inland horizon and that
hopeless semicircle of the sea on the other side. A terrible and fitting
place for execution, indeed! It looms up visible for many miles of lower
country around; and as you stand upon the top, earth seems to fall away
with such a fatal ease around it!

The stranger is naturally drawn hence to the Court House, where, by
calling a clerk from his routine in a room fairly lined and stuccoed
with bundles of legal papers, he may get a glimpse of the famous
"witch-pins." These are the identical little instruments which the
afflicted children drew from different parts of their dress, in the
trial-room, declaring that some one of the accused had just caused them
to be sharply inserted into their persons. The pins are kept in a small
glass bottle, and are thin and rudely made; and as one looks at the
curious, homely little relics, it is hard to know whether to laugh at
the absurdly insignificant sight, or shudder at the thought of what
deadly harm they worked in the hands of the bewitched. So, while one is
hesitating, one gives the bottle back to the clerk, who locks it up
speedily, and at the next instant is absorbed in the drawing up of some
document; leaving the intruder free to pursue his search for antiquities
elsewhere. But the monuments and remains of the past are nowhere large
enough, in our American towns, to furnish the pilgrim a complete shelter
and make an atmosphere of their own. The old Curwin Mansion, or "Witch
House," to be sure, with its jutting upper story, and its dark and grimy
room where witch-trials are rumored to have been held, is a solid scrap
of antique gloom; but an ephemeral druggist's shop has been fastened on
to a corner of the old building, and clings there like a wasp's
nest,--as subversive, too, of quiet contemplation. The descendants of
the first settlers have with pious care preserved the remains of the
First Church of Salem, and the plain little temple may still be seen,
though hidden away in the rear of the solid, brick-built Essex
Institute. Yet, after all, it is only the skeleton of the thing, the
original framework set into a modern covering for protection,--the whole
church being about as large as a small drawing-room only. Into this
little space a few dumb and shrinking witnesses of the past have been
huddled: the old communion-table, two ancient harpsichords, a single
pew-door, a wooden samp-mortar, and a huge, half-ruinous loom; and some
engraved portraits of ancient ministers hang upon the walls. When I
visited the place, a party of young men and women were there, who
hopelessly scattered any slight dust of revery that might have settled
on me from the ancient beams, and sent the ghosts fleeing before their
light laughter. The young women fingered the old harpsichords, and
incontinently thrummed upon them; and one cried, "Play a waltz!" She was
a pretty creature; and, as her gay tone mingled with the rattle of
protesting strings in the worn-out instrument, one might easily have
divined how dire a fate would have been hers, in the days when men not
only believed in bewitchment, but made it punishable. Then a young man
who had clung for guidance amid her spells to the little printed
pamphlet that describes the church, read aloud from its pages,
seriously: "'Nowhere else in this land may one find so ancient and
worshipful a shrine. Within these walls, silent with the remembered
presence of Endicott, Skelton, Higginson, Roger Williams, and their
grave compeers, the very day seems haunted, and the sunshine falls but
soberly in.'"

"O don't!" besought the siren, again. "We're not in a solemn state."

And, whether it was the spell of her voice or not, I confess the
sunshine did not seem to me either haunted or sober.

Thus, all through Salem, you encounter a perverse fate which will not
let you be alone with the elusive spirit of the past. Yet, on
reflection, why should it? This perverse fate is simply the life of
to-day, which has certainly an equal right to the soil with that of our
dreams and memories. And before long the conflict of past and present
thus occasioned leads to a discovery.

In the first place, it transpires that the atmosphere is more favorable
than at first appears for backward-reaching revery. The town holds its
history in reverence, and a good many slight traces of antiquity, with
the quiet respect maintained for them in the minds of the inhabitants,
finally make a strong cumulative attack on the imagination. The very
meagreness and minuteness of the physical witnesses to a former
condition of things cease to discourage, and actually become an
incitement more effective than bulkier relics might impart. The delicacy
of suggestion lends a zest to your dream; and the sober streets open out
before you into vistas of austere reminiscence. The first night that I
passed in Salem, I heard a church-bell ringing loudly, and asked what it
was. It was the nine-o'clock bell; and it had been appointed to ring
thus every night, a hundred years ago or more. How it reverberated
through my mind, till every brain-cell seemed like the empty chamber of
a vanished year! Then, in the room where I slept, there was rich and
ponderous furniture of the fashion of eld; the bed was draped and
canopied with hangings that seemed full of spells and dreamery; and
there was a mirror, tall, and swung between stately mahogany posts
spreading their feet out on the floor, which recalled that fancy of
Hawthorne's, in the tale of "Old Esther Dudley," [Footnote: See also
American Note-Books, Vol. I.; and the first chapter of The House of the
Seven Gables.] about perished dames and grandees made to sweep in
procession through "the inner world" of a glass. Such small matters as
these engage the fancy, and lead it back through a systematic review of
local history with unlooked-for nimbleness. Gradually the mind gets to
roving among scenes imaged as if by memory, and bearing some strangely
intimate relation to the actual scenes before one. The drift of clouds,
the sifting of sudden light from the sky, acquire the import of historic
changes of adversity and prosperity. The spires of Salem, seen one day
through a semi-shrouding rain, appeared to loom up through the mist of
centuries; and the real antiquity of sunlight shone out upon me, at
other times, with cunning quietude, from the weather-worn wood of old,
unpainted houses. Every hour was full of yesterdays. Something of
primitive strangeness and adventure seemed to settle into my mood, and
the air teemed with anticipation of a startling event; as if the deeds
of the past were continually on the eve of returning. With all this,
too, a certain gray shadow of unreality stole over everything.

Then one becomes aware that this frame of mind, produced by actual
contact with Salem, is subtly akin to the mood from which so many of
Hawthorne's visions were projected. A flickering semblance, perhaps, of
what to him must have been a constant though subdued and dreamy flame
summoning him to potent incantation over the abyss of time; but from
this it was easy to conceive it deepened and intensified in him a
hundred-fold. Moreover, in his youth and growing-time, the influence
itself was stronger, the suggestive aspect of the town more salient. If
you read even now, on the ground itself, the story of the settlement and
the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate
suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts
of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly
from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the
founders themselves.

John White, the English Puritan divine, who, with the "Dorchester
Adventurers," established the first colony at Cape Ann, was moved to
this by the wish to establish in Massachusetts Bay a resting-place for
the fishermen who came over from Dorchester in England, so that they
might be kept under religious influences. This was the origin of Salem;
for the emigrants moved, three years later, to this spot, then called
Naumkeag. In the Indian name they afterward found a proof, as they
supposed, that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it
"proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by
interpretation, the bosom of consolation." Later, they named it Salem,
"for the peace," as Cotton Mather says, "which they had and hoped in
it"; and when Hugh Peters on one occasion preached at Great Pond, now
Wenham, he took as his text, "At Enon, near to Salim, because there was
much water there." This playing with names is a mere surface indication
of the ever-present scriptural analogy which these men were constantly
tracing in all their acts. Cut off by their intellectual asceticism from
any exertion of the imagination in literature, and denying themselves
all that side of life which at once develops and rhythmically restrains
the sense of earthly beauty, they compensated themselves by running
parallels between their own mission and that of the apostles,--a
likeness which was interchangeable at pleasure with the fancied
resemblance of their condition to that of the Israelites. When one
considers the remoteness of the field from their native shores, the
enormous energy needful to collect the proper elements for a population,
and to provide artificers with the means of work; the almost impassable
wildness of the woods; the repeated leagues of hostile Indians; the
depletions by sickness; and the internal dissensions with which they had
to struggle,--one cannot wonder that they invested their own unsurpassed
fortitude, and their genius for government and war, with the quality of
a special Providence. But their faith was inwoven in the most singular
way with a treacherous strand of credulity and superstition. Sometimes
one is impressed with a sense that the prodigious force by which they
subdued the knotty and forest-fettered land, and overcame so many other
more dangerous difficulties, was the ecstasy of men made morbidly strong
by excessive gloom and indifference to the present life. "When we are in
our graves," wrote Higginson, "it will be all one whether we have lived
in plenty or penury, whether we have died in a bed of downe or lockes of
straw." And Hawthorne speaks of the Puritan temperament as
"accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so
little." Yet, though they were not, as Winthrop says, "of those that
dreame of perfection in this world," they surely had vast hopes at
heart, and the fire of repressed imagination played around them and
before them as a vital and guiding gleam, of untold value to them, and
using a mysterious power in their affairs. They were something morbid in
their imaginings, but that this morbid habit was a chief source of their
power is a mistaken theory. It is true that their errors of imagination
were so closely knit up with real insight, that they could not
themselves distinguish between the two. Their religious faith, their
outlook into another life, though tinged by unhealthy terrorism, was a
solid, energetic act of imagination; but when it had to deal with
intricate tangles of mind and heart, it became credulity. That lurking
unhealthiness spread from the centre, and soon overcame their judgment
entirely. The bodeful glare of the witchcraft delusion makes this
fearfully clear. Mr. Upham, in his "Salem Witchcraft,"--one of the most
vigorous, true, and thorough of American histories, without which no one
can possess himself of the subject it treats,--has shown conclusively
the admirable character of the community in which that delusion broke
out, its energy, common-sense, and varied activity; but he points out
for us also the perilous state of the Puritan imagination in a matter
where religion, physiology, and affairs touched each other so closely as
in the witchcraft episode. The persecution at Salem did not come from
such deep degeneration as has been assumed for its source, and it was
not at the time at all a result of uncommon bigotry. In the persecution
in England in 1645-46, Matthew Hopkins, the "witch-finder-general,"
procured the death, "in one year and in one county, of more than three
times as many as suffered in Salem during the whole delusion"; several
persons were tried by water ordeal, and drowned, in Suffolk, Essex, and
Cambridgeshire, at the same time with the Salem executions; and capital
punishments took place there some years after the end of the trouble
here. It is well known, also, that persons were put to death for
witchcraft in two other American colonies. The excess in Salem was
heightened by a well-planned imposture, but found quick sustenance
because "the imagination, called necessarily into extraordinary action
in the absence of scientific certainty, was ... exercised in vain
attempts to discover, unassisted by observation and experiment, the
elements and first principles of nature," [Footnote: Upham, I. 382] and
"had reached a monstrous growth," nourished by a copious literature of
magic and demonology, and by the opinions of the most eminent and humane
preachers and poets.

The imagination which makes beauty out of evil, and that which
accumulates from it the utmost intensity of terror, are well exemplified
in Milton and Bunyan. Doubtless Milton's richly cultured faith, clothed
in lustrous language as in princely silks that overhang his chain-mail
of ample learning and argument, was as intense as the unlettered belief
of Bunyan; and perhaps he shared the prevalent opinions about
witchcraft; yet when he touches upon the superstitious element, the
material used is so transfused with the pictorial and poetic quality
which Milton has distilled from the common belief, and then poured into
this _image_ of the common belief, that I am not sure he cared for
any other quality in it.

  "Nor uglier follow the night-hag, when, call'd
  In secret, riding through the air she comes,
  Lured by the smell of infant blood, to dance
  With Lapland witches, while the laboring moon
  Ellipses at their charms."

_Paradise Lost_, II. 662.

Again, in Comus:--

  "Some say, no evil thing that walks by night,
  Blue meagre hag, or stubborn, unlaid ghost
  That breaks his magic chains at curfew time,
  No goblin, or swart faery of the mine,
  Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity."

How near these passages come to Shakespere, where he touches the same
string! And is it not clear that both poets exulted so in the
_beauty_ born among dark, earthy depths of fear, that they would
have rejected any and every horror which failed to contribute something
to the beautiful? Indeed, it may easily be that such high spirits accept
awful traditions and cruel theologies, merely because they possess a
transmuting touch which gives these things a secret and relative value
not intrinsically theirs; because they find here something to satisfy an
inward demand for immense expansions of thought, a desire for all sorts
of proportioned and balanced extremes. This is no superficial
suggestion, though it may seem so. But in such cases it is not the
positive horror and its direct effect which attract the poet: a deeper
symbolism and an effect both aesthetic and moral recommend the element
to him. With Milton, however, there follows a curious result. He
produces his manufactured myth of Sin and Death and his ludicrous Limbo
of Vanity with a gravity and earnestness as convincing as those which
urge home any part of his theme; yet we are aware that he is only making
poetic pretence of belief; so that a certain distrust of his sincerity
throughout creeps in, as we read. How much, we ask, is allegory in the
poet's own estimation, and how much real belief? Now in Bunyan there is
nothing of this doubt. Though the author declares his narrative to be
the relation of a dream, the figment becomes absolute fact to us; and
the homely realism of Giant Despair gives him a firmer hold upon me as
an actual existence, than all the splendid characterization of Milton's
Beelzebub can gain. Even Apollyon is more real. Milton assumes the
historic air of the epic poet, Bunyan admits that he is giving an
allegory; yet of the two the humble recorder of Christian's progress
seems the more worthy of credit. Something of this effect is doubtless
due to art: the "Pilgrim's Progress" is more adequately couched in a
single and consistent strain than the "Paradise Lost." Milton, by
implying veracity and then vaporing off into allegory, challenges
dispute; but Bunyan, in humbly confessing himself a dreamer, disarms his
reader and traps him into entire assent. Certainly Bunyan was not the
greater artist: that supposition will not even bear a moment's
contemplation; but, as it happened, his weakness was his strength. He
had but one chance. His work would have been nothing without allegory,
and the simple device of the dream--which is the refuge of a man
unskilled in composition, who feels that his figures cannot quite stand
as self-sufficient entities--happens to be as valuable to him as it was
necessary; for the plea of unreality brings out, in the strong light of
surprise, a contrast between the sincere substance of the story and its
assumed insubstantiality. Milton had many chances, many resources of
power to rely on; but by grasping boldly at the effect of authenticity
he loses that one among the several prizes within his reach. I do not
know that I am right, but all this seems to me to argue a certain
dividing and weakening influence exerted by the imagination which uses
religious or superstitious dread for the purposes of beauty; while that
which discourses confidently of the passage from this to another life,
with all the several stages clearly marked, and floods the whole scene
with a vivid and inartificial light from "the powers and terrors of what
is yet unseen," affects the mind with every atom of energy economized
and concentred.

Leaving the literary question, we may bring this conclusion to bear upon
the Puritans and Salem, as their history affected Hawthorne. I have said
that a gradual suffusion of the marvellous overspreads the comparatively
arid annals of the town, if one reviews them amid the proper influences;
and I have touched upon the two phases of imagination which, playing
over the facts, give them this atmosphere. Now if what I guess from the
contrast between Milton and Bunyan be true, the lower kind of
imagination--that is, imagination deformed to credulity--would be likely
to be the more impressive. This uncanny quality of superstition, then,
is the one which insensibly exudes from the pages of New England's and
perhaps especially of Salem's colonial history, as Hawthorne turns them.
This is the dank effluence that, mingling with the sweeter and freer air
of his own reveries, has made so many people shudder on entering the
great romancer's shadowy but serene domain.

