Hathorne =
|
+-------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| | | |
Robert Hathorne William, came in the = Anne | John Hathorne of = Sarah
writes to his Arbella, with John | | Salem and Lynn, |
brother, William, Winthrop 1630; first | | died in Lynn |
from Bray (Berks), of Dorchester; | | 12 Dec. 1676. |
1 April, 1653. afterwards of Salem; | | Will sworn to |
deputy, speaker of | | 25-1-1677. |
the House, | | |
Assistant, Major | | |
commanding in | | |
Indian Wars; ob. | | |
1681 in 74th year of | | |
his age. Will proved | | |
28 June, 1681. | | |
| | |
+--------------------------------------+ | |
| | |
| +-------------------+ |
| | |
| Elizabeth = Capt. Richard Davenport |
| (?) killed by lightning |
| 15 July, 1665. |
| |
| +-------+-----------+---+--------------+-+---+---------------+
| | | | | | | | |
| | John | William b. in | | Phebe b. in Lynn |
| | bapt. at Salem | Lynn ---- Nov. | | 22 March, 1665. |
| | 18 Oct. 1646. | 1651; d. 14 Sept.| | |
| | | 1676. | | |
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
| Sarah bapt. at Salem | | Ebenezer b. in Lynn |
| 2 June, 1644. | | ---- March, 1656. |
| Priscilla | |
| bapt. at Salem | |
| 22 July, 1649; Mary b. in Lynn |
| m. 15 Jan. 1669 ---- July 1653; |
| to Jonathan Shore. d. 31 Dec. 1676. |
| |
| Nathaniel
| named in his
| father's will.
+-+--------------+--+------+---------------+-+-----+-----------+
| | | | | | | |
---- = ---- | | Nathaniel | | William = Sarah |
(dau.) | Helwise | | b. 11 Aug. 1639. | | b. 1 Apr. |
| | | | | 1645; |
Gervice Helwise | | | | d. 14 July, |
in "Urop" | | | | 1676. Captain. |
according | | | | |
to his gr. | | | | |
father's will. | | | | |
| | | Anna born |
| | | 12 Dec. 1643; |
| | | m. 27 Jan. 1664-5 |
| | | to Joseph Porter. |
| Eleazer b. 1 Aug. 1637; | +-----------+
| m. 28-6-1663, Abigail, | |
| dau. of Capt. George | Elizabeth
| Curwen, of Salem. | b. 22 July, 1649;
| | m. 20-9-1672
Sarah born 11 March, 1644-5; | to Israel Porter.
m. 13 April, 1665, to Joseph |
Coker of Newbury, and died |
3 Feb'y, 1688. |
+-------------------------+
|
John b. 4 Aug. 1641 = Ruth dau. of Lieut.
representative; Assistant; | George Gardner;
Judge in Witchcraft cases; | married 22-1-1674-5.
Judge Sup. Court 1702-15; |
Colonel; died 10 May, |
1717; will proved 27 June, |
1717. |
|
+--------------------+--------+-------+----+--+-------------------+
| | | | | |
John b. 10 Jan'y 1675. | | | | |
| | | Ruth, = James Pitman |
Nathaniel = Ebenezer | bapt. |
b. 25 Nov.| bapt. Mch. 1685. | Sept. 1694. |
1678. | | Benjamin
+--------+ | (named in his
| | father's will).
John mentioned |
in his gr. father's will. |
+-------------------+
|
Joseph bapt. June, 1691. = Sara dau. of Capt. W.
Will proved 15 July, 1762. | Bowditch b. 10 Jan'y,
| 1695-6.
|
+---------------------+-------+---+-------------------+---------+--+
| | | | | | |
William = Mary dau. of | | Sarah = Daniel Chever | | |
born 20 John Touzell | | bapt. | | |
Feb'y, m. 29 March, | | 27 Jan. 1722. | | |
1715-1716. 1741. | | Ebenezer | |
Joseph | bapt. 26 Dec. 1725. | |
bapt. 4th | +-----------------+ |
May, 1718. | | +---------------+
| | |
| | Ruth = David Ropes
| | m. 30 Sept.
