ONE OF THE BOY'S FAVORITE OCCUPATIONS.
Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town. He went to school and to church, loved the sea, and prophesied that he would go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading, and was not averse to a good fight with any of his school-fellows who had, as he expressed it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, and life seemed a very good thing to him, whether he was roaming the streets of Salem, sitting idly on the wharves, or at home stretched on the floor reading one of his favorite authors. As a rule all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and Hawthorne was no exception. When reading, he was living in the magic world of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and Pilgrim's Progress. This last was a great and special favorite with him, its lofty and beautiful spirit carrying his soul with it into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without understanding.
For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in the life of the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Maine, where the family moved for a time. Here, he says, he lived the life of a bird of the air, with no restraint, and in absolute supreme freedom. In the summer he would take his gun and spend days in the forest, shooting, fishing, and doing whatever prompted his vagabond spirit at the moment. In the winter he would follow the hunters through the snow, or skate till midnight alone upon the frozen lake, with only the shadows of the hills to keep him company, and sometimes passing the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, whose hearth would blaze with the burning trunks of the fallen evergreens.
He entered Bowdoin in 1821, and had among his fellow-students Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States, and several others who distinguished themselves in later life. Long afterward Hawthorne recalls his days at Bowdoin as among the happiest of his life, and in writing to one of his old college friends speaks of the charm that lingers around the memory of the place, where he gathered blueberries in study hours; watched the great logs drifting down from the lumbering districts above along the current of the Androscoggin, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and squirrels at odd hours which ought to have been devoted to the classics.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
After leaving Bowdoin, Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he passed the next twelve years of his life, and during which he must have marked out authorship as his profession, as he attempted nothing else. Here he produced, from time to time, stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals of the day, and which won for him a reputation among other American writers. But it is remarkable that the years which a man devotes usually to the best work of his life were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of what he meant to accomplish later on; for exquisite as is some of the work produced at this time, it never would have won for the author the highest place in American literature. These stories and sketches were collected later on, and published under the titles Twice-Told Tales and Snow Image. They are full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, but in speaking of them Hawthorne himself says that there is in this result of twelve years little to show for its thought and industry. But whatever may have been the cause of delay, the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance. In writing this book Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of old Puritan times in New England, and out of the tarnished records of the past he created a work of art of marvellous and imperishable beauty.
In the days of which he wrote a Puritan town or village was exactly like a large family bound together by mutual interests, in which the acts of each life were regarded as affecting the whole community. In this novel Hawthorne imprisoned forever the spirit of colonial New England, with all its struggles, hopes, and fears; and the conscience-driven Puritan, who lived in the new generation only in public records and church histories, was lifted into the realm of art.
In Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of Indian fights, village pillories, town meetings, witch-burnings, and church councils, was already a memory. He had drifted into the past with his steeple-crowned hat and his matchlock. He had left the pleasant New England farm-lands with their pastures and meadows, hills and valleys and wild-pine groves, and lurked like a ghost among the old church-yards and court-houses where his deeds were recorded.