And just here it is advisable to triangulate our ground, by bringing
Milton, Bunyan, and Hawthorne together in a simultaneous view. Wide
apart as the first two stand, they seem to effect a kind of union in
this modern genius; or, rather, their influence here conjoins, as the
rays from two far-separated stars meet in the eye of him who watches the
heavens for inspiration. Something of the peculiar virtue of each of
these Puritan writers seems to have given tone to Hawthorne's no less
individual nature. In Bunyan, who very early laid his hand on
Hawthorne's intellectual history, we find a very fountain-head of
allegory. His impulse, of course, was supremely didactic, only so much
of mere narrative interest mixing itself with his work as was
inseparable from his native relish for the matter of fact; while in
Milton's poetry the clear aesthetic pleasure held at least an exact
balance with the moral inspiration, and, as we have just seen, perhaps
outweighed it at times. The same powerful, unrelaxing grasp of allegory
is found in the American genius as in Bunyan, and there likewise comes
to light in his mind the same delight in art for art's sake that added
such a grace to Milton's sinewy and large-limbed port. In special cases
the allegorical motive has distinctly got the upper hand, in Hawthorne's
work; yet even in those the artistic integument, that marvellous verbal
style, those exquisite fancies, are not absent: on the contrary, in the
very instances where Hawthorne has most constantly and clearly held to
the illustration of a single idea, and made his fiction fit itself most
absolutely to the jewelled truth it holds,--in these very causes, I say,
the command of his genius over literary resources is generally shown by
an unusual splendor of means applied to the ideal end in view. It is
here that, while resembling Bunyan, he is so unlike him. But more
commonly we find in Hawthorne the two moods, the ethical and the
aesthetic, exerted in full force simultaneously; and the result seems to
be a perfection of unity. The opposing forces, like centripetal and
centrifugal attractions, produce a finished sphere. And in this, again,
though recalling Milton, he differs from him also. In Milton's epic the
tendency is to alternate these moods; and one works against the other.
In short, the two elder writers undergo a good deal of refinement and
proportioning, before mixing their qualities in Hawthorne's veins.
However great a controversialist Milton may be held, too, the very fact
of his engaging in the particular discussions and in the manner he
chose, while never to be deplored, may have something to do with the
want of fusion of the different qualities present in his poetry. We may
say, and doubtless it is so, that Hawthorne could never have written
such magnificent pamphlets as the "Eikonoklastes," the "Apology," the
"Tetrachordon": I grant that his refinement, though bringing him
something which Milton did not have, has cost him something else which
Milton possessed. But, for all that, the more deep-lying and inclusive
truths which he constantly entertained, and which barred him from the
temporary exertion of controversy, formed the sources of his completer
harmony. There is a kind of analogy, too, between the omnipresence of
Milton in his work, and that of Hawthorne in his. The great Puritan
singer cannot create persons: his Satan is Milton himself in
singing-robes, assuming for mere argument's and epic's sake that side of
a debate which he does not believe, yet carrying it out in the most
masterly way; his angels and archangels are discriminated, but still
they are not divested of his informing quality; and "Comus" and "Samson
Agonistes," howsoever diverse, are illustrations of the athletic prime
and the autumnal strength of the poet himself, rather than anywise
dramatic evolutions of his themes. Bunyan, with much less faculty for
any subtle discrimination of characters, also fails to give his persons
individuality, though they stand very distinctly for a variety of
traits: it is with Bunyan as if he had taken an average human being,
and, separating his impulses, good and evil, had tried to make a new man
or woman out of each; so that there is hardly life-blood enough to go
round among them. Milton's creatures are in a certain way more vital,
though less real. Bunyan's characters being traits, the other's are
moods. Yet both groups seem to have been cast in a large, elemental
mould. Now, Hawthorne is vastly more an adept than either Milton or
Bunyan in keeping the creatures of his spirit separate, while
maintaining amongst them the bond of a common nature; but besides this
bond they are joined by another, by something which continually brings
us back to the author himself. It is like a family resemblance between
widely separated relatives, which suggests in the most opposite quarters
the original type of feature of some strong, far-back progenitor. These
characters, with far more vivid presence and clear definition than those
of the other two writers, are at the same time based on large and
elementary forces, like theirs. They are for the most part embodied
moods, or emotions expanded to the stature of an entire human being, and
made to endure unchanged for years together. Thus, while Hawthorne, as
we shall see more fully further on, is essentially a dramatic genius,
Bunyan a simple allegorist, and Milton an odic poet of unparalleled
strength,--who, taking dramatic and epic subjects and failing to fill
them, makes us blame not _his_ size and shape, but the too minute
intricacies of the theme,--there is still a sort of underground
connection between all three. It is curious to note, further, the
relation of Milton's majestic and multitudinous speech, the
chancellor-like stateliness of his wit, in prose, to Hawthorne's
resonant periods, and dignity that is never weakened though admirably
modified by humor. Altogether, if one could compound Bunyan and Milton,
combine the realistic imagination of the one with the other's passion
for ideas, pour the ebullient undulating prose style of the poet into
the veins of the allegorist's firm, leather-jerkined English, and make a
modern man and author of the whole, the result would not be alien to
Hawthorne.

Yet that native love of historic murkiness and mossy tradition which we
have been learning to associate with Salem would have to be present in
this compound being, to make the likeness complete. And this, with the
trains of revery and the cast of imagination which it must naturally
breed, would be the one thing not easily supplied, for it is the
predisposition which gives to all encircling qualities in Hawthorne
their peculiar coloring and charm. That predisposition did not find its
sustenance only in the atmosphere of sadness and mystery that hangs over
the story of Salem; bygone generations have left in the town a whole
legacy of legend and shudder-rousing passages of family tradition, with
many well-supported tales of supernatural hauntings; and it is worth
while to notice how frequent and forcible a use Hawthorne makes of this
enginery of local gossip and traditional horror, in preparing the way
for some catastrophe that is to come, or in overshooting the mark with
some exaggerated rumor which, by pretending to disbelieve it, he causes
to have just the right effect upon the reader's mind. Some of the old
houses that stand endwise to the street, looking askant at the
passer,--especially if he is a stranger in town,--might be veritable
treasuries of this sort of material. Gray, close-shuttered, and
retiring, they have not so much the look of death; it is more that they
are poor, widowed homes that have mournfully long outlived their lords.
One would not have them perish; and yet there is something drearily sad
about them. One almost feels that the present tenants must be in danger
of being crowded out by ghosts, or at least that they must encounter
strange obstacles to living there. Are not their windows darkened by the
light of other days? An old mansion of brick or stone has more character
of its own, and is less easily overshadowed by its own antiquity; but
these impressible wooden abiding-places, that have managed to cling to
the soil through so many generations, seem rife with the inspirations of
mortality. They have a depressing influence, and must often mould the
occupants and leave a peculiar impress on them. We are all odd enough in
our way, whatever our origin or habitation; but is it not possible that
in a town of given size, placed under specified conditions, there should
be a greater proportion of oddities produced than in another differently
circumstanced? Certainly, if this be so, it has its advantages as well
as its drawbacks; a stability of surrounding and of association, which
perhaps affects individuals in the extreme, is still a source of
continuity in town character. And Salem is certainly remarkable for
strong, persistent, and yet unexhausted individuality, as a town, no
less than for a peculiar dignity of character which has become a
pronounced trait in many of its children. But, on the other hand, it is
fecund of eccentricities. Though many absorb the atmosphere of age to
their great advantage, there must be other temperaments among the
descendants of so unique and so impressionable a body of men as the
early settlers of this region, which would succumb to the awesome and
depressing influences that also lurk in the air; and these may easily
pass from piquant personality into mere errant grotesqueness. Whether
from instinctive recognition of this or not, it has never seemed to me
remarkable that people here should see apparitions of themselves, and
die within the year; it did not strike me as strange when I was told of
persons who had gone mad with no other cause than that of inherited
insanity,--as if, having tried every species of sane activity for two or
three hundred years, a family should take to madness from sheer disgust
with the monotony of being healthy; nor could any case of warped
idiosyncrasy, or any account of half-maniacal genius be instanced that
seemed at all out of keeping. One day I passed a house where a crazy
man, of harmless temper, habitually amused himself with sitting at a
window near the ground, and entering into talk, from between the
half-closed shutters, with any one on the sidewalk who would listen to
him. Such a thing, to be sure, might easily be met with in twenty other
places; but here it seemed natural and fitting. It was not a
preposterous thought, that any number of other men in the neighborhood
might quietly drop into a similar vein of decrepitude, and also attempt
to palm off their disjointed fancies upon the orderly foot-passengers. I
do not by this mean to insinuate any excessive leaning toward mental
derangement on the part of the inhabitants; but it is as if the town,
having lived long enough according to ordinary rules to be justified in
sinking into superannuation, and yet not availing itself of the
privilege, but on the contrary maintaining a life of great activity, had
compensated itself in the persons of a few individuals. But when one has
reached this mood, one remembers that it is all embodied in "The House
of the Seven Gables." Though Hawthorne, in the Preface to that romance,
takes precautions against injuring local sentiment, by the assurance
that he has not meant "to describe local manners, nor in any way to
meddle with the characteristics of a community for whom he cherishes a
proper respect and a natural regard," the book is not the less a genuine
outgrowth of Salem. Perhaps the aspect under which Salem presents itself
to me is tinged with fancy, though Hawthorne in the same story has
called it "a town noted for its frugal, discreet, well-ordered, and
home-loving inhabitants, ... but in which, be it said, there are odder
individuals, and now and then stranger occurrences, than one meets with
almost anywhere else." But it is certain that poor Hepzibah Pyncheon,
and the pathetic Clifford, and quaint Uncle Venner, are types which
inevitably present themselves as belonging pre-eminently to this place.
Not less subtle is the connection with it of the old wizard Maule, and
the manner of his death at the witchcraft epoch; for it is hinted in the
romance that old Colonel Pyncheon joined in denouncing the poor man,
urged by designs on a piece of land owned by Maule; and Mr. Upham's
careful research has shown that various private piques were undoubtedly
mixed up in the witchcraft excitement, and swelled the list of
accusations. Young Holgrave, the photographer, also, represents in a
characteristic way the young life of the place, the germ that keeps it
fresh, and even dreams at times of throwing off entirely the visible
remains of the past.

It may be mentioned, at this point, as a coincidence, even if not
showing how Hawthorne insensibly drew together from a hundred nooks and
crannies, and formulated and embodied his impressions of this his native
place in "The House of the Seven Gables," that the name of Thomas Maule
(the builder of the house, and son of the Matthew brought to his death
by Colonel Pyncheon) appears in Felt's "Annals of Salem" as that of a
sympathizer with the Quakers. He was also author of a book called "Truth
Held Forth," published in 1695; and of a later one, the title of which,
"The Mauler Mauled," shows that he had humor in him as well as pluck. He
seems to have led a long career of independent opinion, not altogether
in comfort, however, for in 1669 he was ordered to be whipped for saying
that Mr. Higginson preached lies, and that his instruction was "the
doctrine of devils"; and his book of "Truth Held Forth," which contained
severe reflections on the government for its treatment of the Quakers,
was seized and suppressed. It is not improbable that at some time
Hawthorne may have read of this person. At all events, he serves as a
plausible suggestion of the Maule who so early in the romance utters his
prophecy of ill against Colonel Pyncheon, that he "shall have blood to
drink."

Another minor coincidence, and yet proper to be noted, is that of the
laboring-man Dixey, who appears in the opening of the story with some
comments upon Aunt Hepzibah's scheme of the cent-shop, and only comes in
once afterward, at the close, to touch upon the subject in a different
strain. At first, unseen, but overheard by Miss Pyncheon, he prophesies
to a companion, "in a tone as if he were shaking his head," that the
cent-shop will fail; and when Clifford and Hepzibah drive off in their
carriage, at the end, he remarks sagaciously, "Good business,--good
business." It certainly is odd that this subordinate in the romance
should find a counterpart in one William Dixy, appointed ensign of the
Salem military company which John Hawthorne commanded, in 1645.

The name Pyncheon, also, on which the imaginary Colonel and Judge cast
such a doubtful light, was a well-known name in old New England, and
became the source of some annoyance to Hawthorne, after he had written
the "Seven Gables"; but of this we shall hear more, further on. It is
enough, now, to recall these coincidences. I do not suppose that he
searched the names out and founded his use of them upon some suggestion
already connected with them; indeed, he expressly declared, when
remonstrated with on his use of the Pyncheons, that he did not know of
any person of that title connected with Salem history of that time; but
the circumstance of his using the other names is interesting as showing
that many minute facts must have gone to make up the atmosphere of that
half-historic and half-imaginative area whereon so many of his short
tales and two of the romances were enacted. Maule and Dixey were very
likely absorbed into his mind and forgotten; but suddenly when he
chanced to need these characters for the "Seven Gables," they revived
and took shape with something of the historic impress still upon them.
That their very names should have been reproduced finds explanation in
the statement once made by Hawthorne to a friend, that the most
vexatious detail of romance-writing, to him, was the finding of suitable
names for the _dramatis personae._ Balzac used to look long among
the shop-signs of Paris for the precise name needed by a preconceived
character, and the absolute invention of such titles is doubtless very
rare; few fictionists are gifted with Dickens's fertility in the
discovering of names bearing the most forcible and occult relations to
the fleshless owners of them. And it is interesting to find that
Hawthorne--somewhat as Scott drew from the local repertory of his
countrymen's nomenclature--found many of his surnames among those of the
settlers of New England. Hooper, Prynne, Felton, Dolliver, Hunnewell,
and others belong specially to these and to their descendants. Roger
Chillingworth, by the by, recalls the celebrated English divine and
controversialist, William; and Bishop Miles Coverdale's name has been
transferred, in "Blithedale," from the reign of Edward VI. to the
experimental era of Brook Farm.

It has been urged as a singular deficiency of Hawthorne's, that he could
not glorify the moral strength and the sweeter qualities of the Puritans
and of their lives. But there was nothing in the direction of his genius
that called him to this. As well urge against him that he did not write
philanthropic pamphlets, or give himself to the inditing of biographies
of benevolent men, or compose fictions on the plan of Sir Charles
Grandison, devoted to the illumination of praiseworthy characters. It is
the same criticism which condemns Dickens for ridiculing certain
preachers, and neglecting to provide the antidote in form of a model
apostle, contrasted in the same book. This is the criticism which would
reduce all fiction to the pattern of the religious tract. Certain men
have certain things before them to do; they cannot devote a lifetime to
proving in their published works that they appreciate the excellence of
other things which they have no time and no supreme command to do.
Nothing, then, is more unsafe, than to imply from their silence that
they are deficient in particular phases of sympathy. The exposition of
the merits of the New England founders has been steadily in progress
from their own time to the present; and they have found a worthy
monument in the profound and detailed history of Palfrey. All the more
reason, why the only man yet born who could fill the darker spaces of
our early history with palpitating light of that wide-eyed truth and
eternal human consciousness which cast their deep blaze through
Hawthorne's books, should not forego his immortal privilege! The eulogy
is the least many-sided and perpetual of literary forms, and unless
Hawthorne had made himself the eulogist of the Puritans, he would still
have had to turn to our gaze the wrongs that, for good or ill, were
worked into the tissue of their infant state. But as it is, he has been
able to suggest a profounder view than is permitted either to the race
of historians or that of philosophers. It does not profess to be a
satisfactory statement of the whole, nor is there the least ground for
assuming that it does so. Its very absorption in certain phases
constitutes its value,--a value unspeakably greater than that of any
other presentation of the Puritan life, because it rests upon the
insight of a poet who has sounded the darkest depths of human nature.
Had Hawthorne passed mutely through life, these gloomy-grounded pictures
of Puritanism might have faded from the air like the spectres of things
seen in dazzling light, which flit vividly before the eye for a time,
then vanish forever.

But in order to his distinctive coloring, no distortion had to be
practised; and I do not see why Hawthorne should be reckoned to have had
no sight for that which he did not record. With his unique and
penetrating touch he marked certain salient and solemn features which
had sunk deep into his sensitive imagination, and then filled in the
surface with his own profound dramatic emanations. But in his subtle and
strong moral insight, his insatiable passion for truth, he surely
represented his Puritan ancestry in the most worthy and obviously
sympathetic way. No New-Englander, moreover, with any depth of feeling
in him, can be entirely wanting in reverence for the nobler traits of
his stern forefathers, or in some sort of love for the whole body of
which his own progenitors formed a group. Partly for his romantic
purposes, and merely as an expedient of art, Hawthorne chose to treat
this life at its most picturesque points; and to heighten the elements
of terror which he found there was an aesthetic obligation with him. But
there is even a subtler cause at work toward this end. The touches of
assumed repugnance toward his Puritan forefathers, which appear here and
there in his writings, are not only related to his ingrained shyness,
which would be cautious of betraying his deeper and truer sentiment
about them, but are the ensigns of a proper modesty in discoursing of
his own race, his own family, as it were. He shields an actual
veneration and a sort of personal attachment for those brave earlier
generations under a harmless pretence that he does not think at all too
tenderly of them. It is a device frequently and freely practised, and so
characteristically American, and especially Hawthornesque, that it
should not have been overlooked for even a moment. By these means, too,
he takes the attitude of admitting the ancestral errors, and throws
himself into an understanding with those who look at New England and the
Puritans merely from the outside. Here is a profound resort of art, to
prepare a better reception for what he is about to present, by not
seeming to insist on an open recognition from his readers of the
reigning dignity and the noble qualities in the Puritan colony, which he
himself, nevertheless, is always quietly conscious of. And in this way
he really secures a broader truth, while reserving the pride of locality
and race intact; a broader truth, because to the world at large the most
pronounced feature of the Puritans is their austerity.

But if other reason were wanted to account for his dwelling on the
shadows and severities of the Puritans so intently, it might be found in
his family history and its aspects to his brooding mind. His own
genealogy was the gate which most nearly conducted him into the still
and haunted fields of time which those brave but stern religious exiles
peopled.