+---------------------+ | 1752.
| |
John bapt. = Susanna Touzell |
22 May, 1719, | will pro. 7 Sept. |
d. 6 Feb'y, 1750. | 1802. |
| |
+--John } |
| } ment. in will |
+--Susanna} of gr. father. |
|
Daniel, a mariner; = Rachel Phelps
adm. gr. to wid. |
4 May, 1796. |
|
+----------------+----+--------+---------+---+------+---+
| | | | | | | |
Daniel | Eunice | | | Ruth b. |
b. 23 June, 1759; | b. 4 Oct. | | | 20 Jan. |
d. 13 Mar. 1763. | 1766. | | | 1778; d. |
+----------------+ Ob. s. p. | | | 26 July, |
| Daniel | | 1847. |
Sarah = John Crowninshield. b. 25 July, | | |
b. 11 May 1763. 1768. | | Rachel = Simon
+-------------------------------+ | | Forrester.
| | |
Judith = George Archer | --
b. 17 Apr. 1770. m. 2 March, 1792. |
|
+-------------------------------------------+
|
Nathaniel, Sea Captain; b. 19 May, 1775; = Elizabeth Clarke Manning
adm. gr. to his wid. 19 Apr. 1808; | b. 6 Sept. 1780;
died in Surinam. | died 31 July, 1849.
|
+-----------------+-----------------+------------------+
| | |
Elizabeth Manning | Maria Louisa
born 7 March, 1802; | b. 9 Jan'y, 1808;
died 1 Jan'y, 1883. | lost in the steamer
| Henry Clay, burned
| on the Hudson River
| 27 July, 1852.
|
+NATHANIEL+ b. 4 July, 1804; = Sophia, dau. of Doc. Nathl. Peabody,
d. at Plymouth, N. H. of Salem; b. 21 Sept. 1809; mar. in
19 May, 1864. Boston July, 1842.
Buried at Concord, Mass.
23 May, 1864.
He changed his surname to
Hawthorne.
The founders of the American branch were men of independent character,
proud, active, energetic, capable of extreme sternness and endowed with
passionate natures, no doubt. But they were men of affairs; they touched
the world on the practical side, and, even during the decline of the
family fortunes, continued to do so. All at once, in the personality of
the younger Nathaniel Hawthorne, this energy which persisted in them
reversed its direction, and found a new outlet through the channel of
literary expression. We must suppose that he included among his own
characteristics all those of his predecessors; their innate force, their
endurance, their capacity for impassioned feeling; but in him these
elements were fused by a finer prevailing quality, and held in firm
balance by his rare temperament. This must be borne in mind, if we would
understand the conjunction of opposite traits in him. It was one of his
principles to guard against being run away with by his imagination, and
to cultivate in practical affairs what he called "a morose common
sense." There has been attributed to him by some of those who knew him
a certain good-humored gruffness, which might be explained as a heritage
from the self-assertive vitality of his ancestors. While at Liverpool he
wrote to one of his intimates in this country, and in doing so made
reference to another acquaintance as a "wretch," to be away from whom
made exile endurable. The letter passed into the hands of the
acquaintance thus stigmatized long after Hawthorne was in his grave; but
he declared himself to be in no wise disturbed by it, because he knew
that the remark was not meant seriously, being only one of the
occasional explosions of a "sea-dog" forcefulness, which had come into
the writer's blood from his skipper forefathers. Hawthorne had, in fact,
parted on friendly terms from the gentleman of whom he thus wrote. On
the other hand we have the traits of sensitiveness, great delicacy,
reserve and reverie, drawn from both his father and his mother. Captain
Hathorne had been a man of fine presence, handsome, kindly, and rather
silent; a reader, likewise; and his son's resemblance to him was so
marked that a strange sailor stopped Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem
Custom House, many years afterward, to ask him if he were not a son or
nephew of the Captain, whom he had known.
His mother belonged to an excellent family, the Mannings, of English
stock, settled in Salem and Ipswich ever since 1680, and still well
represented in the former place. She, too, was a very reserved person;
had a stately, aristocratic manner; is remembered as possessing a
peculiar and striking beauty. Her education was of that simple, austere,
but judicious and perfected kind that--without taking any very wide
range--gave to New England women in the earlier part of this century a
sedate freedom and a cultivated judgment, which all the assumed
improvements in pedagogy and the general relations of men and women
since then have hardly surpassed. She was a pious woman, a sincere and
devoted wife, a mother whose teachings could not fail to impress upon
her children a bias towards the best things in life. Nathaniel's sister
Elizabeth, although a recluse to the end of her days, and wholly unknown
to the public, gave in her own case evidence indisputable of the fine
influences which had moulded her own childhood and that of her brother.
