Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VIII.djvu/549

 HAWTHORNE 535 HAWTHORNE. I. Nathaniel, an American au- thor, born in Salem, Mass., July 4, 1804, died at Plymouth, N. H., May 19, 1864. His ances- tors, who came from England, had settled at Salem in the early part of the 17th century. The Hawthornes in that century took part in the persecution of the Quakers and the witches. For a long period the men of the family followed the sea ; "a gray-headed shipmaster in each Deration retiring from the quarter-deck to the nomestead, while a boy of 14 took the heredi- tary place before the mast, confronting the salt ray and the gale, which had blustered against us sire and grandsire." The father of Nathan- 3! Hawthorne was a shipmaster who died of rellow fever in Surinam in 1808. His mother, rhose maiden name was Manning, was a wo- of great beauty and extreme sensibility. Eer grief at her husband's death was hardly litigated by time, and for the rest of her life le lived a mourner in absolute seclusion. For 5re than 30 years she >k her meals alone in ler chamber. At the of 14, on account of feeble health, Nathan- el Hawthorne was sent live on a farm be- Dnging to his family in Raymond, on the bor- ders of Sebago lake in Maine. He returned to Salem for a year to complete his studies preparatory to entering Bowdoin college, where he graduated in 1825, in the same class with George B. Oheever and Henry W. Longfellow. Franklin Pierce, who was in the preceding class, was his intimate friend. After quitting college he resided many years in Salem, leading a solitary life of medi- tation and study, a recluse even from his own household, walking out by night and passing the day alone in his room, and writing wild tales, most of which he burned, and some of which appeared in newspapers, magazines, and annu- als. In 1828 he published in Boston an anony- mous romance, called " Fanshawe," which he never acknowledged, and which has not been reprinted. In 1836 he went to Boston to edit the "American Magazine of Useful Knowl- ,'" of which he wrote the whole, and for which, owing to the insolvency of the publish- ers, he received no pay. In 1837 he collected from the annual called " The Token " and from other periodicals a number of his tales and sketches, and published them at Boston under the title of "Twice-told Tales." The book was noticed with high praise in the "North American Review " by Mr. Longfellow, who pronounced it the work of a man of genius and of a true poet, but it attracted little atten- tion from the general public. Gradually, how- ever, it found its way into the hands of the more cultivated and appreciative class of read- ers ; and in 1842 a new edition was issued, to- gether with a second series of tales collected from the "Democratic Review" and other magazines. These volumes, says Mr. George W. Curtis, are "full of glancing wit, of tender satire, of exquisite natural description, of sub- tle and strange analysis of human life, darkly passionate and weird." In 1838 Mr. Bancroft the historian, then collector of the port of Boston, appointed Mr. Hawthorne a weigher and gauger in the custom house. He fulfilled his novel duties well, was a favorite with the sailors, it is said, and held his office till after the inauguration of President Harrison in 1841, when, being a democrat, he was dis- placed to make room for a whig. After leav- ing the custom house he went to live with the The Old Manse at Concord, Mass. association for agriculture and education at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Mass., of which he was one of the founders. He remained here a few months, "belaboring the rugged furrows;" but before the year expired he re- turned to Boston, where he resided till 1843, when he married Miss Sophia Peabody and took up his abode in the old manse at Concord, which adjoins the first battle field of the revo- lution, a parsonage which had never before been profaned by a lay occupant. In the in- troduction to the volume of tales and sketches entitled "Mosses from an old Manse" (New York, 1846), he has given a charming account of his life here, of "wild, free days on the Assabet, indulging fantastic speculations be- side our fire of fallen boughs with Ellery Chan- ning, or talking with Thoreau about pine trees and Indian relics in his hermitage at Walden." These "Mosses" were mostly written in the old manse, in a delightful little nook of a study