The head of the American branch of the Hathorne, or Hawthorne family,
was Major William Hathorne, of Wigcastle, Wilton, Wiltshire, [Footnote:
This name appears in the American Note-Books (August 22, 1837) as
Wigcastle, Wigton. I cannot find any but the Scotch Wigton, and have
substituted the Wilton of Wiltshire as being more probable. Memorials of
the family exist in the adjoining county of Somerset. (_A. N. B._,
October, 1836.)] in England, a younger son, who came to America with
Winthrop and his company, by the Arbella, arriving in Salem Bay June 12,
1630. He probably went first to Dorchester, having grants of land there,
and was made a freeman about 1634, and representative, or one of "the
ten men," in 1635. Although a man of note, his name is not affixed to
the address sent by Governor Winthrop and several others from Yarmouth,
before sailing, to their brethren in the English Church; but this is
easily accounted for by the fact that Hathorne was a determined
Separatist, while the major part of his fellow-pilgrims still clung to
Episcopacy. In 1636, Salem tendered him grants of land if he would
remove hither, considering that "it was a public benefit that he should
become an inhabitant of that town." He removed accordingly, and, in
1638, he had additional lands granted to him "in consideration of his
many employments for towne and countrie." Some of these lands were
situated on a pleasant rising ground by the South River, then held to be
the most desirable part of the town; and a street running through that
portion bears the name of Hathorne to this day. In 1645, he petitioned
the General Court that he might be allowed, with others, to form a
"company of adventurers" for trading among the French; and in the same
year he was appointed captain of a military company, the first regular
troop organized in Salem to "advance the military art." From 1636 to
1643 he had been a representative of the people, from Dorchester and
Salem; and from 1662 to 1679 he filled the higher office of an
assistant. It was in 1667 that he was empowered to receive for the town
a tax of twenty pounds of powder per ton for every foreign vessel over
twenty tons trading to Salem and Marblehead, thus forestalling his
famous descendant in sitting at the receipt of customs. Besides these
various activities, he officiated frequently as an attorney at law; and
in the Indian campaign of 1676, in Maine, he left no doubt of his
efficiency as a military commander. He led a portion of the army of
twelve hundred men which the colony had raised, and in September of this
year he surprised four hundred Indians at Cocheco. Two hundred of these
"were found to have been perfidious," and were sent to Boston, to be
sold as slaves, after seven or eight had been put to death. A couple of
weeks later, Captain Hathorne sent a despatch: "We catched an Indian
Sagamore of Pegwackick and the gun of another; we found him in many
lies, and so ordered him to be put to death, and the Cocheco Indians to
be his executioners." There was some reason for this severity, for in
crossing a river the English had been ambuscaded by the savages. The
captain adds: "We have no bread these three days." This early ancestor
was always prominent. He had been one of a committee in 1661, who
reported concerning the "patent, laws, and privileges and duties to his
Majesty" of the colonists, opposing all appeals to the crown as
inconsistent with their charter, and maintained the right of their
government to defend itself against all attempts at overthrow. Two years
later he was charged by Charles's commissioners with seditious words,
and apologized for certain "unadvised" expressions; but the committee of
1661 reported at a critical time, and it needed a good deal of
stout-heartedness to make the declarations which it did; and on the
whole William Hathorne may stand as a sturdy member of the community. He
is perhaps the only man of the time who has left a special reputation
for eloquence. Eliot speaks of him as "the most eloquent man of the
Assembly, a friend of Winthrop, but often opposed to Endicott, who
glided with the popular stream; as reputable for his piety as for his
political integrity." And Johnson, in his "Wonder-Working Providence,"
naming the chief props of the state, says: "Yet through the Lord's mercy
we still retain among our Democracy the godly Captaine William Hathorn,
whom the Lord hath indued with a quick apprehension, strong memory, and
Rhetorick, volubility of speech, which hath caused the people to make
use of him often in Publick Service, especially when they have had to do
with any foreign government." It is instructive to find what ground he
took during the Quaker persecutions of 1657 to 1662. Endicott was a
forward figure in that long-sustained horror; and if Hathorne naturally
gravitated to the other extreme from Endicott, he would be likely, one
supposes, to have sympathized with the persecuted. The state was divided
in sentiment during those years; but James Cudworth wrote that "he that
will not whip and lash, persecute, and punish men that differ in matters
of religion, must not sit on the bench nor sustain any office in the
commonwealth." Cudworth himself was deposed; and it happens that
Hathorne's terms of service, as recorded, seem at first to leave a gap
barely wide enough to include this troublesome period. But, in fact, he
resumed power as a magistrate just in time to add at least one to the
copious list of bloody and distinguishing atrocities that so disfigure
New England history.

Sewel relates [Footnote: History of the Quakers, I. 411, 412.] that
"Anne Coleman and four of her friends were whipped through Salem,
Boston, and Dedham by order of Wm. Hawthorn, who before he was a
magistrate had opposed compulsion for conscience; and when under the
government of Cromwell it was proposed to make a law that none shall
preach without license, he publicly said at Salem that if ever such a
law took place in New England he should look upon it as one of the most
abominable actions that were ever committed there, and that it would be
as eminent a Token of God's having forsaken New England, as any could
be." His famous descendant, alluding to this passage, [Footnote: See
"The Custom House," introductory to "The Scarlet Letter."] says that the
account of this incident "will last longer, it is to be feared, than any
record of his better deeds, though these were many." Yet it should not
be overlooked that Hathorne is the only one among the New England
persecutors whom Sewel presents to us with any qualifying remark as to a
previous more humane temper. Sole, too, in escaping the doom of sudden
death which the historian solemnly records in the cases of the rest. So
that even if we had not the eminent example of Marcus Aurelius and Sir
Thomas More, we might still infer from this that it is no less possible
for the man of enlightened ability and culture, than for the ignorant
bigot, to find himself, almost of necessity, a chief instrument of
religious coercion. Doubtless this energetic Puritan denouncer of
persecution never conceived of a fanaticism like that of the Friends,
which should so systematically outrage all his deepest sense of decency,
order, and piety, and--not content with banishment--should lead its
subjects to return and force their deaths, as it were, on the
commonwealth; as if a neighbor, under some mistaken zeal, were to
repeatedly mix poison with our porridge, until his arrest and death
should seem our only defence against murder. Perhaps he was even on the
dissenting side, for a time, though there is no record of his saying,
like one Edward Wharton of Salem, that the blood of the Quakers was too
heavy upon him, and he could not bear it. Wharton received twenty lashes
for his sensitiveness, and was fined twenty pounds, and subjected to
more torture afterward. But, whatever Hathorne's first feeling, after
five years of disturbance, exasperation was added to the responsibility
of taking office, and he persecuted. It is easy to see his various
justifications, now; yet one cannot wonder that his descendant was
oppressed by the act. That he was so cannot be regretted, if only
because of the authentic fact that his reading of Sewel inspired one of
his most exquisite tales, "The Gentle Boy."

William Hathorne, however,--whatever his taste in persecution,--makes
his will peacefully and piously in 1679-80: "_Imprimis_, I give my
soul into the hands of Jesus Christ, in whom I hope to bind forevermore
my body to the earth in hope of a glorious resurrection with him, whom
this vile body shall be made like unto his glorious body; and for the
estate God hath given me in this world.... I do dispose of as
followeth." Then he bequeaths various sums of money to divers persons,
followed by "all my housing and land, orchard and appurtenances lying in
Salem," to his son John. Among other items, there is one devising his
"farm at Groton" to "Gervice Holwyse my gr. ch. [grandchild] if he can
come over and enjoy it." Here, by the way, is another bit of coincidence
for the curious. _Gervase Helwyse_ is the name of the young man who
appears in "Lady Eleanor's Mantle," [Footnote: Twice-Told Tales, Vol.
II.] bereft of reason by his love for the proud and fatal heroine of
that tale. [Footnote: In the English Note-Books, May 20, 1854, will be
found some facts connected with this name, unearthed by Mr. Hawthorne
himself. He there tells of the marriage of one _Gervase Elwes_, son
of Sir Gervase Elwes, Baronet of Stoke, in Suffolk. This Gervase died
before his father; his son died without issue; and thus John Maggott
Twining, grandson of the second Gervase through a daughter, came into
the baronetcy. This Twining assumed the name of Elwes. "He was the
famous miser, and must have had Hawthorne blood in him," says Mr.
Hawthorne, "through his grandfather Gervase, whose mother was a
Hawthorne." He then refers to William's devise, and says: "My ancestor
calls him his _nephew_." The will says, "gr. ch."; and I suppose
the mistake occurred through Mr. Hawthorne's not having that document at
hand, for reference.] Captain Hathorne must have been well advanced in
years when he led his troops against the Indians at Cocheco in 1676; for
it was only five years later that he disappeared from history and from
this life forever.

His son John inherited, together with housing and land, a good deal of
the first Hathorne's various energy and eminence. He was a freeman in
1677, representative from 1683 to 1686, and assistant or counsellor,
from 1684 to 1712, except the years of Andros's government. After the
deposition of Andros, he was called to join Bradstreet's Council of
Safety pending the accession of William of Orange; a magistrate for some
years; quartermaster of the Essex companies at first, and afterward, in
1696, the commander of Church's troops, whom he led against St. John. He
attacked the enemy's fort there, but, finding his force too weak, drew
off, and embarked for Boston. As his father's captaincy had somehow
developed into the dignity of major, so John found himself a colonel in
1711. But in 1717 he, too, died. And now there came a change in the
fortunes of the Hathorne line. Colonel John, during his magistracy, had
presided at the witchcraft trials, and had shown himself severe,
bigoted, and unrelenting in his spirit toward the accused persons.
Something of this may be seen in Upham's volumes. One woman was brought
before him, whose husband has left a pathetic record of her suffering.
"She was forced to stand with her arms stretched out. I requested that I
might hold one of her hands, but it was declined me; then she desired me
to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the sweat from her face, which I
did; then she desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she
should faint. Justice Hathorne replied she had strength enough to
torment these persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I
repeating something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me
to be silent, or else I should be turned out of the room." [Footnote:
Chandler's American Criminal Trials, I. p. 85.] It is not strange that
this husband should have exclaimed, that God would take revenge upon his
wife's persecutors; and perhaps he was the very man whose curse was said
to have fallen upon the justice's posterity.

From this time, at all events, the family lost its commanding position
in Salem affairs. Justice Hathorne's son Joseph subsided into the quiet
of farm-life. The only notable association with his name is, that he
married Sarah Bowditch, a sister of the grandfather of the distinguished
mathematician, Nathaniel Bowditch. But it is in the beginning of the
eighteenth century that the Hathornes begin to appear as mariners. In
the very year of the justice's death, one Captain Ebenezer Hathorne
earned the gloomy celebrity attendant on bringing small-pox to Salem, in
his brig just arrived from the Barbadoes. Possibly, Justice John may
have died from this very infection; and if so, the curse would seem to
have worked with a peculiarly malign appropriateness, by making a member
of his own family the unwilling instrument of his end. By and by a
Captain Benjamin Hathorne is cast away and drowned on the coast, with
four other men. Perhaps it was his son, another Benjamin, who, in 1782,
being one of the crew of an American privateer, "The Chase," captured by
the British, escaped from a prison-ship in the harbor of Charleston, S.
C., with six comrades, one of whom was drowned. Thus, gradually,
originated the traditional career of the men of this family,--"a
gray-headed shipmaster in each generation," as the often-quoted passage
puts it, "retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy
of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast." But the most
eminent among these hardy skippers is Daniel, the son of farmer Joseph,
and grandfather of the author.

Daniel Hathorne lived to be eighty-five, and expired only on April 18,
1796, eight years and a little more before his famous grandson came into
the world. Something of the old prowess revived in him, and being a
stout seafarer, and by inheritance a lover of independence, he became
commander of a privateer during our Revolution; indeed, it is said he
commanded several. His guns have made no great noise in history, but
their reverberation has left in the air a general tradition of his
bravery. The only actual account of his achievements which I have met
with is the following ballad, written by the surgeon of his ship, who
was perhaps better able than any one else to gauge the valor of his
countryman and commander, by the amount of bloodshed on his piratical
craft:--

BRIG "FAIR AMERICAN": DANIEL HATHORNE, COMMANDER.

  The twenty-second of August, before the close of day,
  All hands on board our privateer, we got her under weigh.
  We kept the Eastern shore on board for forty leagues or more,
  When our departure took for sea, from the Isle of Monhegan
  shore.

  Bold Hathorne was commander, a man of real worth,
  Old England's cruel tyranny induced him to go forth;
  She with relentless fury was plundering all the coast,
  And thought because her strength was great, our glorious cause
  was lost.

  Now farewell to America,--farewell our friends and wives,
  We trust in Heaven's peculiar care, for to protect their lives,
  To prosper our intended cruise upon the raging main,
  And to preserve our dearest friends till we return again.

  The wind it being leading and bore us on our way,
  As far unto the Eastward as the Gulf of Florida,
  When we fell in with a British ship hound homeward from the main;
  We gave her two bow-chasers, and she returned the same.

  We hauled up our courses and prepared for fight;
  The contest held four glasses,[*] until the dusk of night;
  Then having sprung our mainmast, and had so large a sea,
  We dropped astern, and left our chase till the returning day.

[* The time consumed in the emptying of a half-hour glass four
times,--two hours.]

  Next day we fished our mainmast, the ship still being nigh,
  All hands was for engaging, our chance once more to try;
  But wind and sea being boisterous, our cannon would not bear;
  We thought it quite imprudent, and so we left her there.

  We cruised to the Eastward, near the coast of Portuigale:
  In longitude of twenty-seven we saw a lofty sail.
  We gave her chase, and soon perceived she was a British scow
  Standing for fair America with troops for General Howe.

  Our captain did inspect her with glasses, and he said:--
  "My boys, she means to fight us, but be you not afraid;
  All hands repair to quarters, see everything is clear;
  We'll give him a broadside, my boys, as soon as she comes near."

  She was prepared with nettings, and her men were well secured,
  And bore directly for us, and put us close on board,
  When the cannons roared like thunder, and the muskets fired amain;
  But soon we were alongside, and grappled to her chain.

  And now the scene is altered,--the cannon ceased to roar;
  We fought with swords and boarding-pikes one glass and something more;
  The British pride and glory no longer dared to stay,
  But cut the Yankee grappling, and quickly bore away.

  Our case was not so desperate, as plainly might appear,
  Yet sudden death did enter on board our privateer;
  Mahany, Clew, and Clemmans, the valiant and the brave,
  Fell glorious in the contest, and met a watery grave!

  Ten other men were wounded, among our warlike crew,
  With them our noble captain, to whom all praise is due.
  To him and all our officers let's give a hearty cheer!
  Success to fair America and our good privateer!

This ballad is as long as the cruise, and the rhythm of it seems to show
that the writer had not quite got his sea-legs on, in boarding the
poetic craft. Especially is he to be commiserated on that unhappy
necessity to which the length of the verse compels him, of keeping "the
Eastern shore on board for forty leagues," in the first stanza; but it
was due to its historic and associative value to give it entire.

Perhaps, after all, it was a shrewd insight that caused the Hathornes to
take to the sea. Salem's greatest glory was destined for a term to lie
in that direction. Many of these old New England seaports have
magnificent recollections of a commercial grandeur hardly to be guessed
from their aspect to-day. Castine, Portsmouth, Wiscasset, Newburyport,
and the rest,--they controlled the carrying of vast regions, and
fortune's wheel whirled amid their wharves and warehouses with a merry
and reassuring sound. Each town had its special trade, and kept the
monopoly. Portsmouth and Newburyport ruled the trade with Martinique,
Guadaloupe, and Porto Rico, sending out fish and bringing back sugar;
Gloucester bargained with the West Indies for rum, and brought coffee
and dye-stuffs from Surinam; Marblehead had the Bilboa business; and
Salem, most opulent of all, usurped the Sumatra, African, East Indian,
Brazilian, and Cayenne commerce. By these new avenues over the ocean
many men brought home wealth that literally made princes of them, and
has left permanent traces in the solid and stately homes they built,
still crowded with precious heirlooms, as well as in the refinement
nurtured therein, and the thrifty yet generous character they gave to
the town. Among these successful merchants was Simon Forrester, who
married Nathaniel Hawthorne's great-aunt Rachel, and died in 1817,
leaving an immense property. Him Hawthorne speaks of in "The Custom
House"; alluding to "old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon
Forrester, and many another magnate of his day; whose powdered head,
however, was scarcely in the tomb, before his mountain-pile of wealth
began to dwindle." But Nathaniel's family neither helped to undermine
the heap, nor accumulated a rival one. However good the forecast that
his immediate ancestors had made, as to the quickest and broadest road
to wealth, they travelled long in the wake of success without ever
winning it, themselves. The malediction that fell on Justice Hathorne's
head might with some reason have been thought to still hang over his
race, as Hawthorne suggests that its "dreary and unprosperous condition
... for many a long year back" would show. Indeed, the tradition of such
a curse was kept alive in his family, and perhaps it had its share in
developing that sadness and reticence which seem to have belonged to his
father.

