"To quiet your suspicions, I can assure you that I am neither 'dead, absconded, or anything worse.' I have involved myself in no 'foolish scrape,' as you say all my friends suppose; but ever since my misfortune I have been as steady as a sign-post, and as sober as a deacon, have been in no 'blows' this term, nor drank any kind of 'wine or strong drink.' So that your comparison of me to the 'prodigious son' will hold good in nothing, except that I shall probably return penniless, for I have had no money this six weeks…. The President's message is not so severe as I expected. I perceive that he thinks I have been led away by the wicked ones, in which, however, he is greatly mistaken. I was full as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed me, and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced by another into anything wrong."
The last week of the term and the close of the Senior year appear to have been the seasons of conviviality, and Hawthorne's life of this sort ended with his being an officer of the Navy Club, an impromptu association of those of his classmates, fourteen out of thirty-eight, who for one reason or another were not to have a Commencement part on graduation. The Club met at the college tavern, Miss Ward's, near the campus, for weekly suppers and every night during Commencement week; this entertainment was for these youths the happy climax of their academic life together.
In his studies Hawthorne must have followed his own will very freely. He refused to declaim, and no power could make him do so, and for this reason he was denied the honor of a Commencement part, which he had won, being number eighteen by rank in his class; he was nervously shy about declaiming, owing, it is said, to his having been laughed at on his first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or read a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens, were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, among which he especially mentions Rees's Cyclopśdia—such was the wealth of a boy of genius in those days—but among the eight hundred books it is certain that the bulk of English literature was contained. He practiced writing somewhat, though he had given up poetry; and he played a prank by sending to a Boston paper a fabricated account of one of those destroying insects which visit that region from time to time, with notes on ways of exterminating it,—all for the benefit of his uncle, who took the paper; but no other trace of his composition remains except a memory of his elder sister's that he wrote to her of "progress on my novel." His way of life intellectually had not changed since his schoolboy days, for it is noticeable that then he never mentioned his studies, but only the books he read; so now he read the books for pleasure, and let his studies subsist as best they could in the realm of duty. He was poor, and even in the modest simplicity of this country college, where his expenses could hardly have been three hundred dollars a year, was evidently embarrassed with homely difficulties; the state of his clothes seems to have been on his mind a good deal. But he was self-respecting, patient, and grateful; he formed the good habit of hating debt; and he went on his way little burdened except by doubtful hopes.
Though he was familiar with his classmates and contemporaries at college, and firm and fast friends with a few, like Pierce and Cilley, forming with them the ties that last through all things, he had but one confidant, Horatio Bridge, afterwards of the United States Navy. Hawthorne roomed at first with Alfred Mason, in Maine Hall, and being burned out in their Freshman year, they found temporary quarters elsewhere, but when the Hall was rebuilt returned to it and occupied room number nineteen for the Sophomore year. The two chums, however, did not become intimate, beyond pleasant companionship, and they belonged to different societies; and the last two years Hawthorne roomed alone in a private house, Mrs. Cunning's, where both he and Bridge also boarded. It is from the latter, who remained through life one of Hawthorne's most serviceable friends, that the account of his college days mainly comes. He especially remembered, besides such matters of fact as have been recounted, their walks and rambles together in the pine woods that stretched about the college unbroken for miles, and by the river with its rafts of spring logs, and over to the little bay sent up by a far-reaching arm of the sea; and he recalled the confidences of Hawthorne in speaking of his hopes of being a writer, in repeating to him verses as they leaned in the moonlight over the railing of the bridge below the falls, listening to the moving waters, and in allowing him some inward glimpses of his solitary life in the brooding time of youth. Bridge was a fellow of infinite cheer, and praised him, and clapped him, and urged him on, and gave him the best companionship in the world for that time of life, if not for all times,—the companionship of being believed in by a friend. Hawthorne did not forget it, and in due time paid the tribute of grateful remembrance in the preface to the volume he dedicated to Bridge, where he recalled his college days and his friend's part in them.
"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 or gray squirrels in the woods, or bat-fowling in the summer twilight, or catching trout 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 would have been the worse for us—still, it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction."
The picture is a vignette of the time, and being in the open, too, pleasantly ends the tale of college. On separating, it is pleasant to notice, the friends exchanged keepsakes.
The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne, who now adopted the fanciful spelling of the name after his personal whim, was man grown. There had been trying circumstances in these early days, but he had met them hardily and lightly, as a matter of course; he had practically educated himself by the help of books, and had also discharged his duties as they seemed to the eyes of others; he could go home feeling that he had satisfied his friends. He seems to have feared that he might have satisfied them too well; and, some commendation having preceded him, he endeavored to put them right by a letter to his sister, July 14, 1825:—
"The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my talents, and had probably formed expectations which I shall never realize. I have thought much upon the subject, and have finally 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. I do not say this for the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but merely to set mother and the rest of you right upon a point where your partiality has led you astray. I did hope that uncle Robert's opinion of me was nearer to the truth, as his deportment toward me never expressed a very high estimation of my abilities."
This has the ring of sincerity, like all his home letters, and it is true that so far there had been nothing precocious, brilliant, or extraordinary in him to testify of genius,—he was only one of hundreds of New England boys bred on literature under the shelter of academic culture; and yet there may have been in his heart something left unspoken, another mood equally sincere in its turn, for the heart is a fickle prophet. As Mr. Lathrop suggests in that study of his father-in-law which is so subtly appreciative of those vital suggestions apt to escape record and analysis, another part of the truth may lie in the words of "Fanshawe" where Hawthorne expresses the feelings of his hero in a like situation with himself at the end of college days:—
"He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in solitary study,—in conversation with the dead,—while he had scorned to mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives. Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world, unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities."