Nathaniel Hawthorne | Page 4

upon any and all subjects, as it is one of the best means of his
securing for mature years command of thought and language,"--these
words being written on the first leaf with the date, "Raymond, June 1,
1816." Whether this inscription and the entries which follow it are
genuine must be left undetermined; there is nothing strange in
Hawthorne's keeping a boy's diary, and being urged to do so, in view of
his tastes and circumstances, and it would be interesting to trace to so
early a beginning that habit of the note-book that was such a resource to
him in mature years; but the evidence is inconclusive. Whether by his
hand or not, the diary embodies the life he led in this region on his
visits and during his longer stay; the names and places, the incidents,
the people, the quality of the days are the same that the boy knew,
wrote of in letters of the time, and remembered as a man; and though

the story may be the fabrication of his mulatto boy comrade of those
days, it is woven of shreds and patches of reality. After all, the little
book is but a lad's log of small doings,--swapping knives, swimming
and fishing, of birds and snakes and bears, incidents of the road and
excursions into the woods and on the lake, and notices of the tragic
accidents of the neighborhood. It has some importance as illustrating
the external circumstances of the place, a very rural place indeed, and
suggesting that among these country people Hawthorne found the
secret of that fellowship--all he ever had--with the rough and unlearned,
on a footing of democratic equality, with the ease and naturalness of a
man. Here at Raymond in his youth, where his personal superiority was
too much a matter of course to be noticed, he must have learned this
freemasonry with young and old at the same time that he held apart
from all in his own life. For the rest, he has told himself in his
undoubted words how he swam and hunted, shot hen-hawks and
partridges, caught trout, and tracked bear in the snow, and ran wild, yet
not wholly free of the call-whistle of his master-passion: "I ran quite
wild," he wrote a quarter-century later, "and would, I doubt not, have
willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or shooting with
an old fowling-piece; but reading a good deal, too, on rainy days,
especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress,' and any poetry
or light books within my reach. These were delightful days.... I would
skate all alone on Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills
on either hand. When I found myself far from home, and weary with
the exhaustion of skating, I would sometimes take refuge in a log cabin
where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. I would sit in
the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture
through which the flames went roaring up. Ah, how well I recall the
summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed at will through the
woods of Maine!" In these memories, it is evident, many years,
younger and older, are diffused in one recollection. For him, here rather
than by his native sea were those open places of freedom that boyhood
loves, and with them he associated the beginnings of his spirit,--the
dark as well as the bright; near his end he told Fields, as his mind
wandered back to these days, "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so
perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there I first got my cursed
habits of solitude." The tone of these reminiscences is verified by his

letters, when he went back to Salem; in the first months he writes of
"very hard fits of homesickness;" a year later he breaks out,--"Oh, that I
had the wings of a dove, that I might fly hence and be at rest! How
often do I long for my gun, and wish that I could again savageize with
you! But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be
so happy as when I did;" and, after another year's interval, "I have
preferred and still prefer Raymond to Salem, through every change of
fortune." There can be no doubt where his heart placed the home of his
boyhood; nor is it, perhaps, fanciful to observe that in his books the
love of nature he displays is rather for the woods than the sea, though
he was never content to live long away from the salt air.
It was plainly the need of schooling that took him from his mother's
home at Raymond and brought him back to