It is plain from these circumstances how the idea of "The House of the
Seven Gables" evolved itself from the history of his own family, with
important differences. The person who is cursed, in the romance, uses a
special spite toward a single victim, in order to get hold of a property
which he bequeaths to his own heirs. Thus a double and treble wrong is
done, and the notion of a curse working upon successive generations is
subordinate to the conception of the injury which a man entails to his
own descendants by forcing on them a stately house founded upon a sin.
The parallel of the Hathorne decline in fortune is carried out; but it
must be observed that the peculiar separateness and shyness, which
doubtless came to be in some degree a trait of all the Hathornes, is
transferred in the book from the family of the accursed to that of
Maule, the utterer of the evil prophecy. "As for Matthew Maule's
posterity," says the romancer, "to all appearance they were a quiet,
honest, well-meaning race of people"; but "they were generally
poverty-stricken; always plebeian and obscure; working with unsuccessful
diligence at handicrafts; laboring on the wharves, or following the sea
as sailors before the mast"; and "so long as any of the race were to be
found, they had been marked out from other men--not strikingly, nor as
with a sharp line, but with an effect that was felt, rather than spoken
of--by an hereditary character of reserve. Their companions, or those
who endeavored to become such, grew conscious of a circle round about
the Maules, within the sanctity or the spell of which, in spite of an
exterior of sufficient frankness and good-fellowship, it was impossible
for any man to step." The points of resemblance here may be easily
distinguished. In the "American Note-Books" occurs an anecdote which
recalls the climax of the romance. It concerns Philip English, who had
been tried for witchcraft by John Hathorne, and became his bitter enemy.
On his death-bed, he consented to forgive him; "But if I get well," said
he, "I'll be damned if I forgive him!" One of English's daughters (he
had no sons) afterward married a son of John Hathorne. How masterly is
the touch of the artist's crayon in this imaginative creation, based
upon the mental and moral anatomy of actual beings! It is a delicate
study of the true creative art to follow out this romantic shape, and
contrast it with the real creatures and incidents to which it has a sort
of likeness. With perfect choice, the artist selects, probably not
consciously, but through association, whatever he likes from the real,
and deviates from it precisely where he feels this to be fitting; adds a
trait here, and transfers another there; and thus completes something
having a unity and inspiration of its own, neither a simple reproduction
nor an unmixed invention, the most subtile and harmonious product of the
creative power. It is in this way that "The House of the Seven Gables"
comes to be not merely fancifully a romance typical of Salem, but in the
most essentially true way representative of it. Surely no one could have
better right to thus embody the characteristics of the town than
Hawthorne, whose early ancestors had helped to magnify it and defend it,
and whose nearer progenitors had in their fallen fortunes almost
foreshadowed the mercantile decline of the long-lived capital. Surely no
one can be less open to criticism for illustrating various phases of his
townsmen's character and exposing in this book, as elsewhere, though
always mildly, the gloomier traits of the founders, than this deep-eyed
and gentle man, whose forefathers notably possessed "all the Puritanic
traits, both good and evil," and who uses what is as much to the
disadvantage of his own blood as to that of others, with such absolute,
admirable impartiality.

[Illustration]




III.


BOYHOOD.--COLLEGE DAYS.--FANSHAWE.

1804-1828.

With such antecedents behind him, and such associations awaiting him,
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born, July 4, 1804.

His father, the captain of a trading-vessel, was one of three sons of
the privateersman Daniel, and was born in 1776; so that both father and
son, it happens, are associated by time of birth with the year and the
day that American independence has made honorable and immemorial. The
elder Nathaniel wore his surname in one of several fashions that his
predecessors had provided,--for they had some eight different ways of
writing, though presumably but one of pronouncing it,--and called
himself Hathorne. It was not long after the birth of his only boy,
second of his three children, however, that he left the name to this
male successor, with whom it underwent a restoration to the more
picturesque and flowered form of Hawthorne. Nathaniel, the son of
Daniel, died in Surinam, in the spring of 1808, of a fever, it is
thought, and left his widow stricken with a lifelong grief, his family
suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow and solitude. I think I cannot convey
the sadness of this more fully than by simply saying it. Yet sombre as
the event is, it seems a fit overture to the opening life of this spirit
so nobly sad whom we are about to study. The tradition seems to have
become established that Captain Nathaniel was inclined to melancholy,
and very reticent; also, that though he was an admirable shipmaster, he
had a vigorous appetite for reading, and carried many books with him on
his long voyages. Those who know the inheritances that come with the
Puritan blood will easily understand the sort of dark, underlying
deposit of unutterable sadness that often reminds such persons of their
austere ancestry; but, in addition to this, the Hathornes had now firmly
imbibed the belief that their family was under a retributive ban for its
share in the awful severities of the Quaker and the witchcraft periods.
It was not to them the symbolic and picturesque thing that it is to us,
but a real overhanging, intermittent oppressiveness, that must often
have struck across their actions in a chilling and disastrous way. Their
ingrained reticence was in itself, when contrasted with Major Hathorne's
fame in oratory, a sort of corroboration of the idea that fate was
making reprisals upon them. The captain's children felt this; and the
son, when grown to manhood, was said to greatly resemble his father in
appearance, as well. Of the Endicotts, who also figured largely in the
maritime history of Salem, it is told that in the West Indies the name
grew so familiar as being that of the captain of a vessel, that it
became generic; and when a new ship arrived, the natives would ask, "Who
is the Endicott?" Very likely the Hathornes had as fixed a fame in the
ports where they traded. At all events, some forty years after the
captain's death at Surinam, a sailor one day stopped Mr. Surveyor
Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem Custom House, and asked him if he
had not once a relative--an uncle or a father--who died in Surinam at
the date given above. He had recognized him by his likeness to the
father, of whom Nathaniel probably had no memory at all.

But he inherited much from his mother, too. She has been described by a
gentleman who saw her in Maine, as very reserved, "a very pious woman,
and a very minute observer of religious festivals," of "feasts, fasts,
new moons, and Sabbaths," and perhaps a little inclined to superstition.
Such an influence as hers would inevitably foster in the son that strain
of reverence, and that especial purity and holiness of thought, which
pervade all that he has written. Those who knew her have said also, that
the luminous, gray, magnificent eyes that so impressed people in
Hawthorne were like hers. She had been Miss Elizabeth Clarke Manning,
the daughter of Richard Manning, whose ancestors came to New England
about 1680, and sister of Richard and of Robert Manning, a well-known
pomologist of the same place. After the death of her husband, this
brother Robert came to her assistance, Captain Hathorne having left but
little property: he was only thirty-two when he died.

Nathaniel had been born in a solid, old-fashioned little house on Union
Street, which very appropriately faced the old shipyard of the town in
1760; and it appears that in the year before his birth, the Custom House
of that time had been removed to a spot "opposite the long brick
building owned by W. S. Gray, and Benjamin H. Hathorne,"--as if the
future Surveyor's association with the revenue were already drawing
nearer to him. The widow now moved with her little family to the house
of her father, in Herbert Street, the next one eastward from Union. The
land belonging to this ran through to Union Street, adjoining the house
they had left; and from his top-floor study here, in later years,
Hawthorne could look down on the less lofty roof under which he was
born. The Herbert Street house, however, was spoken of as being on Union
Street, and it is that one which is meant in a passage of the "American
Note-Books" (October 25, 1838), which says, "In this dismal chamber FAME
was won," as likewise in the longer revery in the same volume, dated
October 4, 1840.

"Certainly," the sister of Hawthorne writes to me of him, "no man ever
needed less a formal biography." But the earlier portion of his life, of
which so little record has been made public, must needs bear so
interesting a relation to his later career, that I shall examine it with
as much care as I may.

Very few details of his early boyhood have been preserved; but these go
to show that his individuality soon appeared. "He was a pleasant child,
quite handsome, with golden curls," is almost the first news we have of
him; but his mastering sense of beauty soon made itself known. While
quite a little fellow, he is reported to have said of a woman who was
trying to be kind to him, "Take her away! She is ugly and fat, and has a
loud voice!" When still a very young school-boy, he was fond of taking
long walks entirely by himself; was seldom or never known to have a
companion; and in especial, haunted Legg's Hill, a place some miles from
his home. The impression of his mother's loss and loneliness must have
taken deep and irremovable hold upon his heart; the wide, bleak,
uncomprehended fact that his father would never return, that he should
never see him, seems to have sunk into his childish reveries like a
cabalistic spell, turning thought and feeling and imagination toward
mournful and mysterious things. Before he had passed from his mother's
care to that of the schoolmaster, it is known that he would break out
from the midst of childish broodings, and exclaim, "There, mother! I is
going away to sea, some time"; then, with an ominous shaking of the
head, "and I'll never come back again!" The same refrain lurked in his
mind when, a little older, he would tell his sisters fantastic tales,
and give them imaginary accounts of long journeys, which he should take
in future, in the course of which he flew at will through the air; on
these occasions he always ended with the same hopeless prophecy of his
failing to return. No doubt, also, there was a little spice of boyish
mischief in this; and something of the fictionist, for it enabled him to
make a strong impression on his audience. He brought out the
_dénouement_ in such a way as to seem--so one of those who heard
him has written--to enjoin upon them "the advice to value him the more
while he stayed with" them. This choice of the lugubrious, however,
seems to have been native to him; for almost before he could speak
distinctly he is reported to have caught up certain lines of "Richard
III." which he had heard read; and his favorite among them, always
declaimed on the most unexpected occasions and in his loudest tone,
was,--

  "Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pass!"

Though he has nowhere made allusion to the distant and sudden death of
his father, Hawthorne has mentioned an uncle lost at sea, in the
"English Notes," [Footnote: June 30, 1854]--a startling passage. "If it
is not known how and when a man dies," he says "it makes a ghost of him
for many years thereafter, perhaps for centuries. King Arthur is an
example; also the Emperor Frederic [Barbarossa] and other famous men who
were thought to be alive ages after their disappearance. So with private
individuals. I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the
beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour. But
as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up
the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons
whose descriptions answered to his. Some people actually affirmed that
they had seen him in various parts of the world. Thus, so far as her
belief was concerned, he still walked the earth. And even to this day I
never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that
this may be the lost uncle." At the time of that loss Hawthorne was but
eight years old; he wrote this memorandum at fifty; and all that time
the early impression had remained intact, and the old semi-hallucination
about the uncle's being still alive hung about his mind through forty
years. When we change the case, and replace the uncle in whom he had no
very distinct interest with the father whose decease had so overclouded
his mother's life, and thwarted the deep yearnings of his own young
heart, we may begin to guess the depth and persistence of the emotions
which must have been awakened in him by this awful silence and absence
of death, so early thrown across the track of his childish life. I
conceive those lonely school-boy walks, overblown by shadow-freighting
murmurs of the pine and accompanied by the far-off, muffled roll of the
sea, to have been full of questionings too deep for words, too sacred
for other companionship than that of uninquisitive Nature;--questionings
not even shaped and articulated to his own inner sense.

Yet, whatever half-created, formless world of profound and tender
speculations and sad reflections the boy was moulding within himself,
this did not master him. The seed, as time went on, came to miraculous
issue; but as yet the boy remained, healthily and for the most part
happily, a boy still. A lady who, as a child, lived in a house which
looked upon the garden of the widow's new abiding-place, used to see him
at play there with his sisters, a graceful but sturdy little figure; and
a little incident of his school-days, at the same time that it shows how
soon he began to take a philosophical view of things, gives a hint of
his physical powers. He was put to study under Dr. J. E. Worcester, the
famous lexicographer, (who, on graduating at Yale, in 1811, had come to
Salem and taken a school there for a few years;) and it is told of him
at this time, on the best authority, that he frequently came home with
accounts of having fought with a comrade named John Knights.

"But why do you fight with him so often?" asked one of his sisters.

"I can't help it," he said. "John Knights is a boy of very quarrelsome
disposition."

Something in the judicial, reproving tone of the reply seems to hint
that Hawthorne had taken the measure of his rival, physically as well as
mentally, and had found himself more than a match for the poor fellow.
All that is known of his bodily strength in maturer boyhood and at
college weighs on this side; and Horatio Bridge, [Footnote: See
Prefatory Note to The Snow Image.] his classmate and most intimate
friend at Bowdoin College, tells me that, though remarkably
calm-tempered, any suspicion of disrespect roused him into readiness to
give the sort of punishment that his athletic frame warranted.

But one of the most powerful influences acting on this healthy,
unsuspected, un-self-suspecting genius must have been that of books. The
house in Herbert Street was well provided with them, and he was allowed
to make free choice. His selection was seldom, if ever, questioned; and
this was well, for he thus drew to himself the mysterious aliment on
which his genius throve. Shakespere, Milton, Pope, and Thomson are
mentioned among the first authors with whom he made acquaintance on
first beginning to read; and "The Castle of Indolence" seems to have
been one of his favorite poems while a boy. He is also known to have
read, before fourteen, more or less of Rousseau's works, and to have
gone through, with great diligence, the whole of "The Newgate Calendar,"
which latter selection excited a good deal of comment among his family
and relatives, but no decisive opposition. A remark of his has come down
from that time, that he cared "very little for the history of the world
before the fourteenth century"; and he had a judicious shyness of what
was considered useful reading. Of the four poets there is of course but
little trace in his works; Rousseau, with his love of nature and
impressive abundance of emotion, seems to stand more directly related to
the future author's development, and "The Newgate Calendar" must have
supplied him with the most weighty suggestions for those deep ponderings
on sin and crime which almost from the first tinged the pellucid current
of his imagination. There is another book, however, early and familiarly
known to him, which indisputably affected the bent of his genius in an
important degree. This is Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."

Being a healthy boy, with strong out-of-door instincts planted in him by
inheritance from his seafaring sire, it might have been that he would
not have been brought so early to an intimacy with books, but for an
accident similar to that which played a part in the boyhoods of Scott
and Dickens. When he was nine years old he was struck on the foot by a
ball, and made seriously lame. The earliest fragment of his writing now
extant is a letter to his uncle Robert Manning, at that time in Raymond,
Maine, written from Salem, December 9, 1813. It announces that his foot
is no better, and that a new doctor is to be sent for. "May be," the boy
writes, "he will do me some good, for Dr. B---- has not, and I don't
know as Dr. K---- will." He adds that it is now four weeks since he has
been to school, "and I don't know but it will be four weeks longer."
This weighing of possibilities, and this sense of the uncertain future,
already quaintly show the disposition of the man he is to grow into;
though the writing is as characterless as extreme youth, exaggerated
distinctness, and copy-books could make it. The little invalid has not
yet quite succumbed, however, for the same letter details that he has
hopped out into the street once since his lameness began, and been "out
in the office and had four cakes." But the trouble was destined to last
much longer than even the young seer had projected his gaze. There was
some threat of deformity, and it was not until he was nearly twelve that
he became quite well. Meantime, his kind schoolmaster, Dr. Worcester (at
whose sessions it may have been that Hawthorne read Enfield's "Speaker,"
the name of which had "a classical sound in his ears," long, long
afterward, when he saw the author's tombstone in Liverpool), came to
hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after
this in Hawthorne's boyish history; but a copy of Worcester's Dictionary
still exists and is in present use, which bears in a tremulous writing
on the fly-leaf the legend: "Nathaniel Hawthorne, Esq., with the
respects of J. E. Worcester." For a long time, in the worst of his
lameness, the gentle boy was forced to lie prostrate, and choosing the
floor for his couch, he would read there all day long. He was extremely
fond of cats,--a taste which he kept through life; and during this
illness, forced to odd resorts for amusement, he knitted a pair of
stockings for the cat who reigned in the household at the time. When
tired of reading, he diverted himself with constructing houses of books
for the same feline pet, building walls for her to leap, and perhaps
erecting triumphal arches for her to pass under. In this period he must
have taken a considerable range in literature, for his age; and one
would almost say that Nature, seeing so rare a spirit in a sound body
that kept him sporting and away from reading, had devised a seemingly
harsh plan of luring him into his proper element.

It was more likely after this episode than before, that Bunyan took that
hold upon him so fraught with consequences. He went every Sunday to his
grandmother Hathorne's, and every Sunday he would lay hands upon the
book; then, going to a particular three-cornered chair in a particular
corner of the room, "he would read it by the hour, without once
speaking." I have already suggested the relations of the three minds,
Milton, Bunyan, and Hawthorne. The more obvious effect of this reading
is the allegorical turn which it gave the boy's thoughts, manifest in
many of his shorter productions while a young man; the most curious and
complete issue being that of "The Celestial Railroad," in the "Mosses,"
where Christian's pilgrimage is so deftly parodied in a railroad route
to the heavenly goal. Full of keen satire, it does not, as it might at
first seem, tend to diminish Bunyan's dignity, but inspires one with a
novel sense of it, as one is made to gradually pierce the shams of
certain modern cant. But a more profound consequence was the direction
of Hawthorne's expanding thought toward sin and its various and occult
manifestations. Imagine the impression upon a mind so fine, so
exquisitely responsive, and so well prepared for grave revery as
Hawthorne's, which a passage like the following would make. In his
discourse with Talkative, Faithful says: "A man may cry out against sin,
of policy; but he cannot abhor it but by virtue of a godly antipathy. I
have heard many cry out against sin in the pulpit, who can abide it well
enough in the heart, house, and conversation."

