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over him. His father, pursuing the sea-cap- | Salem, to his mother, in Maine, he had disuseless dreamer, and this drove him in upon himself; but he persisted. There was nothing gloomy in his character; a secluded youth in the shadow of his mother's sacred widowhood, however, combined with extraordinary fineness of organization in himself, had made him shy and reticent; and the clashing of his ideal aims with the more sordid ones of most men that he saw, increased his hesitation to mix with the currents of life until he should have gained a foot-hold of his own. I urge this here, to

tain life that had now become traditional in the family, died at Surinam in 1808, and the shadow of that loss lay upon the whole of Hawthorne's youth. For his mother was an extremely sensitive woman, whose strong character deepened the sway of grief at her husband's death, and she became a complete recluse. In the house to which they now moved * a part of his boyhood and some of the weightiest years of youth were passed. His father's strange failure to return from that last voyage, working, perhaps, with some spell of the sea inherited in his blood, affected the little boy very soon; and when quite young-perhaps not more than five or six-he would sometimes burst out of a reverie with, "There, mother!" and then announce that when he grew up he too should go away to sea "and never come back again;" little knowing the meaning of his declaration, or the dread and yearning sorrow it must have waked in the widow's heart. But this threat soon passed. They left Salem in 1818 to go to Raymond, Maine, for Nathaniel's health, he having fallen ill; but not before he had listened to the thunder of that desperate battle off Marblehead, in the war of 1812-13, between the American frigate "Chesapeake" and the British frigate "Shannon." The "Chesapeake" was captained by young Lawrence of Tripolitan and other fame, who got his death-wound in this disastrous duel of ships. After a year Hawthorne came back to Salem and studied, entered Bowdoin College in 1821, and again returned to the ancestral town on graduation. Indeed, it is strange to see how, in later life, with all the distaste for Salem that lurked always in his mind, he kept drifting thither at intervals till 1850 (only fourteen years before his death), when Concord became his home and restingplace. A youth of twenty-one, he had now fixed his thought on a very different career from that of a sea-captain. In a letter written while he was a boy,t probably from

* It stood on Herbert street, the next one eastward from Union; but the gardens of the two joined, and from his top-floor study in the Herbert street house Hawthorne could look down upon the less lofty roof under which he was born. The estate belonged to the Mannings, and ran through from one street to the other; but the Herbert street house was spoken of as Union street, and it is this one that is meant in that passage of the "American Note-Books," under date of October 25, 1838: "In this dismal Chamber FAME was won;" as also in that longer reverie in the same volume, dated October 4, 1840.

† This letter, long in the possession of Miss E.

cussed the choice of occupations in these terms: "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 for me but to be an author. How would you like, some day, to see a whole shelf full of books written by your son, with Hawthorne's Works' printed on their backs?" In another, dated 1820, which I have seen, he says: "Shall you want me to be a minister, doctor, or lawyer? A minister I will not be." It is clear from these utterances that he found little difficulty in narrowing the prospect for himself to that which he afterward chose. His college friend, Horatio Bridge,‡ too, had brought to bear upon him the influence of a confident and prophetic sympathy. In fine, this latest scion of that vigorous Puritan stock entered upon the destiny opening before him with the mysterious certainty which seems to guide the steps of all great writers. And it is now that we begin to see how his antecedents played into the hands of his inborn tendency. As I have hinted, his mother's solitude was complete. When she and her son and two daughters were again living together in Herbert street, they remained frequently in separate rooms, sometimes scarcely seeing each other for weeks, nor even eating in company. Hawthorne himself stayed all day in his study under the eaves, his meals being brought up and left at the door. He read in the morning and wrote in the afternoon; at night he walked abroad, and thus gradually rambled over the whole neighboring coast, from Gloucester to Lynn, sometimes also, without doubt, haunting the old scenes of the witchcraft outbreak in Salem Village (Danvers), or musing under the trees of Endicott's ancient Orchard Farm. (By this it is not to be understood that he "never saw the sun," as has been reported: he commonly saw it rise, every day in summer, when going down to the sea to bathe, and he of course walked by daylight when so minded.) This seclusion arose on his part, largely from the silent but trying conflict between his own bent and the sternly practical life around him. His relatives urged him to go into business; his genius forbade

it. He was made to feel that he was a

P. Peabody, Mr. Hawthorne's sister-in-law, unfor. tunately does not exist any longer. The date has thus been forgotten, but the passage is clear in Miss Peabody's recollection.

+ See Prefatory Note to "The Snow Image."

mean to command attention to the fact that this belongs to the trait of growth in him which is so distinctive of all high genius. He begins in the past and comes down to the present; his later writings centered rather upon his own time than upon a previous period. Moreover, as in "The House of the Seven Gables," it is one of his favorite themes to trace the genesis of the present out of the past. At the same time, I may enlarge upon the method and scope of his own growth. In the "Twice-Told Tales" we see the reflec

mitigate prevalent notions about his pecution of his youth as in a darkened glass.

liarity, which perhaps tend to attach him by another unreal association to Poe again. Hawthorne believed himself to have a strongly social nature, which was permanently restrained by the long and sad retirement of his youth; speaking of this mode of life to a friend who did much to break up its austerity, he said: "We do not even live at our house!" And, at another time, telling of the period in which the "TwiceTold Tales" were written: "I was like a person talking to himself in a dark room." He knew the dreariness and in one sense the mistakenness of these years-too well! But they were not of his making. We, however, his readers, who represent that outside world which gave Hawthorne so little encouragement, have, through no merit of our own, reaped a rich profit from his providential privacy. It was in this silence and darkness that he was able to revive the past of New England, and fill a few imagined hearts with a breath that shall keep them beating long beyond our own. I have it as a fact without doubt, that his exquisite story of "The Gentle Boy" was suggested to him by reading Sewall's "History of the ❘tions of his dreams. Nor is there ever any

