Hawthorne | Page 8

of this epistle--"O how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do
but to go a-gunning! But the happiest days of my life are gone." In 1821, in his
seventeenth year, he entered Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine. This institution was
in the year 1821--a quarter of a century after its foundation--a highly honourable, but not
a very elaborately organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning. I say it was
not impressive, but I immediately remember that impressions depend upon the minds
receiving them; and that to a group of simple New England lads, upwards of sixty years
ago, the halls and groves of Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been,
may have seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple, frugal,
"country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp; exerting within its limits a
civilizing influence, working, amid the forests and the lakes, the log-houses and the
clearings, toward the amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering a
very sufficient education to the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen, politicians, and
editors, of the very active and knowledge-loving community that supported it. It did more
than this--it numbered poets and statesmen among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call
of its sons it has several distinguished names. Among Hawthorne's fellow-students was
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who divides with our author the honour of being the most
distinguished of American men of letters. I know not whether Mr. Longfellow was
especially intimate with Hawthorne at this period (they were very good friends later in
life), but with two of his companions he formed a friendship which lasted always. One of
these was Franklin Pierce, who was destined to fill what Hawthorne calls "the most
august position in the world." Pierce was elected President of the United States in 1852.
The other was Horatio Bridge, who afterwards served with distinction in the Navy, and to
whom the charming prefatory letter of the collection of tales published under the name of
The Snow Image, is addressed. "If anybody is responsible at this day for my being an
author it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but while we were lads together
at a country college--gathering blueberries in study-hours under those tall Academic
pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin;
or shooting pigeons and grey squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer
twilight; or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still
wandering river-ward through the forest--though you and I will never cast a line in it
again--two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred
things the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been worse for us--still it was your
prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction." That is a very
pretty picture, but it is a picture of happy urchins at school, rather than of undergraduates
"panting," as Macaulay says, "for one and twenty." Poor Hawthorne was indeed
thousands of miles away from Oxford and Cambridge; that touch about the blueberries
and the logs on the Androscoggin tells the whole story, and strikes the note, as it were, of
his circumstances. But if the pleasures at Bowdoin were not expensive, so neither were
the penalties. The amount of Hawthorne's collegiate bill for one term was less than 4l.,
and of this sum more than 9s. was made up of fines. The fines, however, were not heavy.
Mr. Lathrop prints a letter addressed by the President to "Mrs. Elizabeth C. Hathorne,"
requesting her co-operation with the officers of this college, "in the attempt to induce
your son faithfully to observe the laws of this institution." He has just been fined fifty
cents for playing cards for money during the preceding term. "Perhaps he might not have
gamed," the Professor adds, "were it not for the influence of a student whom we have

dismissed from college." The biographer quotes a letter from Hawthorne to one of his
sisters, in which the writer says, in allusion to this remark, that it is a great mistake to
think that he has been led away by the wicked ones. "I was fully as willing to play as the
person he suspects of having enticed me, and would have been influenced by no one. I
have a great mind to commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be
seduced by another into anything wrong." There is something in these few words that
accords with the impression that the observant reader of Hawthorne gathers of the
personal character that underlay his duskily-sportive imagination--an impression of
simple manliness and transparent honesty.
He appears to have been a