Here is almost the motive and the moral of "The Scarlet Letter." But
Hawthorne refined upon it unspeakably, and probed many fathoms deeper,
when he perceived that there might be motives far more complex than that
of policy, a condition much more subtly counterfeiting the mien of
goodness and spirituality. Talkative replies, "You lie at a catch, I
perceive,"--meaning that he is sophistical. "No, not I," says Faithful;
"I am only for setting things right." Did not this desire of setting
things right stir ever afterward in Hawthorne's consciousness? It is not
a little singular to trace in Bunyan two or three much more direct links
with some of Hawthorne's work. When Christiana at the Palace Beautiful
is shown one of the apples that Eve ate of, and Jacob's ladder with some
angels ascending upon it, it incites one to turn to that marvellously
complete "Virtuoso's Collection," [Footnote: Mosses from an Old Manse,
Vol. II.] where Hawthorne has preserved Shelley's skylark and the steed
Rosinante, with Hebe's cup and many another impalpable marvel, in the
warden-ship of the Wandering Jew. So, too, when we read Great-Heart's
analysis of Mr. Fearing, this expression, "He had, I think, a Slough of
Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him," we
can detect the root of symbolical conceptions like that of "The Bosom
Serpent." [Footnote: Mosses from an Old Manse, Vol. II.] I cannot
refrain from copying here some passages from this same portion which
recall in an exceptional way some of the traits of Hawthorne, enough, at
least, to have given them a partially prophetic power over his
character. Mr. Great-Heart says of Mr. Fearing: "He desired much to be
alone; yet he always loved good talk, and often would get behind the
screen to hear it." (So Hawthorne screened himself behind his genial
reserve.) "He also loved much to see ancient things, and to be pondering
them in his mind." What follows is not so strictly analogous throughout.
Mr. Honest asks Great-Heart why so good a man as Fearing "should be all
his days so much in the dark." And he answers, "There are two sorts of
reasons for it. One is, the wise God will have it so: some must pipe,
and some must weep.... And for my part, I care not at all for that
profession which begins not in heaviness of mind. The first string that
the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in
tune. God also plays upon this string first, when he sets the soul in
tune for himself. Only there was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing; he
could play upon no other music but this, till towards his latter end."
Let the reader by no means imagine a moral comparison between Hawthorne
and Bunyan's Mr. Fearing. The latter, as his creator says, "was a good
man, though much down in spirit"; and Hawthorne, eminent in uprightness,
was also overcast by a behest to look for the most part at the darker
phases of human thinking and feeling; yet there could not have been the
slightest real similarity between him and the excellent but weak-kneed
Mr. Fearing, whose life is made heavy by the doubt of his inheritance in
the next world. Still, though the causes differ, it could be said of
Hawthorne, as of Master Fearing, "Difficulties, lions, or Vanity Fair,
he feared not at all; it was only sin, death, and hell that were to him
a terror." I mean merely that Hawthorne may have found in this
character-sketch--Bunyan's most elaborate one, for the typical subject
of which he shows an evident fondness and leniency--something peculiarly
fascinating, which may not have been without its shaping influence for
him. But the intimate, affectionate, and lasting relation between
Bunyan's allegory and our romancer is something to be perfectly assured
of. The affinity at once suggests itself, and there are allusions in the
"Note-Books" and the works of Hawthorne which recall and sustain it. So
late as 1854, he notes that "an American would never understand the
passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a
by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no stiles
and by-paths in our country." Rarely, too, as Hawthorne quotes from or
alludes to other authors, there is a reference to Bunyan in "The
Blithedale Romance," and several are found in "The Scarlet Letter": it
is in that romance that the most powerful suggestion of kinship between
the two imaginations occurs. After Mr. Dimmesdale's interview with
Hester, in the wood, he suffers the most freakish temptations to various
blasphemy on returning to the town: he meets a deacon, and desires to
utter evil suggestions concerning the communion-supper; then a pious and
exemplary old dame, fortunately deaf, into whose ear a mad impulse urges
him to whisper what then seemed to him an "unanswerable argument against
the immortality of the soul," and after muttering some incoherent words,
he sees "an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like
the _shine of the celestial city_ on her face." Then comes the most
frightful temptation of all, as he sees approaching him a maiden newly
won into his flock. "She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in
Paradise. The minister knew well that he himself was enshrined within
the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about
his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a
religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young
girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of
this sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?--this lost and
desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered to him to
condense into small compass and drop into her tender bosom a germ of
evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit
betimes." Now, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, "poor Christian was
so confounded, that he did not know his own voice.... Just when he was
come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones
got behind him and stepped up softly to him, and, whisperingly,
suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had
proceeded from his own mind." I need not enlarge upon the similar drift
of these two extracts; still less mark the matured, detailed, and
vividly human and dramatic superiority of Hawthorne's use of the element
common to both.

For other reading in early boyhood he had Spenser (it is said that the
first book which he bought with his own money was "The Faery Queen," for
which he kept a fondness all his life), Froissart's "Chronicles," and
Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion." The incident of Dr. Johnson's
penance in Uttoxeter Market dwelt so intimately in Hawthorne's mind (he
has treated it in the "True Stories," and touches very tenderly upon it
in "Our Old Home," where he says that he "has always been profoundly
impressed" by it), that I fancy a childish impression must have endeared
it to him; and Boswell may have been one of his acquisitions at this
time. Perhaps Dr. Worcester made the book known to him; and he would not
be at a loss to find endless entertainment there.

It was in November, 1813, that the accident at ball disabled him. In
June of the same year an event had taken place which must have entered
strongly into his heart, as into that of many another Salem boy. Young
Lawrence, of the American navy,--who had won honors for himself at
Tripoli and in the then prevailing war with Great Britain,--had just
been promoted, for gallant achievements off the coast of Brazil, to a
captaincy, and put in command of the frigate "Chesapeake," at Boston. A
British frigate, the "Shannon," had been cruising for some time in the
neighborhood, seeking an encounter with the "Chesapeake," and the
valiant Lawrence felt compelled to go out and meet her, though he had
only just assumed command, had had no time to discipline his crew (some
of whom were disaffected), and was without the proper complement of
commissioned officers. Americans know the result; how the "Chesapeake"
was shattered and taken in a fifteen minutes' fight off Marblehead, and
how Lawrence fell with a mortal wound, uttering those unforgotten words,
"Don't give up the ship." The battle was watched by crowds of people
from Salem, who swarmed upon the hillsides to get a glimpse of the
result.

When the details at last reached the town, many days afterward, Captain
George Crowninshield fitted out a flag of truce, sailed for Halifax with
ten shipmasters on board, and obtained the bodies of Lawrence and his
lieutenant, Ludlow. Late in August they returned, and the city gave
itself to solemnities in honor of the lost heroes, with the martial
dignity of processions and the sorrowing sound of dirges. Cannon
reverberated around them, and flags drooped above them at half-mast,
shorn of their splendor. Joseph Story delivered an eloquent oration over
them, and there was mourning in the hearts of every one, mixed with that
spiritualized sense of national grandeur and human worth that comes at
hours like this. Among the throngs upon the streets that day must have
stood the boy Nathaniel Hawthorne; not too young to understand, and
imbibing from this spectacle, as from many other sources, that profound
love of country, that ingrained, ineradicable American quality, which
marked his whole maturity.

I have not found any distinct corroboration of the report that Nathaniel
again lost the use of his limbs, before going to Maine to live. In
another brief, boyish letter dated "Salem, Monday, July 21, 1818" (all
these documents are short, and allude to the writer's inability to find
anything more to say), he speaks of wanting to "go to dancing-school a
little longer" before removing with his mother to the house which his
uncle is building at Raymond. He has also, he says, been to Nahant,
which he likes, because "fish are very thick there"; both items seeming
to show a proper degree of activity. There has been a tendency among
persons who have found nothing to obstruct the play of their fancies, to
establish a notion of almost ill-balanced mental precocity in this
powerful young genius, who seems to have advanced as well in muscular as
in intellectual development.

It was in October, 1818, that Mrs. Hathorne carried her family to
Raymond, to occupy the new house, a dwelling so ambitious, gauged by the
primitive community thereabouts, that it gained the title of "Manning's
Folly." Raymond is in Cumberland County, a little east of Sebago Lake,
and the house, which is still standing, mossy and dismantled, is near
what has since been called Radoux's Mills. Though built by Robert
Manning, it was purchased afterward by his brother Richard, whose widow
married Mr. Radoux, the owner of these mills. Richard Manning's will
provided for the establishing of a meeting-house in the neighborhood,
and his widow transformed the Folly into a Tabernacle; but, the
community ceasing to use it after a few years, it has remained
untenanted and decaying ever since, enjoying now the fame of being
haunted. Lonely as was the region then, it perhaps had a more lively
aspect than at present: A clearing probably gave the inmates of the
Folly a clear sweep of vision to the lake; and to the northwest, beyond
the open fields that still lie there, frown dark pine slopes, ranging
and rising away into "forest-crowned hills; while in the far distance
every hue of rock and tree, of field and grove, melts into the soft blue
of Mount Washington." This weird and woodsy ground of Cumberland became
the nurturing soil of Hawthorne for some years. He stayed only one
twelvemonth at Sebago Lake, returning to Salem after that for college
preparation. But Brunswick, where his academic years were passed, lies
less than thirty miles from the home in the woods, and within the same
county: doubtless, also, he spent some of his summer vacations at
Raymond. The brooding spell of his mother's sorrow was perhaps even
deepened in this favorable solitude. I know not whether the faith of
women's hearts really finds an easier avenue to such consecration as
this of Mrs. Hathorne's, in Salem, than elsewhere. I happen lately to
have heard of a widow in that same neighborhood who has remained
bereaved and uncomforted for more than seventeen years. With pathetic
energy she spends the long days of summer, in long, incessant walks,
sorrow-pursued, away from the dwellings of men. But, however this be, I
think this divine and pure devotion to a first love, though it may have
impregnated Hawthorne's mind too keenly with the mournfulness of
mortality, was yet one of the most cogent means of entirely clarifying
the fine spirit which he inherited, and that he in part owes to this
exquisite example his marvellous, unsurpassed spirituality. A woman thus
true to her highest experience and her purest memories, by living in a
sacred communion with the dead, annihilates time and is already set in
an atmosphere of eternity. Ah, strong and simple soul that knew not how
to hide your grief under specious self-comfortings and maxims of
convenience, and so bowed in lifelong prostration before the knowledge
of your first, unsullied love, be sure the world will sooner or later
know how much it owes to such as you!

More than once has Nathaniel Hawthorne touched the delicate fibres of
the heart that thrill again in this memorial grief of his mother's; and,
incongruous as is the connection of the following passage out of one of
the Twice-Told Tales, it is not hard to trace the origin of the
sensibility and insight which prompted it: "It is more probably the
fact," so it runs, "that while men are able to reflect upon their lost
companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other
hand, are _conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the
departed, whithersoever he has gone_" [Footnote: "drippings with a
Chisel," in Vol. II. of the Twice-Told Tales.] But the most perfect
example of his sympathy with this sorrow of widowhood is that brief,
concentrated, and seemingly slight tale, "The Wives of the Dead,"
[Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales.] than which
I know of nothing more touching and true, more exquisitely proportioned
and dramatically wrought out among all English tales of the same scope
and length. It pictures the emotions of "two young and comely women,"
the "recent brides of two brothers, a sailor and a landsman; and two
successive days had brought tidings of the death of each, by the chances
of Canadian warfare and the tempestuous Atlantic." The action occupies
the night after the news, and turns upon the fact that each sister is
roused, unknown to the other, at different hours, to be told that the
report about her husband is false. One cannot give its beauty without
the whole, more than one can separate the dewdrop from the morning-glory
without losing the effect they make together. It is a complete
presentment, in little, of all that dwells in widowhood. One sentence I
may remind the reader of, nevertheless: "Her face was turned partly inward
to the pillow, and had been hidden there to weep; but a look of motionless
contentment was now visible upon it, as if her heart, like a deep lake,
had grown calm because its dead had sunk down so far within it." Even as
his widowed mother's face looked, to the true-souled boy, when they dwelt
there together in the forest of pines, beside the placid lake!

Yet clear and searching as must then have been his perceptions, he had
not always formulated them or made them his chief concern. On May 16,
1819 (the first spring after coming to the new abode), he writes to his
uncle Robert that "we are all very well"; and "the grass and some of the
trees look very green, the roads are very good, there is no snow on
Lymington mountains. The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid
out and planted.... I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught
eighteen large trout out of our brooke. I am sorry you intend to send me
to school again." Happy boy! he thinks he has found his vocation: it is,
to shoot henhawks and catch trout. But his uncle, fortunately, is
otherwise minded, though Nathaniel writes, in the same note: "Mother
says she can hardly spare me." The sway of outdoor life must have been
very strong over this stalwart boy's temperament. One who saw a great
deal of him has related how in the very last year of his life Hawthorne
reverted with fondness, perhaps with something of a sick and sinking
man's longing for youthful scenes, to these early days at Sebago Lake;
"Though it was there," he confessed, "I first got my cursed habits of
solitude." "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so
perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the moonlight nights of
winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with
the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself
far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would
sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning
on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the
stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring
up. "Ah," he said, "how well I recall the summer days, also, when with
my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!... Everything is
beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it then!" The same
writer mentions the author's passion for the sea, telling how, on the
return from England in 1860, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his
quiet, earnest way: "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never
touch the shore again." I have it from his sister that he used to
declare that, had he not been sent to college, he should have become a
mariner, like his predecessors. Indeed, he had the fresh air and the
salt spray in his blood.

Still it is difficult to believe that by any chance he could have missed
carrying out his inborn disposition toward literature. After we have
explained all the fostering influences and formative forces that
surround and stamp a genius of this sort, we come at last to the
inexplicable mystery of that interior impulse which, if it does not find
the right influences at first, presses forth, breaks out to right and
left and keeps on pushing, until it feels itself at ease. It cannot
wholly _make_ its own influences, but it fights to the death before
it will give up the effort to lay itself open to these; that is, to get
into a proper surrounding. The surrounding may be as far as possible
from what we should prescribe as the fit one; but the being in whom
perception and receptivity exist in that active state which we call
genius will adapt itself, and will instinctively discern whether the
conditions of life around it can yield a bare nourishment, or whether it
must seek other and more fertile conditions. Hawthorne had an ancestry
behind him connected with a singular and impressive history, had
remarkable parents, and especially a mother pure and lofty in spirit;
lived in a suggestive atmosphere of private sorrow and amid a community
of much quaintness; he was also enabled to know books at an early age;
yet these things only helped, and not produced, his genius. Sometimes
they helped by repression, for there was much that was uncongenial in
his early life; yet the clairvoyance, the unconscious wisdom, of that
interior quality, _genius_, made him feel that the adjustment of
his outer and his inner life was such as to give him a chance of
unfolding. Had he gone to sea, his awaking power would have come
violently into contact with the hostile conditions of sailor-life: he
would have revolted against them, and have made his way into literature
against head-wind or reluctant tiller-rope alike. It may, of course, be
said that this prediction is too easy. But there are evidences of the
mastering bent of Hawthorne's mind, which show that it would have ruled
in any case.

As we have seen, he returned to Salem in 1819, to school; and on March
7, 1820, he wrote thus to his mother:--

"I have left school, and have begun to fit for College under Benjm. L.
Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in
your family. Mr. Oliver thought I could enter College next commencement,
but Uncle Robert is afraid I should have to study too hard. I get my
lessons at home, and recite them to him [Mr. Oliver] at 7 o'clock in the
morning.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A
minister I will not be." This is the first dawn of the question of a
career, apparently. Yet he still has a yearning to escape the solution.
"I am extremely homesick," he says, in one part of the letter; and at
the close he gives way to the sentiment entirely: "O how I wish I was
again with you, with nothing to do but to go a gunning. But the happiest
days of my life are gone.... After I have got through college, I will
come down to learn E---- Latin and Greek." (Is it too fanciful to note
that at this stage of the epistle "college" is no longer spelt with a
large C?) The signature to this letter shows the boy so amiably that I
append it.

"I remain," he says,
  "Your
    Affectionate
      and
        Dutiful
          son,
            and
              Most
                Obedient
                  and
                    Most
                      Humble
                        Servant,
                          and
                            Most
                              Respectful
                                and
                                  Most
                                    Hearty
                                      Well-wisher,
                            NATHANIEL HATHORNE."

A jesting device this, which the writer, were he now living, would
perhaps think too trivial to make known; yet why should we not recall
with pleasure the fact that in his boyish days he could make this
harmless little play, to throw an unexpected ray of humor and gladness
into the lonely heart of his mother, far away in the Maine woods? And
with this pleasure, let there be something of honor and reverence for
his pure young heart.

In another letter of this period [Footnote: This letter, long in the
possession of Miss E. P. Peabody, Mr. Hawthorne's sister-in-law,
unfortunately does not exist any longer. The date has thus been
forgotten, but the passage is clear in Miss Peabody's recollection.] he
had made a long stride towards the final choice, as witness this
extract:--

"I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases, nor a minister
to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I
don't see that there is anything left for me but to be an author. How
would you like some day to see a whole shelf full of books, written by
your son, with 'Hawthorne's Works' printed on their backs?"

But, before going further, it will be well to look at certain "Early
Notes," purporting to be Hawthorne's, and published in the Portland
"Transcript" at different times in 1871 and 1873. A mystery overhangs
them; [Footnote: See Appendix I.] and it has been impossible, up to this
time, to procure proof of their genuineness. Most of the persons named
in them have, nevertheless, been identified by residents of Cumberland
County, who knew them in boyhood, and the internal evidence of
authorship seems to make at least some of them Hawthorne's. On the first
leaf of the manuscript book, said to contain them, was written (as
reported by the discoverer) an inscription, to the effect that the book
had been given to Nathaniel Hawthorne by his uncle Richard Manning,
"with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as
good words as he can, upon any and all subjects, as it is one of the
best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and
language"; and this was dated at Raymond, June 1, 1816. This account, if
true, puts the book into the boy's hands at the age of twelve. He did
not go to Raymond to live until two years later, but had certainly been
there, before, and his Uncle Richard was already living there in 1816.
So that the entries may have begun soon after June, of that year, though
their mature character makes this improbable. In this case, they must
cover more than a year's time. The dates were not given by the furnisher
of the extracts, and only one item can be definitely provided with a
date. This must have been penned in or after 1819; and yet it seems also
probable that the whole series was written before the author's college
days. If genuine, then, they hint the scope and quality of Hawthorne's
perceptions during a few years antecedent to his college-course,
and--whether his own work or not--they picture the sort of life which he
must have seen at Raymond.

