Page:Nathaniel Hawthorne (Woodbury).djvu/22

 in the winter interval he seems to have gone for a few weeks to the house of the Rev. Caleb Bradley, Stroudwater, Westbrook, in the same county as Raymond, to be tutored. He remained in Salem with his uncles for the next two years, and was prepared for college, partly, at least, by Benjamin Oliver, a lawyer, at the expense of his uncle Robert, and during a portion of this time he earned some money by writing in the office of his uncle William; but he was occupied chiefly with his studies, reading, and early compositions. At the beginning of this period, in his first autumn letters, he mentions having lately read "Waverley," "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom," "Roderick Random," and a volume of "The Arabian Nights;" and he has learned the easy rhyming of first verses, and stuffs his letters with specimens of his skill, clever stanzas, well written, modulated in the cadences of the time, with melancholy seriousness and such play of sad fancy as youthful poets use. He laid little store by his faculty for verse, and yet he had practiced it from an early childish age and had a fair mastery of its simple forms; and once or twice in mature life he indulged himself in writing and even in publishing serious poems. In these years, however, verses were only a part of the ferment of his literary talent, nor have any of them individuality. He practiced prose, too, and in the next summer, 1820, issued four numbers of a boy's paper, "The Spectator," bearing