Nathaniel Hawthorne | Page 2

himself so inhumanely in court that the
husband of one of the sufferers cursed him,--it must have been
dramatically done to have left so vivid a mark in men's minds,--him
and his children's children. This was the curse that lingered in the

family memory like a black blot in the blood, and was ever after used
to explain any ill luck that befell the house. The third heir of the name,
Joseph, was a plain farmer, in whose person the family probably ceased
from the ranks of the gentry, as the word was then used. The fourth,
Daniel, "bold Hathorne" of the Revolutionary ballad, was a
privateersman, robust, ruddy of face, blue-eyed, quick to wrath,--a
strong-featured type of the old Salem shipmaster. His son, Nathaniel,
the fifth descendant, was also bred to the sea, a young man of slight,
firm figure, and in face and build so closely resembling his famous
son--for he was the father of Hawthorne--that a passing sailor once
recognized the latter by the likeness. What else he transmitted to his
son, in addition to physique, by way of temperament and inbred
capacity and inclination, was to suffer more than a sea-change; but he is
recalled as a stern man on deck, of few words, showing doubtless the
early aging of those days under the influence of active responsibility,
danger, and the habit of command, and, like all these shipmasters--for
they were men of some education--he took books to sea with him. He
died at Surinam in 1808, when thirty-two years old. He had married
Elizabeth Clarke Manning, herself a descendant in the fifth generation
of Richard Manning, of St. Petrox Parish, Dartmouth, whose widow
emigrated to New England with her children in 1679. Other old
colonial families that had blended with the Hathornes and Mannings in
these American years were the Gardner, Bowditch, and Phelps stocks,
on the one side, and the Giddings, Potter, and Lord, on the other. Of
such descent, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the second child and only son of
this marriage, was born at Salem, July 4, 1804, in his grandfather
Daniel's house, on Union Street, near the wharves.
The pleasant, handsome, bright-haired boy was four years old when his
mother called him into her room and told him that his father was dead.
She soon removed with him and his sisters, of whom Elizabeth was
four years older and Louisa two years younger than himself, to her
father's house in the adjoining yard, which faced on Herbert Street; and
there the young mother, who was still but twenty-seven, following a
custom which made much of widows' mourning in those times,
withdrew to a life of seclusion in her own room, which, there or
elsewhere, she maintained till her death, through a period of forty years;

and, as a perpetual outward sign of her solitude, she took her meals
apart, never eating at the common table. There is a touch of mercy in
life which allows childhood to reconcile itself with all conditions; else
one might regret that the lad was to grow up from his earliest memory
in the visible presence of this grief separating him in some measure
from his mother's life; it was as if there were a ghost in the house; and
though early anecdotes of him are few and of little significance, yet in
his childish threat to go away to sea and never come back again,
repeated through years, one can but trace the deep print of that sorrow
of the un-returning ones which was the tragedy of women's lives all
along this coast. His mother cared for him none the less, though she
was less his companion, and there seems to have been no diminution of
affection and kindness between them, though an outward habit of
coldness sprang up as time went on. He had his sisters for playmates at
first, and as he grew up, he was much looked after by his uncles. His
first master was Dr. Worcester, the lexicographer, then just graduated
from Yale, who set up a school in Salem; and, the lad being lamed in
ball-playing, the young teacher came to the house to carry on the
lessons. The accident happened when Hawthorne was nine years old,
and the injury, which reduced him to crutches, continued to trouble him
till he was twelve, at least, after which, to judge by the fact that he
attended dancing-school, he seems to have entirely recovered from it.
The habit of reading came to him earlier, perhaps because of his
confinement and disability for sports in these three or four years; he
was naturally thrown back upon himself. He is seen lying upon the
floor habitually, and when not playing with cats--the only boyish
fondness told of him--reading Shakspere, Milton, Thomson, the books
of the household, not uncommon