Hawthorne | Page 7

advantage which familiarity had made stale--the fact that he lived in the most democratic
and most virtuous of modern communities. Of the virtue it is but civil to suppose that his
own family had a liberal share; but not much of the wealth, apparently, came into their
way. Hawthorne was not born to a patrimony, and his income, later in life, never
exceeded very modest proportions.
Of his childish years there appears to be nothing very definite to relate, though his
biographer devotes a good many graceful pages to them. There is a considerable
sameness in the behaviour of small boys, and it is probable that if we were acquainted
with the details of our author's infantine career we should find it to be made up of the

same pleasures and pains as that of many ingenuous lads for whom fame has had nothing
in keeping.
The absence of precocious symptoms of genius is on the whole more striking in the lives
of men who have distinguished themselves than their juvenile promise; though it must be
added that Mr. Lathrop has made out, as he was almost in duty bound to do, a very good
case in favour of Hawthorne's having been an interesting child. He was not at any time
what would be called a sociable man, and there is therefore nothing unexpected in the
fact that he was fond of long walks in which he was not known to have had a companion.
"Juvenile literature" was but scantily known at that time, and the enormous and
extraordinary contribution made by the United States to this department of human
happiness was locked in the bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne, therefore, like
many of his contemporaries, was constrained to amuse himself, for want of anything
better, with the Pilgrim's Progress and the Faery Queen. A boy may have worse
company than Bunyan and Spenser, and it is very probable that in his childish rambles
our author may have had associates of whom there could be no record. When he was nine
years old he met with an accident at school which threatened for a while to have serious
results. He was struck on the foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept at
home for a long time, and had not completely recovered before his twelfth year. His
school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New England--the primary
factor in that extraordinarily pervasive system of instruction in the plainer branches of
learning, which forms one of the principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he
was fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of an uncle, her
brother, who was established in the town of Raymond, near Lake Sebago, in the State of
Maine. The immense State of Maine, in the year 1818, must have had an even more
magnificently natural character than it possesses at the present day, and the uncle's
dwelling, in consequence of being in a little smarter style than the primitive structures
that surrounded it, was known by the villagers as Manning's Folly. Mr. Lathrop
pronounces this region to be of a "weird and woodsy" character; and Hawthorne, later in
life, spoke of it to a friend as the place where "I first got my cursed habits of solitude."
The outlook, indeed, for an embryonic novelist, would not seem to have been cheerful;
the social dreariness of a small New England community lost amid the forests of Maine,
at the beginning of the present century, must have been consummate. But for a boy with a
relish for solitude there were many natural resources, and we can understand that
Hawthorne should in after years have spoken very tenderly of this episode. "I lived in
Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the long
summer days he roamed, gun in hand, through the great woods, and during the moonlight
nights of winter, says his biographer, quoting another informant, "he would skate until
midnight, all alone, upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either
hand."
In 1819 he was sent back to Salem to school, and in the following year he wrote to his
mother, who had remained at Raymond (the boy had found a home at Salem with another
uncle), "I have left school and have begun to fit for college under Benjm. L. Oliver,
Lawyer. So you are in danger of having one learned man in your family.... I get my
lessons at home and recite them to him (Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the morning....
Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A Minister I will not be." He

adds, at the close