She showed a quiet, unspoiled, and ardent love of Nature, and was to the
last not only an assiduous reader of books but also a very discriminating
one. The range of her reading was very wide, but she never made any more
display of it than Hawthorne did of his. An intuitive judgment of
character was hers, which was really startling at times: merely from the
perusal of a book or the inspection of a portrait, she would arrive at
accurate estimates of character which revealed a power of facile and
comprehensive insight; and her letters, even in old age, flowed
spontaneously into utterance of the same finished kind that distinguished
Nathaniel Hawthorne's epistolary style. How fresh and various, too, was
her interest in the affairs of the world! For many years she had not
gone farther from her secluded abode in a farm-house at Montserrat, than
to Beverly or Salem; yet I remember that, only six months before her
death, she wrote a letter to her niece, a large part of which was
devoted to the campaign of the English in Egypt, then progressing: with
a lively and clear comprehension she discussed the difficulties of the
situation, and expressed the utmost concern for the success of the
English army, at the same time that she laughed at herself for
displaying, as an old woman, so much anxiety about the matter. Now, a
mother who could bring up her daughter in such a way as to make all this
possible and natural, must be given much credit for her share in
developing an illustrious son. Let us not forget that it was to his
mother that Goethe owed in good measure the foundation of his greatness.
Mrs. Hathorne had large, very luminous gray eyes, which were reproduced
in her son's; so that, on both sides, his parentage entitled him to the
impressive personal appearance which distinguished him. In mature life
he became somewhat estranged from her, but their mutual love was
presumably suspended only for a time, and he was with her at her death,
in 1849. She lived long enough to see him famous as the author of
"Twice-Told Tales"; but "The Scarlet Letter" had not been written when
she died.
She, as well as her husband, was one of a family of eight brothers and
sisters; these were the children of Richard Manning. Two of the
brothers, Richard and Robert, were living in Salem when she was left a
widow; Robert being eminent in New England at that time as a
horticulturist. She was without resources, other than her husband's
earnings, and Robert undertook to provide for her. Accordingly, she
removed with her young family to the Manning homestead on Herbert
Street, the next street east of Union Street, where Nathaniel was born.
This homestead stood upon a piece of land running through to Union
Street, and adjoining the garden attached to Hawthorne's birthplace. At
that time Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, a physician, occupied a house in a
brick block on the opposite side of Union Street; and there in 1809,
September 21st, was born his daughter, Sophia A. Peabody, who afterwards
became Hawthorne's wife. Her birthplace, therefore, was but a few rods
distant from that of her future husband. Sophia Peabody's eldest sister,
Mary, who married Horace Mann, noted as an educator and an abolitionist,
remembers the child Nathaniel, who was then about five years old. He
used to make his appearance in the garden of the Herbert Street mansion,
running and dancing about there at play, a vivacious, golden-haired boy.
The next oldest sister, who was the first of this family to make the
acquaintance of the young author some thirty years later on, was Miss
Elizabeth P. Peabody, who has taken an important part in developing the
Kindergarten in America. There were plenty of books in the Manning
house, and Nathaniel very soon got at them. Among the authors whom he
earliest came to know were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and
Rousseau. The "Castle of Indolence" was one of his favorite volumes.
Subsequently, he read the whole of the "Newgate Calendar," and became
intensely absorbed in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which undoubtedly
left very deep impressions upon him, traceable in the various allusions
to it scattered through his works. He also made himself familiar with
Spenser's "Faërie Queen," Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's
"History of the Rebellion."
"Being a healthy boy, with strong out-of-door instincts planted in him
by inheritance from his sea-faring 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
the foot is no better, and that a new doctor is to be sent for. 'Maybe,'
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.'... 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, ... came to
hear him his lessons at home. The good pedagogue does not figure after
this in Hawthorne's 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 socks for the cat who
reigned in the household at the time. When tired of reading, he
constructed houses of books for the same feline pet, building walls for
her to leap, and perhaps erecting triumphal arches for her to pass
under."[1]
The lexicographer, Dr. Worcester, was then living at Salem in charge of
a school, which he kept for a few years; and it was with him that
Hawthorne was carrying on his primary studies. He also went to
dancing-school, was fond of fishing as well as of taking long walks, and
doubtless engaged in the sundry occupations and sports, neither more nor
less extraordinary than these, common to lads of his age. He already
displayed a tendency towards dry humor. As he brought home from school
frequent reports of having had a bout at fisticuffs with another pupil
named John Knights, his sister Elizabeth asked him: "Why do you fight
with John Knights so often?" "I can't help it," he answered: "John
Knights is a boy of very quarrelsome disposition."
