The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is easy to see how some of the materials for "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Scarlet Letter" were already depositing themselves in the form of indelible recollections and suggestions taken from his surroundings.

      Oppressed by her great sorrow, his mother had shut herself away, after her husband's death, from all society except that of her immediate relatives. This was perhaps not a very extraordinary circumstance, nor one that need be construed as denoting a morbid disposition; but it was one which must have distinctly affected the tone of her son's meditations. In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, she retired to a still deeper seclusion, in Maine; but the occasion of this was simply that her brother Robert, having purchased the seven-mile-square township of Raymond, in that State, had built a house there, intending to found a new home. The year that Hawthorne passed in that spot, amid the breezy life of the forest, fishing and shooting, watching the traits and customs of lumber-men and country-folk, and drinking in the tonic of a companionship with untamed nature, was to him a happy and profitable one. "We are all very well," he wrote thence to his Uncle Robert, in May, 1819: "The fences are all finished, and the garden is laid out and planted.... I have shot a partridge and a henhawk, and caught eighteen large trout out of our brook. I am sorry you intend to send me to school again." He had been to the place before, probably for short visits, when his Uncle Richard was staying there, and his memories of it were always agreeable ones. To Mr. James T. Fields, he said in 1863: "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." "During the moonlight nights of winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring up. 'Ah,' he said, 'how well I recall the summer days, also, when with my gun I roamed through the woods of Maine!'"[2]

      Hawthorne at this time had an intention of following the example of his father and grandfather, and going to sea; but this was frustrated by the course of events. His mother, it is probable, would strongly have objected to it. In a boyish journal kept while he was at Raymond he mentions a gentleman having come with a boat to take one or two persons out on "the Great Pond," and adds: "He was kind enough to say that I might go (with my mother's consent), which she gave after much coaxing. Since the loss of my father she dreads to have any one belonging to her go upon the water." And again: "A young man named Henry Jackson, Jr., was drowned two days ago, up in Crooked River.... I read one of the Psalms to my mother this morning, and it plainly declares twenty-six times that 'God's mercy endureth forever.'... Mother is sad; says she shall not consent any more to my swimming in the mill-pond with the boys, fearing that in sport my mouth might get kicked open, and then sorrow for a dead son be added to that for a dead father, which she says would break her heart. I love to swim, but I shall not disobey my mother." This same journal, which seems to have laid the basis of his life-long habit of keeping note-books, was begun at the suggestion of Mr. Richard Manning, who gave him a blank-book, with advice that he should use it for recording his thoughts, "as the best means of his securing for mature years command of thought and language." In it were made a number of entries which testify plainly to his keenness of observation both of people and scenery, to his sense of humor and his shrewdness. Here are a few:—

      "Swapped pocket-knives with Robinson Cook yesterday. Jacob Dingley says that he cheated me, but I think not, for I cut a fishing-pole this morning and did it well; besides, he is a Quaker, and they never cheat."

      "This morning the bucket got off the chain, and dropped back into the well. I wanted to go down on the stones and get it. Mother would not consent, for fear the well might cave in, but hired Samuel Shaw to go down. In the goodness of her heart, she thought the son of old Mrs. Shaw not quite so good as the son of the Widow Hathorne."

      Of a trout that he saw caught by some men:—"This trout had a droll-looking hooked nose, and they tried to make me believe that, if the line had been in my hands, I should have been obliged to let go, or have been pulled out of the boat. They are men, and have a right to say so. I am a boy, and have a right to think differently."

      "We could see the White Hills to the northwest, though Mr. Little said they were eighty miles away; and grand old Rattlesnake to the northeast, in its immense jacket of green oak, looked more inviting than I had ever seen it; while Frye's Island, with its close growth of great trees growing to the very edge of the water, looked like a monstrous green raft, floating to the southeastward. Whichever way the eye turned, something charming appeared."

      The mental clearness, the sharpness of vision, and the competence of the language in this early note-book are remarkable, considering the youth and inexperience of the writer; and there is one sketch of "a solemn-faced old horse" at the grist-mill, which exhibits a delightful boyish humor with a dash of pathos in it, and at the same time is the first instance on record of a mild approach by Hawthorne to the writing of fiction:—

      "He had brought for his owner some bags of corn to be ground, who, after carrying them into the mill, walked up to Uncle Richard's store, leaving his half-starved animal in the cold wind with nothing to eat, while the corn was being turned into meal. I felt sorry, and, nobody being near, thought it best to have a talk with the old nag, and said, 'Good morning, Mr. Horse, how are you to-day?' 'Good morning, youngster,' said he, just as plain as a horse can speak; and then said, 'I am almost dead, and I wish I was quite. I am hungry, have had no breakfast, and must stand here tied by the head while they are grinding the corn, and until master drinks two or three glasses of rum at the store, then drag the meal and him up the Ben Ham Hill home, and am now so weak that I can hardly stand. Oh dear, I am in a bad way;' and the old creature cried. I almost cried myself. Just then the miller went down-stairs to the meal-trough; I heard his feet on the steps, and not thinking much what I was doing, ran into the mill, and, taking the four-quart toll-dish nearly full of corn out of the hopper, carried it out, and poured it into the trough before the horse, and placed the dish back before the miller came up from below. When I got out, the horse was laughing, but he had to eat slowly, because the bits were in his mouth. I told him that I was sorry, but did not know how to take them out, and should not dare to if I did.... At last the horse winked and stuck out his lip ever so far, and then said, 'The last kernel is gone;' then he laughed a little, then shook one ear, then the other; then he shut his eyes. I jumped up and said: 'How do you feel, old fellow; any better?' He opened his eyes, and looking at me kindly answered, 'Very much,' and then blew his nose exceedingly loud, but he did not wipe it. Perhaps he had no wiper. I then asked him if his master whipped him much. He answered, 'Not much lately. He used to till my hide got hardened, but now he has a white-oak goad-stick with an iron brad in its end, with which he jabs my hind-quarters and hurts me awfully.'... The goad with the iron brad was in the wagon, and snatching it out I struck the end against a stone, and the stabber flew into the mill-pond. 'There,' says I, 'old colt,' as I threw the goad back into the wagon, 'he won't harpoon you again with that iron.' The poor old brute understood well enough what I said, for I looked him in the eye and spoke horse language."

      Mother and uncles could hardly have missed observing in him many tokens of a gifted intelligence and an uncommon individuality. The perception of these, added to Mrs. Hawthorne's dread of the sea, may have led to the decision which was taken to send him to college. In 1819 he went back to Salem, to continue his schooling; and one year later, March 7, 1820, wrote to his mother, who was still at Raymond: "I have left school, and have begun to fit for College, under Benjamin L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in your family.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A minister I will not be." Miss E. P. Peabody remembers another letter of his, in which he touched the same problem, thus: "I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So I don't see that there is anything left but for me to be an author. How would you like some day to see a whole shelf full of books written by your son, with 'Hathorne's Works' printed on the backs?" There appears to have been but little difficulty for him in settling the problem of his future occupation. During part of August and September he amused himself by writing three numbers of a miniature