"Two kingbirds have built their nest between our house and the
mill-pond. The male is more courageous than any creature that I know
about. He seems to have taken possession of the territory from the great
pond to the small one, and goes out to war with every fish-hawk that
flies from one to the other, over his dominion. The fish-hawks must be
miserable cowards, to be driven by such a speck of a bird. I have not
yet seen one turn to defend himself.

"Swapped pocket knives with Robinson Cook yesterday. Jacob Dingley says
that he cheated me, but I think not, for I cut a fishing pole this
morning, and did it well; besides, he is a Quaker, and they never
cheat."

Richard Manning had married Susan Dingley; this Jacob was probably her
nephew. In this allusion to Quakers one might fancy a germ of tolerance
which ripened into "The Gentle Boy."

"Captain Britton from Otisfield was at Uncle Richard's today. Not long
ago, uncle brought here from Salem a new kind of potatoes called 'Long
Reds.' Captain Britton had some for seed, and uncle asked how he liked
them. He answered, 'They yield well, grow very long,--one end is very
poor, and the other good for nothing.' I laughed about it after he was
gone, but uncle looked sour and said there was no wit in his answer, and
that the saying was 'stale.' It was new to me, and his way of saying it
very funny. Perhaps uncle did not like to hear his favorite potato
spoken of in that way, and that if the captain had praised it he would
have been called witty."

"Captain Britton promised to bring 'Gulliver's Travels' for me to read,
the next time he comes this way, which is every time he goes to
Portland. Uncle Richard has not the book in his library.

"This morning the bucket got off the chain, and dropped back into the
well. I wanted to go down on the stones and get it. Mother would not
consent, for fear the wall might cave in, but hired Samuel Shane to go
down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs.
Shane not quite so valuable as the son of the Widow Hawthorne. God bless
her for all her love for me, though it may be some selfish. We are to
have a pump in the well, after this mishap.

"Washington Longley has been taking lessons of a drumming master. He was
in the grist-mill to day, and practised with two sticks on the
half-bushel. I was astonished at the great number of strokes in a
second, and if I had not seen that he had but two sticks, should have
supposed that he was drumming with twenty."

"Major Berry went past our house with a large drove of sheep yesterday.
One, a last spring's lamb, gave out; could go no farther. I saw him down
near the bridge. The poor dumb creature looked into my eyes, and I
thought I knew just what he would say if he could speak, and so asked
Mr. Berry what he would sell him for. 'Just the price of his pelt, and
that will bring sixty-five cents,' was the answer. I ran and petitioned
mother for the money, which she soon gave me, saying with a smile that
she tried to make severe, but could not, that I was 'a great
spendthrift.' The lamb is in our orchard now, and he made a bow (without
taking off his hat) and thanked me this morning for saving him from the
butcher.

"Went yesterday in a sail-boat on the Great Pond, with Mr. Peter White
of Windham. He sailed up here from White's Bridge to see Captain
Dingley, and invited Joseph Dingley and Mr. Ring to take a boat-ride out
to the Dingley Islands and to the Images. He was also kind enough to say
that I might go (with my mother's consent), which she gave after much
coaxing. Since the loss of my father she dreads to have any one
belonging to her go upon the water. It is strange that this beautiful
body of water is called a 'Pond.' The geography tells of many in
Scotland and Ireland not near so large that are called 'Lakes.' It is
not respectful to speak of so noble, deep, and broad a collection of
clear water as a 'Pond'; it makes a stranger think of geese, and then of
goose-pond. Mr. White, who knows all this region, told us that the
streams from thirty-five ponds, large and small, flow into this, and he
calls it Great Basin. We landed on one of the small islands that Captain
Dingley cleared for a sheep pasture when he first came to Raymond. Mr.
Ring said that he had to do it to keep his sheep from the bears and
wolves. A growth of trees has started on the island, and makes a grove
so fine and pleasant, that I wish almost that our house was there. On
the way from the island to the Images Mr. Ring caught a black spotted
trout that was almost a whale, and weighed before it was cut open, after
we got back to Uncle Richard's store, eighteen and a half pounds. The
men said that if it had been weighed as soon as it came out of the water
it would have been nineteen pounds. This trout had a droll-looking
hooked nose, and they tried to make me believe, that if the line had
been in my hands, that I should have been obliged to let go, or have
been pulled out of the boat. They were men, and had a right to say so. I
am a boy, and have a right to think differently. We landed at the
Images, when I crept into the cave and got a drink of cool water. In
coming home we sailed over a place, not far from the Images, where Mr.
White has, at some time, let down a line four hundred feet without
finding bottom. This seems strange, for he told us, too, that his boat,
as it floated, was only two hundred and fifty feet higher than the boats
in Portland Harbor, and that if the Great Pond was pumped dry, a man
standing on its bottom, just under where we then were, would be more
than one hundred and fifty feet lower than the surface of the water at
the Portland wharves. Coming up the Dingley Bay, had a good view of
Rattlesnake Mountain, and it seemed to me wonderfully beautiful as the
almost setting sun threw over its western crags streams of fiery light.
If the Indians were very fond of this part of the country, it is easy to
see why; beavers, otters, and the finest fish were abundant, and the
hills and streams furnished constant variety. I should have made a good
Indian, if I had been born in a wigwam. To talk like sailors, we made
the old hemlock-stub at the mouth of the Dingley Mill Brook just before
sunset, and sent a _boy_ ashore with a hawser, and was soon safely
moored to a bunch of alders. After we got ashore Mr. White allowed me to
fire his long gun at a mark. I did not hit the mark, and am not sure
that I saw it at the time the gun went off, but believe, rather, that I
was watching for the noise that I was about to make. Mr. Ring said that
with practice I could be a gunner, and that now, with a very heavy
charge, he thought I could kill a horse at eight paces. Mr. White went
to Uncle Richard's for the night, and I went home and amused my mother
with telling how pleasantly the day had passed. When I told her what Mr.
Ring said about my killing a horse, she said he was making fun of me. I
had found that out before.

"Mr. March Gay killed a rattlesnake yesterday not far from his house,
that was more than six feet long and had twelve rattles. This morning
Mr. Jacob Mitchell killed another near the same place, almost as long.
It is supposed that they were a pair, and that the second one was on the
track of its mate. If every rattle counts a year, the first one was
twelve years old. Eliak Maxfield came down to mill to-day and told me
about the snakes.

"Mr. Henry Turner of Otisfield took his axe and went out between
Saturday and Moose ponds to look at some pine-trees. A rain had just
taken off enough of the snow to lay bare the roots of a part of the
trees. Under a large root there seemed to be a cavity, and on examining
closely something was exposed very much like long black hair. He cut off
the root, saw the nose of a bear, and killed him, pulled out the body;
saw another, killed that, and dragged out its carcass, when he found
that there was a third one in the den, and that he was thoroughly awake,
too; but as soon as the head came in sight it was split open with the
axe, so that Mr. Turner, alone with only an axe, killed three bears in
less than half an hour, the youngest being a good-sized one, and what
hunters call a yearling. This is a pretty great bear story, but probably
true, and happened only a few weeks ago; for John Patch, who was here
with his father Captain Levi Patch, who lives within two miles of the
Saturday Pond, told me so yesterday.

"A young man named Henry Jackson, Jr., was drowned two days ago, up in
Crooked River. He and one of his friends were trying which could swim
the faster. Jackson was behind but gaining; his friend kicked at him in
fun, thinking to hit his shoulder and push him back, but missed, and hit
his chin, which caused him to take in water and strangle, and before his
friend could help or get help, poor Jackson was (Elder Leach says)
beyond the reach of mercy. I read one of the Psalms to my mother this
morning, and it plainly declares twenty-six times that 'God's mercy
endureth forever.' I never saw Henry Jackson; he was a young man just
married. Mother is sad, says that she shall not consent to my swimming
any more in the mill-pond with the boys, fearing that in sport my mouth
might get kicked open, and then sorrow for a dead son be added to that
for a dead father, which she says would break her heart. I love to swim,
but I shall not disobey my mother.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Fishing from the bridge to-day, I caught an eel two thirds as long as
myself. Mr. Watkins tried to make me believe that he thought it a water
moccasin snake. Old Mr. Shane said that it was a 'young sea-sarpint
sure.' Mr. Ficket, the blacksmith, begged it to take home for its skin,
as he said for buskin-strings and flail-strings. So ends my day's
fishing.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Went over to-day to see Watkins make bricks. I have always thought
there was some mystery about it, but I can make them myself. Why did the
Israelites complain so much at having to make bricks without straw? I
should not use straw if I was a brick-maker; besides, when they are
burned in the kiln, the straw will burn out and leave the bricks full of
holes.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I can, from my chamber window, look across into Aunt Manning's garden,
this morning, and see little Betty Tarbox, flitting among the
rose-bushes, and in and out of the arbor, like a tiny witch. She will
never realize the calamity that came upon her brothers and sisters that
terrible night when her father and mother lay within a few rods of each
other, in the snow, freezing to death. I love the elf, because of her
loss; and still my aunt is much more to her than her own mother, in her
poverty, could have been."

       *       *       *       *       *

This little girl was the child of some poor people of the neighborhood
who were frozen to death one March night, in 1819. In a letter to his
uncle Robert, March 24, 1819, Nathaniel says: "I suppose you have not
heard of the death of Mr. Tarbox and his wife, who were froze to death
last Wednesday. They were brought out from the Cape on Saturday, and
buried from Captain Dingley's on Sunday." This determines the time of
writing the last-quoted extract from the journal.

       *       *       *       *       *

"This morning I saw at the grist-mill a solemn-faced old horse, hitched
to the trough. He had brought for his owner some bags of corn to be
ground, who, after carrying them into the mill, walked up to Uncle
Richard's store, leaving his half-starved animal in the cold wind with
nothing to eat, while the corn was being turned to meal. I felt sorry,
and nobody being near, thought it best to have a talk with the old nag,
and said, 'Good morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?' 'Good morning,
youngster,' said he, just as plain as a horse can speak, and then said,
'I am almost dead, and I wish I was quite. I am hungry, have had no
breakfast, and must stand here tied by the head while they are grinding
the corn, and until master drinks two or three glasses of rum at the
store, then drag him and the meal up the Ben Ham Hill, and home, and am
now so weak that I can hardly stand. O dear, I am in a bad way'; and the
old creature cried. I almost cried myself. Just then the miller went
down stairs to the meal-trough; I heard his feet on the steps, and not
thinking much what I was doing, ran into the mill, and taking the
four-quart toll-dish nearly full of corn out of the hopper, carried it
out and poured it into the trough before the horse, and placed the dish
back before the miller came up from below. When I got out, the horse was
laughing, but he had to eat slowly, because the bits were in his mouth.
I told him that I was sorry, but did not know how to take them out, and
should not dare to if I did, for his master might come out and see what
I was about. 'Thank you,' said he, 'a luncheon of corn with the bits in
is much better than none. The worst of it is, I have to munch so slowly,
that master may come before I finish it, and thrash me for eating his
corn, and you for the kindness.' I sat down on a stone out of the wind,
and waited in trouble, for fear that the miller and the owner of the
corn would come and find out what I had done. At last the horse winked
and stuck out his upper lip ever so far, and then said, 'The last kernel
is gone'; then he laughed a little, then shook one ear, then the other,
then shut his eyes as if to take a nap. I jumped up and said: 'How do
you feel, old fellow; any better?' He opened his eyes, and looking at me
kindly, answered 'very much,' and then blew his nose exceedingly loud,
but he did not wipe it. Perhaps he had no wiper. I then asked if his
master whipped him much. He opened his eyes, and looking at me kindly,
answered, 'Not much lately; he used to till my hide got hardened, but
now he has a white-oak goad-stick with an iron brad in its end, with
which he jabs my hind quarters and hurts me awfully.' I asked him why he
did not kick up, and knock his tormentor out of the wagon. 'I did try
once,' said he, 'but am old and was weak, and could only get my heels
high enough to break the whiffletree, and besides lost my balance and
fell down flat. Master then jumped down, and getting a cudgel struck me
over the head, and I thought my troubles were over. This happened just
before Mr. Ben Ham's house, and I should have been finished and ready
for the crows, if he had not stepped out and told master not to strike
again, if he did he would shake his liver out. That saved my life, but I
was sorry, though Mr. Ham meant good.' The goad with the iron brad was
in the wagon, and snatching it out I struck the end against a stone, and
the stabber flew into the mill-pond. 'There,' says I, 'old colt,' as I
threw the goad back into the wagon, 'he won't harpoon you again with
_that_ iron.' The poor old brute knew well enough what I said, for
I looked him in the eye and spoke horse language. At that moment the
brute that owned the horse came out of the store, and down the hill
towards us. I slipped behind a pile of slabs. The meal was put in the
wagon, the horse unhitched, the wagon mounted, the goad picked up and a
thrust made, but dobbin was in no hurry. Looking at the end of the
stick, the man bawled, 'What little devil has had my goad?' and then
began striking with all his strength; but his steed only walked, shaking
his head as he went across the bridge; and I thought I heard the ancient
Equus say as he went, 'Thrash as much as you please, for once you cannot
stab.' I went home a little uneasy, not feeling sure that the feeding
the man's corn to his horse was not stealing, and thinking that if the
miller found it out, he would have me taken down before Squire Longley.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Polly Maxfield came riding to mill to-day on horseback. She rode as
gracefully as a Trooper. I wish with all my heart that I was as daring a
rider, or half so graceful.

       *       *       *       *       *

"This morning walked down to the Pulpit Rock Hill, and climbed up into
the pulpit. It looks like a rough place to preach from, and does not
seem so much like a pulpit when one is in it, as when viewing it from
the road below. It is a wild place, and really a curiosity. I brought a
book and sat in the rocky recess, and read for nearly an hour. This is a
point on the road known to all teamsters. They have a string of names
for reference by which they tell each other where they met
fellow-teamsters and where their loads got stuck, and I have learned
them from those who stop for drinks at the store. One meets another near
our house, and says, 'Where did you meet Bill?' 'Just this side of
Small's Brook,' or 'At the top of Gray's Pinch,' 'At the Dry Mill-Pond,'
'Just the other side of Lemmy Jones's,' 'On the long causeway,' 'At
Jeems Gowen's,' 'Coming down the Pulpit Rock Hill,' 'Coming down Tarkill
Hill.' I have heard these answers till I have them by heart, without
having any idea where any of the places are, excepting the one I have
seen to-day. While on the bridge near the Pulpit, Mr. West, who lives
not far away, came along and asked where I had been. On my telling him,
he said that no money would hire him to go up to that pulpit; that the
Devil used to preach from it long and long ago; that on a time when
hundreds of them were listening to one of his sermons, a great chief
laughed in the Devil's face, upon which he stamped his foot, and the
ground to the southwest, where they were standing, sunk fifty feet, and
every Indian went down out of sight, leaving a swamp to this day. He
declared that he once stuck a pole in there, which went down easily
several feet, but then struck the skull-bone of an Indian, when
instantly all the hassocks and flags began to shake; he heard a yell as
from fifty overgrown Pequots; that he left the pole and ran for life.
Mr. West also said that no Indian had ever been known to go near that
swamp since, but that whenever one came that way, he turned out of the
road near the house of Mr. West, and went straight to Thomas Pond,
keeping to the eastward of Pulpit Rock, giving it a wide berth. Mr. West
talked as though he believed what he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