But all this time an interior growth, of which we can have no direct
account, was proceeding in his mind. The loss of the father whom he had
had so little chance to see and know and be fondled by, no doubt
produced a profound effect upon him. While still a very young child he
would rouse himself from long broodings, to exclaim with an impressive
shaking of the head: "There, mother! I is going away to sea some time;
and I'll never come back again!" The thought of that absent one, whose
barque had glided out of Salem harbor bound upon a terrestrial voyage,
but had carried him softly away to the unseen world, must have been
incessantly with the boy; and it would naturally melt into what he heard
of the strange, shadowy history of his ancestors, and mix itself with
the ever-present hush of settled grief in his mother's dwelling, and
blend with his unconscious observations of the old town in which he
lived. Salem then was much younger in time, but much older to the eye,
than it is now. In "Alice Doane's Appeal" he has sketched a rapid
bird's-eye view of it as it appeared to him when he was a young man.
Describing his approach with his sisters to Witch Hill, he says: "We ...
began to ascend a hill which at a distance, by its dark slope and the
even line of its summit, resembled a green rampart along the road; ...
but, strange to tell, though the whole slope and summit were of a
peculiarly deep green, scarce a blade of grass was visible from the base
upward. This deceitful verdure was occasioned by a plentiful crop of
'wood-wax,' which wears the same dark and gloomy green throughout the
summer, except at one short period, when it puts forth a profusion of
yellow blossoms. At that season, to a distant spectator the hill appears
absolutely overlaid with gold, or covered with a glory of sunshine even
under a clouded sky." This wood-wax, it may be said, is a weed which
grows nowhere but in Essex County, and, having been native in England,
was undoubtedly brought over by the Pilgrims. He goes on: "There are few
such prospects of town and village, woodland and cultivated field,
steeples and country-seats, as we beheld from this unhappy spot....
Before us lay our native town, extending from the foot of the hill to
the harbor, level as a chess-board, embraced by two arms of the sea, and
filling the whole peninsula with a close assemblage of wooden roofs,
overtopped by many a spire and intermixed with frequent heaps of
verdure.... Retaining these portions of the scene, and also the peaceful
glory and tender gloom of the declining sun, we threw in imagination a
deep veil of forest over the land, and pictured a few scattered villages
here and there and this old town itself a village, as when the prince of
Hell bore sway there. The idea thus gained of its former aspect, its
quaint edifices standing far apart with peaked roofs and projecting
stories, and its single meeting-house pointing up a tall spire in the
midst; the vision, in short, of the town in 1692, served to introduce a
wondrous tale." There were in fact several old houses of the kind here
described still extant during Hawthorne's boyhood, and he went every
Sunday to service in the First Church, in whose congregation his
forefathers had held a pew for a hundred and seventy years. It is easy
to see how some of the materials for "The House of the Seven Gables" and
"The Scarlet Letter" were already depositing themselves in the form of
indelible recollections and suggestions taken from his surroundings.
Oppressed by her great sorrow, his mother had shut herself away, after
her husband's death, from all society except that of her immediate
relatives. This was perhaps not a very extraordinary circumstance, nor
one that need be construed as denoting a morbid disposition; but it was
one which must have distinctly affected the tone of her son's
meditations. In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, she retired to a
still deeper seclusion, in Maine; but the occasion of this was simply
that her brother Robert, having purchased the seven-mile-square township
of Raymond, in that State, had built a house there, intending to found a
new home. The year that Hawthorne passed in that spot, amid the breezy
life of the forest, fishing and shooting, watching the traits and
customs of lumber-men and country-folk, and drinking in the tonic of a
companionship with untamed nature, was to him a happy and profitable
one. "We are all very well," he wrote thence to his Uncle Robert, in
May, 1819: "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 brook. I am sorry you intend to send me to school
again." He had been to the place before, probably for short visits, when
his Uncle Richard was staying there, and his memories of it were always
agreeable ones. To Mr. James T. Fields, he said in 1863: "I lived in
Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But
it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude." "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 through the woods of Maine!'"[2]
Hawthorne at this time had an intention of following the example of his
father and grandfather, and going to sea; but this was frustrated by the
course of events. His mother, it is probable, would strongly have
objected to it. In a boyish journal kept while he was at Raymond he
mentions a gentleman having come with a boat to take one or two persons
out on "the Great Pond," and adds: "He was 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." And again: "A young man named Henry Jackson, Jr.,
was drowned two days ago, up in Crooked River.... I read one of the
Psalms to my mother this morning, and it plainly declares twenty-six
times that 'God's mercy endureth forever.'... Mother is sad; says she
shall not consent any more to my swimming 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." This same journal, which seems to have laid the basis of his
life-long habit of keeping note-books, was begun at the suggestion of
Mr. Richard Manning, who gave him a blank-book, with advice that he
should use it for recording his thoughts, "as the best means of his
securing for mature years command of thought and language." In it were
made a number of entries which testify plainly to his keenness of
observation both of people and scenery, to his sense of humor and his
shrewdness. Here are a few:--
"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."
