Nathaniel Hawthorne | Page 9

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 or gray
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 riverward 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 that the Faculty never heard
of, or else it would have been the worse for us--still, it was your
prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction."
The picture is a vignette of the time, and being in the open, too,
pleasantly ends the tale of college. On separating, it is pleasant to
notice, the friends exchanged keepsakes.
The four years had lapsed quietly and quickly by, and Hawthorne, who
now adopted the fanciful spelling of the name after his personal whim,
was man grown. There had been trying circumstances in these early
days, but he had met them hardily and lightly, as a matter of course; he
had practically educated himself by the help of books, and had also
discharged his duties as they seemed to the eyes of others; he could go
home feeling that he had satisfied his friends. He seems to have feared
that he might have satisfied them too well; and, some commendation
having preceded him, he endeavored to put them right by a letter to his
sister, July 14, 1825:--
"The family had before conceived much too high an opinion of my
talents, and had probably formed expectations which I shall never

realize. I have thought much upon the subject, and have finally come to
the conclusion that I shall never make a distinguished figure in the
world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude. I do
not say this for the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but
merely to set mother and the rest of you right upon a point where your
partiality has led you astray. I did hope that uncle Robert's opinion of
me was nearer to the truth, as his deportment toward me never
expressed a very high estimation of my abilities."
This has the ring of sincerity, like all his home letters, and it is true that
so far there had been nothing precocious, brilliant, or extraordinary in
him to testify of genius,--he was only one of hundreds of New England
boys bred on literature under the shelter of academic culture; and yet
there may have been in his heart something left unspoken, another
mood equally sincere in its turn, for the heart is a fickle prophet. As Mr.
Lathrop suggests in that study of his father-in-law which is so subtly
appreciative of those vital suggestions apt to escape record and analysis,
another part of the truth may lie in the words of "Fanshawe" where
Hawthorne expresses the feelings of his hero in a like situation with
himself at the end of college days:--
"He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in
solitary study,--in conversation with the dead,--while he had scorned to
mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives.
Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world,
unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his
pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost
heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that
dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a
thousand realities."

II.
THE CHAMBER UNDER THE EAVES.
In the summer of 1825 Hawthorne returned to Salem, going back to the

old house on Herbert Street,--the home of his childhood, where his
mother, disregarding his boyish dissuasions, had again taken up her
abode three years before. He occupied a room on the second floor in
the southwest sunshine under the eaves, looking out on the business of
the wharf-streets; and in it he spent the next twelve years, a period
which remained in his memory as an unbroken tract of time preserving
a peculiar character. The way of his life knew little variation from the
beginning to the end. He lived in an intellectual solitude deepened by
the fact that it was only an inner cell of an outward seclusion almost as
complete, for the house had the habits of a hermitage. His mother, after
nearly a score of years of widowhood, still maintained her separation
even from her home world; she is said to have seen none of her
husband's relatives and few of