"A pedler named Dominicus Jordan was to-day in Uncle Richard's store,
telling a ghost-story. I listened intently, but tried not to seem
interested. The story was of a house, the owner of which was suddenly
killed. Since his death the west garret-window cannot be kept closed;
though the shutters be hasped and nailed at night, they are invariably
found open the next morning, and no one can tell when or how the nails
were drawn. There is also on the farm an apple-tree, the fruit of which
the owner was particularly fond of, but since his death no one has been
able to get one of the apples. The tree hangs full nearly every year,
but whenever any individual tries to get one, stones come in all
directions as if from some secret infernal battery, or hidden catapult,
and more than once have those making the attempts been struck. What is
more strange, the tree stands in an open field, there being no shelter
near from which tricks can be played without exposure. Jordan says that
it seems odd to strangers to see that tree loaded with apples when the
snow is four feet deep; and, what is a mystery, there are no apples in
the spring; no one ever sees the wind blow one off, none are seen on the
snow, nor even the vestige of one on the grass under the tree; and that
children may play on the grass under and around it while it is in the
blossom, and until the fruit is large enough to tempt them, with perfect
safety; but the moment one of the apples is sought for, the air is full
of flying stones. He further says, that late one starlight night he was
passing the house, and looking up saw the phantom walk out of the garret
window with cane in hand, making all the motions as if walking on
_terra firma_, although what appeared to be his feet were at least
six yards from the ground; and so he went walking away on nothing, and
when nearly out of sight there was a great flash and an explosion as of
twenty field-pieces, then--nothing. This story was told with seeming
earnestness, and listened to as though it was believed. How strange it
is that almost all persons, old or young, are fond of hearing about the
supernatural, though it produces nervousness and fear! I should not be
willing to sleep in that garret, though I do not believe a word of the
story.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The lumbermen from Saccarappa are getting their logs across the Great
Pond. Yesterday a strong northwest wind blew a great raft of many
thousands over almost to the mouth of the Dingley Brook. Their anchor
dragged for more than a mile, but when the boom was within twenty or
thirty rods of the shore, it brought up, and held, as I heard some men
say who are familiar with such business. All the men and boys went from
the mill down to the pond to see the great raft, and I among them. They
have a string of logs fastened end to end and surrounding the great
body, which keeps them from scattering, and the string is called a boom.
A small, strong raft, it may be forty feet square, with an upright
windlass in its centre, called a capstan, is fastened to some part of
the boom. The small raft is called 'Head Works,' and from it in a
yawl-boat is carried the anchor, to which is attached a strong rope half
a mile long. The boat is rowed out the whole length of the rope, the
anchor thrown over, and the men on the headworks wind up the capstan and
so draw along the acres of logs. After we went down to the shore,
several of the men came out on the boom nearest to us, and, striking a
single log, pushed it under and outside; then one man with a gallon jug
slung to his back, taking a pickpole, pushed himself ashore on the small
single log,--a feat that seemed almost miraculous to me. This man's name
was Reuben Murch, and he seemed to be in no fear of getting soused. This
masterly kind of navigation he calls 'cuffing the rigging'; nobody could
tell me why he gave it that name. Murch went up to the store, had the
jug filled with rum (the supply having run out on the headworks), and
made the voyage back the way he came. His comrades received him with
cheers, and after sinking the log and drawing it back under the boom,
proceeded to try the contents of the jug, seeming to be well satisfied
with the result of his expedition. It turned out that Murch only rode
the single log ashore to show his adroitness, for the yawl-boat came
round from the headworks, and brought near a dozen men in red shirts to
where we were. I was interested listening to their conversation mixed
with sharp jokes. Nearly every man had a nickname. Murch was called
'Captain Snarl'; a tall, fierce-looking man, who just filled my idea of
a Spanish freebooter, was 'Dr. Coddle.' I think his real name was Wood.
The rum seems to make them crazy, for one, who was called 'Rub-a-dub,'
pitched 'Dr. Coddle' head and heels into the water. A gentlemanly man
named Thompson, who acted as master of ceremonies, or Grand Turk,
interfered and put a stop to what was becoming something like a fight.
Mr. Thompson said that the wind would go down with the sun, and that
they must get ready to start. This morning I went down to look for them,
and the raft was almost to Frye's Island.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I have read 'Gulliver's Travels,' but do not agree with Captain Britton
that it is a witty and uncommonly interesting book; the wit is obscene,
and the _lies_ too _false_."

       *       *       *       *       *

The next and last piece of this note-book was printed two years later
than the preceding items, and after the death of the person who
professed to own the manuscript, but still with the same degree of
mystery, except in the matter of date.

"Day before yesterday Mr. Thomas Little from Windham, Mr. M. P. Sawyer
of Portland, Mr. Thomas A. Deblois, a lawyer, Mr. Hanson of Windham, and
Enoch White, a boy of about my own age, from White's Bridge, came up to
the Dingley Brook in a sail-boat. They were on the way to Muddy River
Bog, for a day's sport, fishing, and shooting ducks. Enoch proposed that
I should go with them. I needed no urging, but knew how unwillingly my
mother would consent. They could wait but a few minutes, and Uncle
Richard kindly wrote a note, asking her to be willing to gratify me
_this_ time.

"She said, 'Yes,' but I was almost sorry, knowing that my day's pleasure
would cost _her_ one of anxiety. However, I gathered up hooks and
lines, with some white salted pork for bait, and with a fabulous number
of biscuit, split in the middle, the insides well buttered, then
skilfully put together again, and all stowed in sister's large work-bag,
and slung over my shoulder. I started, making a wager with Enoch White,
as we walked down to the boat, as to which would catch the largest
number of fish.

"The air was clear, with just breeze enough to shoot us along
pleasantly, without making rough waves. The wind was not exactly after
us, though we made but two tacks to reach the mouth of Muddy River. The
men praised the grand view, after we got into the Great Bay. We could
see the White Hills to the northwest, though Mr. Little said they were
eighty miles from us; and grand old Rattlesnake, to the northeast, in
its immense jacket of green oak, looked more inviting than I had ever
seen it; while Frye's Island, with its close growth of great trees,
growing to the very edge of the water, looked like a monstrous green
raft, floating to the southeastward. Whichever way the eye turned,
something charming appeared. Mr. Little seems to be familiar with every
book that has ever been written, and must have a great memory. Among
other things, he said:--

"'Gentlemen, do you know that this should be called the sea, instead of
the Great Pond; that ships should be built here and navigate this water?
The surface of the Sea of Galilee, of which we hear so much in the New
Testament, was just about equal to the surface of our sea to-day.'

"And then he went on to give a geographical description of the country
about the Sea of Galilee, and draw parallels between places named in the
Testament and points in sight. His talk stole my attention until we were
fairly at Muddy River mouth.

"Muddy River Bog is quite a curiosity. The river empties into the pond
between two small sandy capes or points, only a short distance apart;
but after running up a little between them we found the bog to widen to
fifty or sixty rods in some places, and to be between two or three miles
long. People say that it has no bottom, and that the longest poles that
ever grew may be run down into the mud and then pushed down with another
a little longer, and this may be repeated until the long poles are all
gone.

"Coarse, tall water-grass grows up from the mud over every part, with
the exception of a place five or six rods wide, running its whole
length, and nearly in the middle, which is called the Channel. One can
tell at first sight that it is the place for pickerel and water-snakes.

"Mr. Deblois stated something that I never heard before as a fact in
natural history, that the pickerel wages war upon all fish, except the
trout, who is too active for him; that he is a piscatorial cannibal; but
that under all circumstances and in all places, he lives on good terms
with the water-snake.

"We saw a great many ducks, but they seemed to know that Mr. Sawyer had
a gun, and flew on slight notice. At last, as four were flying and
seemed to be entirely out of gunshot, he fired, saying he would frighten
them, if no more; when, to our surprise, he brought one down. The gun
was loaded with ball, and Mr. Deblois told him he could not do it again
in a million shots. Mr. Sawyer laughed, saying that he had always been a
votary of Chance, and that, as a general thing, she had treated him
handsomely.

"We sailed more than a mile up the bog, fishing and trolling for
pickerel; and though we saw a great many, not one offered to be caught,
but horned pouts were willing, and we caught them till it was no sport.
We found a man there who had taken nearly two bushels of pouts. He was
on a raft, and had walked from near the foot of Long Pond, in Otisfield.
Mr. Little knew him, and, intending to have some fun, said, 'The next
time you come to Portland I want half a dozen of your best jewsharps;
leave them at my store at Windham Hill. I need them very badly.'

"The man deliberately took from the hook a large pout that he had just
pulled up, and, laying his fishing-pole down, began solemnly to explore
in his pockets, and brought out six quaint jewsharps carefully tied to
pieces of corn-cobs; then he tossed them into our boat to Mr. Little,
saying, 'There they are, Tom, and they are as good ones as I ever made;
I shall charge you fifty cents for them.' Mr. Little had the worst of
the joke; but as the other men began to rally him, he took out the
silver and paid the half-dollar; but they laughed at him till he told
them, if they would say no more about it, he would give them all the
brandy they could drink when they got home.

"Mr. Deblois said he would not be bribed; that he must tell Peter White
when he got to Windham Hill.

"Mr. Little said he would not have Peter White know it for a yoke of
steers.

"After fishing till all were tired, we landed on a small dry knoll that
made out into the bog, to take our luncheon. The men had a variety of
eatables, and several bottles that held no eatables. The question was
started whether Enoch and I should be invited to drink, and they
concluded not to urge us, as we were boys, and under their care. So Mr.
Deblois said, 'Boys, anything to eat that is in our baskets is as much
yours as ours; help yourselves; but we shall not invite you to drink
spirits.'

"We thanked them, and said that we had plenty of our own to eat, and had
no relish for spirits, but were very thirsty for water. Mr. Little had
been there before, and directed us to a spring of the best of water,
that boiled up like a pot from the ground, just at the margin of the
bog.

"Before starting to return, the bet between Enoeh and myself had to be
settled. By its conditions, the one who caught the largest number of
fish was to have all the hooks and lines of the other. I counted my
string and found twenty-five. Enoch made twenty-six on his; so I was
about turning over the spoils, when Mr. Sawyer said that my string was
the largest, and that there was a mistake. So he counted, and made
twenty-six on mine, and twenty-five on Enoch's. We counted again, and
found it was as he said, and Enoch prepared to pay the bet, when Mr.
Sawyer again interfered, saying that Enoch's string was certainly larger
than mine, and proposed to count again. This time I had but twenty-four,
and Enoch twenty-seven. All the men counted them several times over,
until we could not tell which was which, and they never came out twice
alike.

"At length Mr. Deblois said solemnly, 'Stop this, Sawyer, you have
turned these fish into a pack of cards, and are fooling us all.' The men
laughed heartily, and so should I if I had known what the point of the
joke was.

"Mr. Deblois said the decision as to our bet would have to go over to
the next term. After starting for home, while running down the bog, Mr.
Sawyer killed three noble black ducks at one shot, but the gun was not
loaded this time with ball. Mr. Hanson struck with his fishing-pole, and
killed a monstrous water-snake. Mr. Little measured a stick with his
hands, and using it as a rule, declared him to be five feet long. If I
thought any such snakes ever went over to Dingley Bay, I never would go
into the water there again.

"When we got out of the bog into the open water, we found a lively
breeze from the northwest, and they landed me at the Dingley Brook in
less than an hour, and then kept on like a great white bird down towards
the Cape, and for the outlet. I stood and watched the boat until it was
nearly half-way to Frye's Island, loath to lose sight of what had helped
me to enjoy the day so much. Taking my fish I walked home, and greeted
mother just as the sun went out of sight behind the hills in Baldwin.
The fish were worthless, but I thought I must have something to show for
the day spent. After exhibiting them to mother and sister, and hearing
the comments as to their ugliness, and much speculation as to what their
horns were for, I gave them to Mr. Lambard, who said that pouts were the
best of fish after they were skinned.

"I have made this account of the expedition to please Uncle Richard, who
is an invalid and cannot get out to enjoy such sport, and wished me to
describe everything just as it had happened, whether witty or silly, and
give my own impressions. He has read my diary, and says that it
interested him, which is all the reward I desire. And now I add these
lines to keep in remembrance the peculiar satisfaction I received in
hearing the conversation, especially of Mr. Deblois and Mr. Little.
August, 1818, Raymond."

       *       *       *       *       *

These extracts from the Raymond Journal, if they be genuine, as in most
respects I believe they must be, will furnish a clew, otherwise wanting,
to the distinct turn which the boy's mind took toward authorship after
his return to Salem, and on passing the propylon of classical culture.
We can also see in them, I think, the beginning of that painstaking
accumulation of fact, the effort to be first of all accurate, which is a
characteristic of his maturer and authenticated note-books; very
significant, too, is the dash of the supernatural and his tone
concerning it. A habit of thus preserving impressions, and of communing
with himself through the pen, so constant and assiduous as we know it to
have been in his later years,--even when mind and time were
preoccupied,--must have been formed early, to retain so strong a hold
upon him. But there is another reason for supposing that he had begun to
compose with care before coming from Raymond to Salem; and this is found
in the fact that, in 1820, he began issuing (probably to a very small
and intimate circle of subscribers) a neat little weekly paper printed
with the pen on sheets of a much-curtailed note size, and written in an
excellent style.

The first number, dated Monday, August 21, 1820, opens with the Editor's
Address:--

"Our feelings upon sending into the world the first number of the
Spectator may be compared to those of a fond Parent, when he beholds a
beloved child about to embark on the troubled Ocean of public Life.
Perhaps the iron hand of Criticism may crush our humble undertaking, ere
it is strengthened by time. Or it may pine in obscurity neglected and
forgotten by those, with whose assistance it might become the Pride and
Ornament of our Country.... We beg leave farther to remark that in order
to carry on any enterprise with spirit MONEY is absolutely necessary.
Money, although it is the root of all evil, is also the foundation of
everything great and good, and therefore our Subscribers ... will please
carefully to remember that the terms are two cents per month."

A little further on there is this allusion to the Scriptural proverb
cited above: "We have been informed that this expression is incorrect,
and that it is the love of Money which is the 'Root of all Evil.' But
money is certainly the cause of the love of Money. Therefore, Money is
the deepest 'Root of Evil.'" (Observe, here, the young student's pride
of reason, and the consciousness of a gift for casuistry!) Under the
head of "Domestic News" occur some remarks on the sea-serpent, the
deduction from various rumors about the monster being that "he seems to
possess a strange and we think rather unusual faculty of appearing in
different shapes to different eyes, so that where one person sees a
shark, another beholds a nameless dragon." (Here, too, is the humorously
veiled distrust that always lurked beneath his dealings with the
marvellous.) In the next columns there is found an advertisement of the
Pin Society, which "will commence lending pins to any creditable person,
on Wednesday, the 23d instant. No numbers except ten, twenty, and thirty
will be lent"; and the rate of interest is to be one pin on every ten
per day. This bold financial scheme is also carried on by the editor in
person,--a combination which in these days would lay him open to
suspicions of unfair dealing. I have seen a little manuscript book
containing the remarkable constitution and by-laws of this society, in
which there were but two members; and it is really a curious study of
whimsical intricacy, the work of a mind perfectly accustomed to solitude
and fertile in resources for making monotony various and delightful. It
does not surprise one to meet with the characteristic announcement from
this editor that he has "concluded not to insert deaths and marriages
(except of very distinguished persons) in the Spectator. We can see but
little use in thus giving to the world the names of the crowd who are
tying the marriage knot, and going down to the silent tomb." There is
some poetry at the end of the paper, excellent for a boy, but without
the easy inspiration of the really witty prose.

It would seem that this weekly once made a beginning, which was also an
end, before nourishing up into the series of which I have synopsized the
first issue; for there is another Number One without date, but
apparently earlier. This contains some exemplary sentiments "On
Solitude," with a touch of what was real profundity in so inexperienced
a writer. "Man is naturally a sociable being," he says; "and apart from
the world there are no incitements to the pursuit of excellence; there
are no rivals to contend with; and therefore there is no improvement....
The heart may be more pure and uncorrupted in solitude than when exposed
to the influences of the depravity of the world; but the benefit of
virtuous examples is equal to the detriment of vicious ones, and both
are equally lost." The "Domestic Intelligence" of this number is as
follows: "The lady of Dr. Winthrop Brown, a son and Heir. Mrs.
Hathorne's cat, Seven Kittens. We hear that both of the above ladies are
in a state of convalescence." Also, "Intentions of Marriage. The
beautiful and accomplished Miss Keziah Dingley will shortly be united to
Dominicus Jordan Esq." (The young author appears to have allowed himself
in this paragraph the stimulus of a little fiction respecting real
persons. Dominicus Jordan is the pedler of the Raymond notes. Who Miss
Keziah was I do not know, but from the name I guess her to have been a
relative, by appellation at least, through Richard Manning's wife. If
Hawthorne did not himself call Miss Dingley aunt, he may very likely
have heard her commonly spoken of by that title. Did the old, boyish
association perhaps unconsciously supply him with a name for the Indian
aunt of "Septimius Felton"?) The next item is "DEATHS. We are sorry to
be under the necessity of informing our readers that no deaths of
importance have taken place, except that of the publisher of this Paper,
who died of Starvation, owing to the slenderness of his patronage."
Notwithstanding this discouraging incident, one of the advertisements
declares that "Employment will be given to any number of indigent Poets
and Authors at this office." But shortly afterward is inserted the
announcement that "Nathaniel Hathorne proposes to publish by
subscription a new edition of the Miseries of Authors, to which will be
added a sequel, containing Facts and Remarks drawn from his own
experience."