"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 well might cave in, but hired Samuel Shaw to go
down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs. Shaw
not quite so good as the son of the Widow Hathorne."
Of a trout that he saw caught by some men:--"This trout had a
droll-looking hooked nose, and they tried to make me believe that, if
the line had been in my hands, I should have been obliged to let go, or
have been pulled out of the boat. They are men, and have a right to say
so. I am a boy, and have a right to think differently."
"We could see the White Hills to the northwest, though Mr. Little said
they were eighty miles away; 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."
The mental clearness, the sharpness of vision, and the competence of the
language in this early note-book are remarkable, considering the youth
and inexperience of the writer; and there is one sketch of "a
solemn-faced old horse" at the grist-mill, which exhibits a delightful
boyish humor with a dash of pathos in it, and at the same time is the
first instance on record of a mild approach by Hawthorne to the writing
of fiction:--
"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 into 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
the meal and him up the Ben Ham Hill home, and am now so weak that I can
hardly stand. Oh 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.... At last the horse winked and stuck out his 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 he shut his eyes. 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 him if his master whipped him much. He 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.'... 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 understood well enough what I said,
for I looked him in the eye and spoke horse language."
Mother and uncles could hardly have missed observing in him many tokens
of a gifted intelligence and an uncommon individuality. The perception
of these, added to Mrs. Hawthorne's dread of the sea, may have led to
the decision which was taken to send him to college. In 1819 he went
back to Salem, to continue his schooling; and one year later, March 7,
1820, wrote to his mother, who was still at Raymond: "I have left
school, and have begun to fit for College, under Benjamin L. Oliver,
Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in your
family.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A
minister I will not be." Miss E. P. Peabody remembers another letter of
his, in which he touched the same problem, thus: "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 but for me to be an author. How would you like some day to
see a whole shelf full of books written by your son, with 'Hathorne's
Works' printed on the backs?" There appears to have been but little
difficulty for him in settling the problem of his future occupation.
During part of August and September he amused himself by writing three
numbers of a miniature weekly paper called "The Spectator;" and in
October we find that he had been composing poetry and sending it to his
sister Elizabeth, who was also exercising herself in verse. At this time
he was employed as a clerk, for a part of each day, in the office of
another uncle, William Manning, proprietor of a great line of stages
which then had extensive connections throughout New England; but he did
not find the task congenial. "No man," he informed his sister, "can be a
poet and a book-keeper at the same time;" from which one infers his
distinct belief that literature was his natural vocation. The idea of
remaining dependent for four years more on the bounty of his Uncle
Robert, who had so generously taken the place of a father in giving him
a support and education, oppressed him, and he even contemplated not
going to college; but go he finally did, taking up his residence at
Bowdoin with the class of 1821.
The village of Brunswick, where Bowdoin College is situated, some thirty
miles from Raymond, stands on high ground beside the Androscoggin River,
which is there crossed by a bridge running zig-zag from bank to bank,
resting on various rocky ledges and producing a picturesque effect. The
village itself is ranged on two sides of a broad street, which meets the
river at right angles, and has a mall in the centre that, in Hawthorne's
time, was little more than a swamp. This street, then known as
"sixteen-rod road," from its width, continues in a straight line to
Casco Bay, only a few miles off; so that the new student was still near
the sea and had a good course for his walks. If Harvard fifty and even
twenty-five years ago had the look of a rural college, Bowdoin was by
comparison an academy in a wilderness. "If this institution," says
Hawthorne in "Fanshawe," where he describes it under the name of Harley
College, "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 local resources for
amusement or dissipation must have been very limited, and the demands of
the curriculum not very severe. Details of Hawthorne's four years' stay
at college are not forthcoming, otherwise than in small quantity. His
comrades who survived him never have been able to give any very vivid
picture of the life there, or to recall any anecdotes of Hawthorne: the
whole episode has slipped away, like a dream from which fragmentary
glimpses alone remain. By one of those unaccountable associations with
trifles, which outlast more important memories, Professor Calvin Stowe
(to whom the authoress of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was afterwards married)
remembers seeing Hawthorne, then a member of the class below him,
crossing the college-yard one stormy day, attired in a brass-buttoned
blue coat, with an umbrella over his head. The wind caught the umbrella
and turned it inside out; and what stamped the incident on Professor
Stowe's mind was the silent but terrible and consuming wrath with which
Hawthorne regarded the implement in its utterly subverted and useless
state, as he tried to rearrange it. Incidents of no greater moment and
the general effect of his presence seem to have created the belief among
his fellows that, beneath the bashful quietude of his exterior, was
stored a capability of exerting tremendous force in some form or other.
