Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1892, volume 3).djvu/151

Rh men followed the sea. Joseph's son, Daniel, commanded a privateer, and Daniel's son, Nathaniel (father of the author), was captain of a trading-vessel. He married Elizabeth Clark Manning, and died in Surinam in 1808. Nathaniel, the second of three children, was their only son. He was born in a plain wooden house near the wharves, in which his mother wholly secluded herself after her husband's death. From the earliest days, Salem had been one of the most sombre of the old New England towns: "its long and lazy street," Hawthorne says, "lounging wearisomely along the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows hill and New Guinea at one end and a view of the almshouse at the other." In the beginning of the century it was an important port for the In- dia trade. But in Hawthorne's youth it began to decline with the other New England sea-ports, and in 1850 he said of the pavement around the custom-house, that it "has grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business." Hawthorne was "a pleasant child," his sister said, "quite handsome, with golden curls." But the austere family tradition, the melancholy temperament of his taciturn father, the secluded widowhood of his mother, the decaying old seaport of witch-haunted memories in which he lived, impressed profoundly the imagination of the solitary boy, whose "native propensities," as he said of himself, " were toward fairy-land." At the age of seven he was placed by his uncle Manning at the school of Dr. Joseph E. Worcester, the lexicographer, and, being severely injured while playing foot-ball, he was confined to the house for two years, where Dr. Worcester still taught him, and where he acquired the habit of reading. His books were the English classics. He pored over Spenser and "Pilgrim's Progress," Froissart's "Chronicles" and Clarendon's history, and he was fascinated by the "Newgate Calendar." In 1818 his mother removed with her family to Raymond, on Sebago lake, in Maine, to a house owned by her brother, where Hawthorne remained for a year. It was a wild country, with scattered clearings, and "nine tenths of it primeval woods." Here he lived in perfect freedom, he says, "like a bird of the air. But here, also, roaming the woods alone or skating or "camping out," his habit of solitude was confirmed. In 1819 he was back again in Salem, fitting for college, and quite sure that the happiest days of his life were gone. Like other boys about entering college, he speculated upon his future vocation, and says in a letter that he would not be a minister, nor a doctor, nor a lawyer, and that there was nothing left but to be an author. There is an apocryphal diary of those days, which was published in the Portland "Transcript" in 1871 and 1873 by the person who professed to own it, but which Hawthorne's son, Julian, dismisses very curtly as of no importance. In August, 1820, Hawthorne issued in Salem the first number of a little weekly paper called the "Spectator," which was discontinued in the middle of September. In 1821 he entered Bowdoin college, Brunswick, Me., "a plain country college." then only twenty-five years old. Henry W. Longfellow, John S. C. Abbott, George B. Cheever, and Horatio Bridge were his classmates, and Franklin Pierce, afterward president, was in the class before him. Bridge and Pierce were his intimate friends, and in the dedication of the " Snow Image "Hawthorne pleasantly lays upon Bridge the responsibility of his literary career.

The year that he entered college was the year in which a distinctive American literature began to appear. Bryant published in that year his first volume of poems, Cooper his "Spy," Dana the "Idle Man," and Percival his first volume of poems, which Edward Everett hailed as the harbinger of a golden day. Halleck's and Drake's "Croakers" were already familiar, and the next year Miss Sedgwick's "New England Tale" was published. There is no evidence that Hawthorne was aware of this literary avatar and promise; there is no trace of any influence from it upon his own works. In college he was distinguished only for his themes. He wrote indifferent verse, and read Scott's novels, and Godwin's, which he "liked next to Scott," and, without the fear of the stern old Puritan Hathornes before his eyes, and to the alarm of the college authorities, he sometimes played cards and showed the natural tastes of vigorous youth. He was graduated in 1825, returned to Salem, and became an absolute recluse, imprisoned, as he said, "in a lonely chamber," where, however, he felt afterward that his mind and character were formed, and in which he said "fame was won." He read and wrote by day and night, seldom going out except at twilight for long, lonely walks along the sea-shore and through the dusky streets of the town. For twelve years this was his life, and, although constantly writing and publishing, he was, in his own words, " the obscurest man of letters in America." In 1826 he published, anonymously and at his own expense, a novel entitled " Fanshawe." It made no impression, but it has traces of his characteristic power and his admirable literary style. Only a few hundred copies were sold, and he endeavored successfully to suppress it. But it is included in the latest editions of his works. The failure probably affected him deeply, for he had the generous thirst for fame which belongs to genius. He was not, however, wholly disheartened, and a little later he completed a series of " Seven Tales of My Native Land," some relating to witchcraft and some to piracy and the sea. He found a publisher with difficulty, and there were such delays in publishing that Hawthorne withdrew the manuscript and burned it. But, however sobered by sharp experience, his good genius would not suffer him to abandon her. Of this time he said to a friend afterward: "I passed the day in writing stories, and the night in burning them." The solitude and seclusion of his life were due not only to his temperament and to disappointment by his literary failures, but to the social ostracism of Democrats in the little town, which was a stronghold of Federalism and the very seat of the Essex junto, the aulic council of the Federal party. Hawthorne's father had been a Democrat, and the son, with no taste for politics, naturally accepted the paternal party connection, and had no disposition to dispute any penalty attaching to it. In 1830 he travelled with an uncle in the valley of the Connecticut. The next year he was in New Hampshire, and about this time he wandered as far as Ticonderoga and Niagara. But the excursions were brief. He was soon again in his solitary room, and, no longer attempting the publication of a book, he was content to send short stories and sketches and essays to the Salem "Gazette" and the "New England Magazine." He sent some manuscripts, including several of the " Twice-told Tales," to Samuel G. Goodrich, the editor of the Boston " Token and Atlantic Souvenir," who wrote to him in January, 1830, that he would try to induce a publisher to undertake the work, and offered him $35 for the first publication of the "Gentle