In Number Two of the new series, the editor speaks of a discourse by Dr.
Stoughton, "on Tuesday evening.... With the amount of the contribution
which was taken up ... we are unacquainted, as, having no money in our
pockets, we departed before it commenced." This issue takes a despondent
view of the difficulties that beset editors. There is a clever paragraph
of "Domestic News" again. "As we know of no News," it says, "we hope our
readers will excuse us for not inserting any. The law which prohibits
paying debts when a person has no money will apply in this case." Next
we have a very arch dissertation "On Industry": "It has somewhere been
remarked that an Author does not write the worse for knowing little or
nothing of his subject. We hope the truth of this saying will be
manifest in the present article. With the benefits of Industry we are
not personally acquainted." The desperate editor winds up his week's
budget with a warning to all persons who may be displeased by
observations in the Spectator, that he is going to take fencing lessons
and practise shooting at a mark. "We also," he adds, "think it advisable
to procure a stout oaken cudgel to be the constant companion of our
peregrinations." The assumption of idleness in the essay on Industry,
just quoted, breaks down entirely in a later number, when the editor--in
apologizing for inaccuracies in the printing of his paper--enumerates
his different occupations: "In the first place we study Latin and Greek.
Secondly we write in the employment of William Manning Esq., [at that
time proprietor of an extensive line of stagecoaches]. Thirdly, we are
Secretary, Treasurer, and Manager of the 'Pin Society'; Fourthly, we are
editor of the Spectator; fifthly, sixthly, and lastly, our own Printers,
Printing Press and Types." But the young journalist carried on his
labors unabatedly, for the term of some five weeks, and managed to make
himself very entertaining. I take from an essay "On Benevolence" a
fragment which has a touch of poetry out of his own life. Benevolence,
he says, is "to protect the fatherless, and to make the Widow's heart
sing for joy." One of the most cherishable effusions is that "On
Wealth," in which the venerable writer drops into a charmingly
confidential and reminiscent vein. "All men," he begins, "from the
highest to the lowest, desire to pursue wealth.... In process of time if
we obtain possession" of a sum at first fixed as the ultimatum, "we
generally find ourselves as far from being contented as at first....
When I was a boy, I one day made an inroad into a closet, to the secret
recesses of which I had often wished to penetrate. I there discovered a
quantity of very fine apples. At first I determined to take only one,
which I put in my pocket. But those which remained were so very inviting
that it was against my conscience to leave them, and I filled my pockets
and departed, wishing that they would hold more. But alas! an apple
which was unable to find space enough among its companions bounced down
upon the floor before all the Family. I was immediately searched, and
forced, very unwillingly, to deliver up all my booty." In the same
number which contains this composition appears the token of what was
doubtless Hawthorne's first recognition in literature. It is a
"Communication," of tenor following:--

"Mr. Editor: I have observed in some of your last papers, Essays on
Various subjects, and am very much pleased with them, and wish you to
continue them. If you will do this, you will oblige

"MARIA LOUISA HATHORNE."

"We hail the above communication," writes the editor with exaggerated
gratitude, "as the dawn of a happy day for us." In his next and final
issue, though (September, 18, 1820), he satirically evinces his
dissatisfaction at the want of a literary fraternity in his native land,
through this "Request":--

"As it is part of the plan of the Spectator to criticise
home-manufactured publications, we most earnestly desire some of our
benevolent Readers to write a book for our special benefit. At present
we feel as we were wont to do in the days of our Boyhood, when we
possessed a Hatchet, without anything to exercise it upon. We engage to
execute the Printing and Binding, and to procure the Paper for the Work,
free of all expense to the Author. If this request should be denied us,
we must infallibly turn our arms against our own writings, which, as
they will not stand the test of criticism, we feel very unwilling to do.
We do not wish that the proposed work should be too perfect; the Author
will please to make a few blunders for us to exercise our Talents upon."

In these quotations one sees very clearly the increased maturity (though
it be only by a year or two) of the lad, since the engrossing of his
records at Raymond. We get in these his entire mood, catch gleams of a
steady fire of ambition under the light, self-possessed air of assumed
indifference, and see how easily already his humor began to play, with
that clear and sweet ripeness that warms some of his more famous pages,
like late sunshine striking through clusters of mellow and translucent
grapes. Yet our grasp of his mental situation at this point would not be
complete, without recognition of the graver emotions that sometimes
throbbed beneath the surface. The doubt, the hesitancy that sometimes
must have weighed upon his lonely, self-reliant spirit with weary
movelessness, and all the pain of awakening ambition and departing
boyhood, seem to find a symbol in this stanza from the fourth
"Spectator":--

  "Days of my youth, ye fleet away,
  As fades the bright sun's cheering ray,
  And scarce my infant hours are gone,
  Ere manhood's troubled step comes on.
    My infant hours return no more,
    And all their happiness is o'er;
    The stormy sea of life appears,
    A scene of tumult and of tears."

Of the vexations of unfledged manhood the boy of sixteen did not speak
without knowledge. Various sorts of pressure from uncongenial sources
were now and then brought to bear upon him; there was present always the
galling consciousness of depending on others for support, and of being
less self-sustaining than approaching manhood made him wish to be.
Allusion has been made to his doing writing for his uncle William. "I
still continue," he says in a letter of October, 1820, to his mother at
Raymond, "to write for Uncle William, and find my salary quite
convenient for many purposes." This, to be sure, was a first approach to
self-support, and flattering to his sense of proper dignity. But
Hawthorne, in character as in genius, had a passion for maturity. An
outpouring of his thoughts on this and other matters, directed to his
sister, accompanies the letter just cited. Let us read it here as he
wrote it more than a half-century ago:--

DEAR SISTER:--I am very angry with you for not sending me some of your
poetry, which I consider a great piece of ingratitude. You will not see
one line of mine until you return the confidence which I have placed in
you. I have bought the 'Lord of the Isles,' and intend either to send or
to bring it to you. I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems. I
have read Hogg's "Tales," "Caleb Williams," "St. Lean," and
"Mandeville." I admire Godwin's novels, and intend to read them all. I
shall read the "Abbot," by the author of "Waverley," as soon as I can
hire it. I have read all Scott's novels except that. I wish I had not,
that I might have the pleasure of reading them again. Next to these I
like "Caleb Williams." I have almost given up writing poetry. No man can
be a Poet and a book-keeper at the same time. I do find this place most
"dismal," and have taken to chewing tobacco with all my might, which, I
think, raises my spirits. Say nothing of it in your letters, nor of the
"Lord of the Isles." ... I do not think I shall ever go to college. I
can scarcely bear the thought of living upon Uncle Robert for four years
longer. How happy I should be to be able to say, "I am Lord of myself!"
You may cut off this part of my letter, and show the other to Uncle
Richard. Do write me some letters in skimmed milk. [The shy spirit finds
it thus hard, even thus early, to be under possible surveillance in his
epistolary musings, and wants to write invisibly.] I must conclude, as I
am in a "monstrous hurry!"

Your affectionate brother, NATH. HATHORNE.

P. S. The most beautiful poetry I think I ever saw begins:--

  "She's gone to dwell in Heaven, my lassie,
  She's gone to dwell in Heaven:
  Ye're ow're pure quo' a voice aboon
  For dwalling out of Heaven."

It is not the words, but the thoughts. I hope you have read it, as I
know you would admire it.

As to the allusion to college, it is but a single ray let into the
obscurity of a season when the sensitive, sturdy, proud young heart must
have borne many a vigil of vexatious and bitter revery. And this must
not be left out in reckoning the grains and scruples that were
compounding themselves into his inner consciousness. But at last he
struck a balance, wisely, among his doubts; and in the fall of 1821 he
went to Bowdoin to become one of the famous class with Longfellow and
Cheever, the memory of which has been enwreathed with the gentle verse
of "Morituri Salutamus,"--a fadeless garland. In "Fanshawe," an
anonymous work of his youth, Hawthorne has pictured some aspects of the
college at Brunswick, under a very slight veil of fiction.

"From the exterior of the collegians," he says, "an accurate observer
might pretty safely judge how long they had been inmates of those
classic walls. The brown cheeks and the rustic dress of some would
inform him that they had but recently left the plough, to labor in a not
less toilsome field. The grave look and the intermingling of garments of
a more classic cut would distinguish those who had begun to acquire the
polish of their new residence; and the air of superiority, the paler
cheek, the less robust form, the spectacles of green, and the dress in
general of threadbare black, would designate the highest class, who were
understood to have acquired nearly all the science their Alma Mater
could bestow, and to be on the point of assuming their stations in the
world. There were, it is true, exceptions to this general description. A
few young men had found their way hither from the distant seaports; and
these were the models of fashion to their rustic companions, over whom
they asserted a superiority in exterior accomplishments, which the
fresh, though unpolished intellect of the sons of the forest denied them
in their literary competitions. A third class, differing widely from
both the former, consisted of a few young descendants of the aborigines,
to whom an impracticable philanthropy was endeavoring to impart the
benefits of civilization.

"If this institution did not offer all the advantages of elder and
prouder seminaries, its deficiencies were compensated to its students by
the inculcation of regular habits, and of a deep and awful sense of
religion, which seldom deserted them in their course through life. The
mild and gentle rule ... was more destructive to vice than a sterner
sway; and though youth is never without its follies, they have seldom
been more harmless than they were here. The students, indeed, ignorant
of their own bliss, sometimes wished to hasten the time of their
entrance on the business of life; but they found, in after years, that
many of their happiest remembrances, many of the scenes which they would
with least reluctance live over again, referred to the seat of their
early studies."

       *       *       *       *       *

He here divides the honors pleasantly between the forest-bred and
city-trained youth, having, from his own experience, an interest in each
class. Yet I think he must have sided, in fact, with the country boys.
Horatio Bridge, his classmate, and throughout life a more confidential
friend than Pierce, was brought up on his father's estate at Bridgton,
north of Sebago Lake; and Franklin Pierce, in the class above him, his
only other frequent companion, was a native of the New Hampshire
hill-lands. He himself, in his outward bearing, perhaps gathered to his
person something the look of both the seaport lads and the sturdy
mountaineers and woodsmen. He was large and strong (in a letter to his
uncle Robert, just before entering college, he gives the measure of his
foot, for some new shoes that are to be sent; it is ten inches), but an
interior and ruling grace removed all suspicion of heaviness. Being a
sea-captain's son, he would naturally make his connections at college
with men who had the out-of-doors glow about them; the simple and severe
life at Raymond, too, had put him in sympathy with the people rather
than with the patricians (although I see that the reminiscences of some
of the old dwellers near Raymond describe the widow and her brother
Richard as being exclusive and what was there thought "aristocratic").
Hawthorne, Pierce, and Bridge came together in the Athenaean Society,
the newer club of the two college literary unions, and the more
democratic; and the trio preserved their cordial relations intact for
forty years, sometimes amid confusions and misconstructions, or between
cross-fires of troublous counter-considerations, with a rare fidelity.
Hawthorne held eminent scholarship easily within his grasp, but he and
his two cronies seem to have taken their curriculum very easily, though
they all came off well in the graduation. Hawthorne was a good Latinist.
The venerable Professor Packard has said that his Latin compositions,
even in the Freshman year, were remarkable; and Mr. Longfellow tells me
that he recalls the graceful and poetic translations which his classmate
used to give from the Roman authors. He got no celebrity in Greek, I
believe, but he always kept up his liking for the Latin writers. Some
years since a Latin theme of his was found, which had been delivered at
an exhibition of the Athenaean Society, in December, 1823. [Footnote:
See Appendix II.] It shows some niceties of selection, and the style is
neat; I even fancy something individual in the choice of the words
_sanctior nec beatior_, as applied to the republic, and a
distinctly Hawthornesque distinction in the _fulgor tantum fuit sine
fervore_; though a relic of this kind should not be examined too
closely, and claims the same exemption that one gives to Shelley's
school-compelled verses, _In Horologium_.

His English compositions also excited notice. Professor Newman gave them
high commendation, and Mr. Bridge speaks of their superiority. But none
of them have survived; whether owing to the author's vigilant
suppression, or to the accidents of time. It was Hawthorne's habit as a
young man to destroy all of his own letters that he could find, on
returning home after an absence; and few records of his college life
remain. Here is a brief note, however.

BRUNSWICK, August 12, 1823.

MY DEAR UNCLE:--I received your letter in due time, and should have
answered it in due season, if I had not been prevented, as L----
conjectures, by laziness. The money was very acceptable to me, and will
last me till the end of the term, which is three weeks from next
Wednesday. I shall then have finished one half of my college life.... I
suppose your farm prospers, and I hope you will have abundance of fruit,
and that I shall come home time enough to eat some of it, which I should
prefer to all the pleasure of cultivating it. I have heard that there is
a steamboat which runs twice a week between Portland and Boston. If this
be the case I should like to come home that way, if mother has no
apprehension of the boiler's bursting.

I really have had a great deal to do this term, as, in addition to the
usual exercises, we have to write a theme or essay of three or four
pages, every fortnight, which employs nearly all my time, so that I hope
you will not impute my neglect of writing wholly to laziness....

Your affectionate nephew, NATH. HATHORNE.

This letter, as well as the others here given, shows how much of boyish
simplicity surrounded and protected the rare and distinct personality
already unfolded in this youth of eighteen. The mixture makes the charm of
Hawthorne's youth, as the union of genius and common-sense kept his
maturity alive with a steady and wholesome light. I fancy that obligatory
culture irked him then, as always, and that he chose his own green lanes
toward the advancement of learning. His later writings vouchsafe only two
slight glimpses of the college days. In his Life of Franklin Pierce, he
recalls Pierce's chairmanship of the Athenaean Society, on the committee
of which he himself held a place. "I remember, likewise," he says, "that
the only military service of my life was as a private soldier in a
college company, of which Pierce was one of the officers. He entered
into this latter business, or pastime, with an earnestness with which I
could not pretend to compete, and at which, perhaps, he would now be
inclined to smile." But much more intimate and delightful is the
reminiscence which, in the dedicatory preface of "The Snow Image,"
addressed to his friend Bridge, he thus calls up. "If anybody is
responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. I know
not whence your faith came: but, while we were lads together at a
country college, gathering blueberries in study hours under those tall
academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the
current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in
the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching treats in
that shadowy little stream, which, I suppose, is still wandering
riverward through the forest,--though you and I will never cast a line
in it again,--two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to
acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard
of, or else it had been the worse for us,--still it was your prognostic
of your friend's destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction." I have
asked Mr. Bridge what gave him this impression of Hawthorne, and he
tells me that it was an indescribable conviction, aroused by the whole
drift of his friend's mind as he saw it. Exquisite indeed must have been
that first fleeting aroma of genius; and I would that it might have been
then and there imprisoned and perpetuated for our delight. But we must
be satisfied with the quick and sympathetic insight with which
Hawthorne's friend discovered his true bent. The world owes more,
probably, to this early encouragement from a college companion than it
can ever estimate.

Nothing in human intercourse, I think, has a more peculiar and
unchanging value than the mutual impressions of young men at college:
they meet at a moment when the full meaning of life just begins to
unfold itself to them, and their fresh imaginations build upon two or
three traits the whole character of a comrade, where a maturer man
weighs and waits, doubts and trusts, and ends after all with a like or
dislike that is only lukewarm. Far on toward the close of life,
Hawthorne, in speaking of something told him by an English gentleman
respecting a former classmate of the latter's, wrote: "It seemed to be
one of those early impressions which a collegian gets of his
fellow-students, and which he never gets rid of, whatever the character
of the person may turn out to be in after years. I have judged several
persons in this way, and still judge them so, though the world has come
to very different opinions. Which is right,--the world, which has the
man's whole mature life on its side; or his early companion, who has
nothing for it but some idle passages of his youth?" The world,
doubtless, measures more accurately the intrinsic worth of the man's
mature actions; but his essential characteristics, creditable or
otherwise, are very likely to be better understood by his classmates. In
this, then, we perceive one of the formative effects on Hawthorne's mind
of his stay at Brunswick. Those four years of student life gave him a
thousand eyes for observing and analyzing character. He learned then,
also, to choose men on principles of his own. Always afterward he was
singularly independent in selecting friends; often finding them even in
unpopular and out-of-the-way persons. The affinity between himself and
Bridge was ratified by forty years of close confidence; and Hawthorne
never swerved from his early loyalty to Pierce, though his faithfulness
gave him severe trials, both public and private, afterward. I am not of
those who explain this steadfastness by a theory of early prepossession
on Hawthorne's part, blinding him to Pierce's errors or defects. There
is ample proof in the correspondence between Bridge and himself, which I
have seen, that he constantly and closely scanned his distinguished
friend the President's character with his impartial and searching eye
for human character, whatsoever its relations to himself. I believe if
he had ever found that the original nucleus of honor and of a certain
candor which had charmed him in Pierce was gone, he would, provided it
seemed his duty, have rejected the friendship. As it was, he saw his old
friend and comrade undergoing changes which he himself thought
hazardous, saw him criticised in a post where no one ever escaped the
severest criticism, and beheld him return to private life amid
unpopularity, founded, as he thought, upon misinterpretation of what was
perhaps error, but not dishonesty. Meanwhile he felt that the old
"Frank," his brother through Alma Mater, dwelt still within the person
of the public man; and though to claim that brotherhood exposed
Hawthorne, under the circumstances, to cruel and vulgar insinuations, he
saw that duty led him to the side of his friend, not to that of the
harsh multitude.

Perhaps his very earliest contribution to light literature was an
apocryphal article which he is said to have written when about eighteen
or nineteen. Just then there came into notice a voracious insect, gifted
with peculiar powers against pear-trees. Knowing that his uncle was
especially concerned in fruit culture, Hawthorne wrote, and sent from
college to a Boston paper, a careful description of the new destroyer,
his habits, and the proper mode of combating him, all drawn from his own
imagination. It was printed, so the tale runs; and a package of the
papers containing it arrived in Salem just as the author reached there
for a brief vacation. Mr. Manning is said to have accepted in good faith
the knowledge which the article supplied, but Hawthorne's amusement was
not unmixed with consternation at the success of his first essay.

In the two or three letters from him at college which still survive,
there is no open avowal of the inner life, which was then the supplier
of events for his outwardly monotonous days; not a breath of that s

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