He was seventeen when he entered college,--tall, broad-chested, with
clear, lustrous gray eyes,[3] a fresh complexion, and long hair: his
classmates were so impressed with his masculine beauty, and perhaps with
a sense of occult power in him, that they nicknamed him Oberon. Although
unusually calm-tempered, however, he was quick to resent disrespectful
treatment (as he had been with John Knights), and his vigorous, athletic
frame made him a formidable adversary. In the same class with him were
Henry W. Longfellow; George Barrell Cheever, since famous as a divine,
and destined to make a great stir in Salem by a satire in verse called
"Deacon Giles's Distillery," which cost him a thirty days' imprisonment,
together with the loss of his pastorate; also John S. C. Abbott, the
writer of popular histories; and Horatio Bridge, afterwards Lieutenant
in the United States Navy, and now Commander. Bridge and Franklin
Pierce, who studied in the class above him, were his most intimate
friends. He boarded in a house which had a stairway on the outside,
ascending to the second story; he took part, I suppose, in the
"rope-pulls" and "hold-ins" between Freshmen and Sophomores, if those
customs were practised then; he was fined for card-playing and for
neglect of theme; entered the Athenæan Society, which had a library of
eight hundred volumes; tried to read Hume's "History of England," but
found it "abominably dull," and postponed the attempt; was fond of
whittling, and destroyed some of his furniture in gratifying that taste.
Such are the insignificant particulars to which we are confined in
attempting to form an idea of the externals of his college-life. Pierce
was chairman of the Athenæan Society, and also organized a military
company, which Hawthorne joined. In the Preface to "The Snow-Image" we
are given a glimpse of the simple amusements which occupied his leisure:
"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 trouts in that shadowy little stream which,
I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest." He became
proficient in Latin. Longfellow was wont to recall how he would rise at
recitation, standing slightly sidewise--attitude indicative of his
ingrained shyness--and read from the Roman classics translations which
had a peculiar elegance and charm. In writing English, too, he won a
reputation, and Professor Newman was often so struck with the beauty of
his work in this kind that he would read them in the evening to his own
family. Professor Packard says: "His themes were written in the
sustained, finished style that gives to his mature productions an
inimitable charm. The recollection is very distinct of Hawthorne's
reluctant step and averted look, when he presented himself at the
professor's study and submitted a composition which no man in his class
could equal."
Hawthorne always looked back with satisfaction to those simple and
placid days. In 1852 he revisited the scene where they were passed, in
order to be present at the semi-centennial anniversary of the founding
of the college. A letter, from Concord (October 13, 1852), to Lieutenant
Bridge, now for the first time published, contains the following
reference to that event:--
"I meant to have told you about my visit to Brunswick.... Only eight of
our classmates were present, and they were a set of dismal old fellows,
whose heads looked as if they had been out in a pretty copious shower of
snow. The whole intermediate quarter of a century vanished, and it
seemed to me as if they had undergone the miserable transformation in
the course of a single night--especially as I myself felt just about as
young as when I graduated. They flattered me with the assurance that
time had touched me tenderly; but alas! they were each a mirror in which
I beheld the reflection of my own age. I did not arrive till after the
public exercises were nearly over--and very luckily, too, for my praises
had been sounded by orator and poet, and of course my blushes would have
been quite oppressive."
Hawthorne's rank in his class entitled him to a "part" at Commencement,
but the fact that he had not cultivated declamation debarred him from
that honor; and so he passed quietly away from the life of Bowdoin and
settled down to his career. "I have thought much upon the subject," he
wrote to his sister, just before graduation, "and have come to the
conclusion that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world,
and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude." But
declamation was not essential to his success, which was to be achieved
in anything but a declamatory fashion.