Nathaniel Hawthorne | Page 3

in New England homes, where good
books were as plenty then as all books are now; and on Sundays, at his
grandmother Hathorne's, across the yard, he would crouch hour after
hour over Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," that refuge of boyhood on the
oldtime Sabbaths. It is recollected that, by the time he was fourteen, he
had read Clarendon, Froissart, and Rousseau, besides "The Newgate
Calendar," a week-day favorite; and he may be said to have begun
youth already well versed in good English books, and with the habit
and taste of literary pleasure established as a natural part of life. "The
Faërie Queene" was the first book he bought with his own money. He

was vigorous enough now; but the two outward circumstances that
most affected his boyhood, the monotone of his mother's sorrow and
his own protracted physical disability, must have given him touches of
gravity and delicacy beyond his years. It is noticeable that nothing is
heard of any boy friends; nor did he contract such friendships,
apparently, before college days.
In the fall of 1818, when Hawthorne was fourteen years old, the family
removed to Raymond, in Maine, where the Mannings possessed large
tracts of land. The site of this township was originally a grant to the
surviving members and the heirs of Captain Raymond's militia
company of Beverly, the next town to Salem, for service in the French
and Indian war; and Hawthorne's grandfather, Richard Manning, being
the secretary of the proprietors, who managed the property and held
their meetings in Beverly, had toward the close of the century bought
out many of their rights. After his death the estate thus acquired was
kept undivided, and was managed for his children by his sons Richard
and Robert, and finally at any rate, more particularly by the latter, who
stood in the closest relation to Hawthorne of all his uncles, having
undertaken to provide for his education. He had built a large, square,
hip-roofed house at Raymond, after the model common in his native
county of Essex, as a comfortable dwelling, but so seemingly grand
amid the humble surroundings of the Maine clearing as to earn the
name of "Manning's folly;" and, about 1814, he built a similar house
for his sister, near his own, but she had not occupied it until now, when
she came to live there, at first boarding with a tenant. It was pleasantly
situated, with a garden and apple orchard, and with rows of
butternut-trees planted beside it; and perhaps she had sought this
retirement with the hope of its being consonant with her own solitude.
The country round about was wilderness, most of it primeval woods.
The little settlement, only a mill and a country store and a few scattered
houses, lay on a broad headland making out into Sebago Lake, better
known as the Great Pond, a sheet of water eight miles across and
fourteen miles long, and connected with other lakes in a chain of
navigable water; to the northwest the distant horizon was filled with the
White Mountains, and northward and eastward rose the unfrequented
hill and lake country, remarkable only, then as now, for its pure air and

waters, and presenting a vast solitude. This was the Maine home of
Hawthorne, of which he cherished the memory as the brightest part of
his boyhood. The spots that can be named which may have excited his
curiosity or interested his imagination are few, and similar places
would not be far off anywhere on the coast. There was near his home a
Pulpit Rock, such as tradition often preserves, and by the Pond there
was a cliff with the usual legend of a romantic leap, and under it were
the Indian rock-paintings called the Images; but the essential charm of
the place was that in all directions the country lay open for adventure
by boat or by trail. Hawthorne had visited the scene before, in summer
times, and he revisited it afterward in vacations, but his long stay here
was in his fifteenth year, the greater part of which he passed in its
neighborhood.
The contemporary record of these days is contained in a diary
[Footnote: Hawthorne's First Diary, with an account of its discovery
and loss. By Samuel T. Pickard. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1897.
The volume has been withdrawn by its editor in consequence of his
later doubts of its authenticity.] which has been regarded as
Hawthorne's earliest writing. The original has never been produced,
and the copy was communicated for publication under circumstances of
mystery that easily allow doubts of its authenticity to arise. The diary is
said to have been given to him by his uncle Richard "with the advice
that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he
can,