Nathaniel Hawthorne | Page 8

or another were not to have a Commencement part on
graduation. The Club met at the college tavern, Miss Ward's, near the
campus, for weekly suppers and every night during Commencement
week; this entertainment was for these youths the happy climax of their
academic life together.
In his studies Hawthorne must have followed his own will very freely.
He refused to declaim, and no power could make him do so, and for
this reason he was denied the honor of a Commencement part, which he
had won, being number eighteen by rank in his class; he was nervously
shy about declaiming, owing, it is said, to his having been laughed at
on his first attempt as a school-boy at Salem; but he either delivered or
read a Latin theme at a Junior exhibition. He also paid scant attention to
mathematics and metaphysics, and had no pride as to failing in
recitation in those branches; but he distinguished himself as a Latin
scholar and in English. His most fruitful hours, as so often happens,
were those spent in the little library of the Athenaeum Society, a
collection, as he writes home, of eight hundred books, among which he
especially mentions Rees's Cyclopædia--such was the wealth of a boy
of genius in those days--but among the eight hundred books it is certain
that the bulk of English literature was contained. He practiced writing
somewhat, though he had given up poetry; and he played a prank by
sending to a Boston paper a fabricated account of one of those
destroying insects which visit that region from time to time, with notes

on ways of exterminating it,--all for the benefit of his uncle, who took
the paper; but no other trace of his composition remains except a
memory of his elder sister's that he wrote to her of "progress on my
novel." His way of life intellectually had not changed since his
schoolboy days, for it is noticeable that then he never mentioned his
studies, but only the books he read; so now he read the books for
pleasure, and let his studies subsist as best they could in the realm of
duty. He was poor, and even in the modest simplicity of this country
college, where his expenses could hardly have been three hundred
dollars a year, was evidently embarrassed with homely difficulties; the
state of his clothes seems to have been on his mind a good deal. But he
was self-respecting, patient, and grateful; he formed the good habit of
hating debt; and he went on his way little burdened except by doubtful
hopes.
Though he was familiar with his classmates and contemporaries at
college, and firm and fast friends with a few, like Pierce and Cilley,
forming with them the ties that last through all things, he had but one
confidant, Horatio Bridge, afterwards of the United States Navy.
Hawthorne roomed at first with Alfred Mason, in Maine Hall, and
being burned out in their Freshman year, they found temporary quarters
elsewhere, but when the Hall was rebuilt returned to it and occupied
room number nineteen for the Sophomore year. The two chums,
however, did not become intimate, beyond pleasant companionship,
and they belonged to different societies; and the last two years
Hawthorne roomed alone in a private house, Mrs. Cunning's, where
both he and Bridge also boarded. It is from the latter, who remained
through life one of Hawthorne's most serviceable friends, that the
account of his college days mainly comes. He especially remembered,
besides such matters of fact as have been recounted, their walks and
rambles together in the pine woods that stretched about the college
unbroken for miles, and by the river with its rafts of spring logs, and
over to the little bay sent up by a far-reaching arm of the sea; and he
recalled the confidences of Hawthorne in speaking of his hopes of
being a writer, in repeating to him verses as they leaned in the
moonlight over the railing of the bridge below the falls, listening to the
moving waters, and in allowing him some inward glimpses of his

solitary life in the brooding time of youth. Bridge was a fellow of
infinite cheer, and praised him, and clapped him, and urged him on, and
gave him the best companionship in the world for that time of life, if
not for all times,--the companionship of being believed in by a friend.
Hawthorne did not forget it, and in due time paid the tribute of grateful
remembrance in the preface to the volume he dedicated to Bridge,
where he recalled his college days and his friend's part in them.
"If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is
yourself. I know not whence your faith came, but while we were lads
together