There is a prevalent somberness about the picture; but how calm, thoughtful, and beautiful the dim image of his face when seen there! Then, behind his own form, we catch theflitting shapes of half-real beings in strange variety of action, smiling and frowning, passionate, or polished, and splendid in their perished grandeur, mysterious shadows trembling over them all; but there are also gleams of the healthiest sunshine striking through, which gives us re-assurance in the subdued, grave atmosphere. There are a few cases among these tales of a nearly unendurable sadness, as in "The White Old Maid," and "The Ambitious Guest;" others in which the horror or the pathos hangs with too dread a weight upon the mind; but these are only such extremes as might excusably proceed from the long and oppressive isola❘tion in which the stories were all written. The wonder should be that Hawthorne's mind could soar above the shadows as often as it did at this time, and, above all, that he should give us always a taste of a complete, a wholesome, unselfish, pure, and profound philosophy amidst even the bitterest distilla

Quakers," and the knowledge that one of his own ancestors had been instrumental in their persecution. And I need not point out to those who know his works the traces

of meditation on New England annals to be found throughout the "American NoteBook," and its æsthetic results in various famed ones of the "Twice-Told Tales," two or three among the "Mosses," "Main Street," and other essays in the "Snow Image" group of stories and sketches, and of course most eminently and marvelously in "The Scarlet Letter," and "The House of Seven Gables." He recurred to it again more directly in "True Stories," written for children; in short, old New England was as necessary and vital a thing to him as it was to the entire New England of his day. One could not be, without the other. In pointing this out, I

The

thing disordered about the sadness that
appears. There is no protest against life and
fate, no gloomy or weak self-pity. The ter-
ror and the tragedy came as legitimate
deductions from deep imaginings about
human nature and searching glances at it.
But even this sad, questioning twilight, at
no time threatening, clears into a steady and
gentle gray luminousness, in succeeding
works, as Hawthorne's mind matures.
proof and multifarious example of this I
must leave to my reader, merely hinting that
he should look through the early Note-Books
to assist him in seeing how the development
proceeded. I only urge here that there was a
constant development and a wholesome mel-
lowing; there was consistent, calm growth,
fed by the giant sap of strong and fine-strung
passions coursing in even flow. Compare

this with Irving's gentle unprogressiveness. | thought I had been exceedingly good-nat

Irving never went beyond the "Sketch Book;" his histories, though a higher order of writing, do not index any larger development. Again, compare it with the spectacle that Poe presents-mad rotations and fitful shocks of ecstatic power, a blinding whirlwind that dizzies and bewilders at first; but when we look again, at ease, and contemplate the entire outline left by the man and his works, we find only a ruined arch. In some sense, Poe had an intellectual struggle, a confused, half-maniacal brawl, with himself and with the world. This argues, at least, more momentum, whatever its effect, than the mild quiescence of the amiable Irving. Hawthorne, on the other hand, experienced a deep and enduring struggle worthy of his powers. But it was the peril and the pain of organic unfolding, not the anguish of an ill-governed egotism, and his exquisite character and genius met both bravely, grew stronger for the obstacles opposed to their advance, and finally triumphed.

It is hard for persons of less acute power of feeling than his to conceive of the suffering which he drew from his long and lonely youth in Salem. In vain to discuss the point whether, had he modified his temperament and been less impressionable, he would not have come off more easily. In that case,

ured in my treatment of them." And so it appeared to most of his readers. But the general public would have been as startled as would the Salem citizens, if they could have known how deep was his disgust at the lack of sympathy there had always been between himself and his fellow-townsmen. Yet, patiently absorbing this bitter experience, he wrote late in life: "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone." This want of sympathy had a practical side, also, as when various Salem people combined to get Hawthorne ousted from the surveyorship, and made representations for that end which he thought untrue. But, in practical affairs, his experiences were often rasping. Most of his earlier tales were written for little or no compensation. In 1836 he went to Boston to edit a magazine, and seems to have been cheated out of the most of his salary. It was at about this time that he was engaged by Mr. S. G. Goodrich to write either the whole or a large part of the famous "Universal History" of Peter Parley, which brought him a hundred dollars and sold by millions of copies for the benefit of his employer. Later, when married and living at the Old Manse, he ad

he would not have been Hawthorne. At ❘vanced money to the "Democratic Review,"

this day, one hears little else than satisfaction, in Salem, at the honor which his genius has added to the place; but, half a century ago, at an epoch when prejudice was everywhere more rife than now, it must have been different enough. Salem was secluded and stationary, and arrested thought is soon slimed with gossip, as stagnant water gets covered with scum. There are two things which are offensive to the average mind: that success which outshines everybody, and that other successful development which with draws you from the prying eye of neighbors, and lets you make of yourself something possibly better than they. And it was this latter kind which made Hawthorne troublesome to the "practical" community around him. Nothing in his books betrays the prolonged exasperation which he felt at the relations between himself and his townsfolk; but there are glimpses of it in some of his letters, which make one marvel at his self-restraint in not letting more of it appear in print. At last, when a little gentle satire escaped him in "The Custom-House," it awoke hot scandal in the little city. "As to the Salem people," he wrote to a friend in 1850, "I really

and delayed collecting the price of sundry contributions until the concern failed, and carried off both the loan and the value of his articles, irrecoverably. It is usually thought that the Liverpool Consulate made a delightful and vastly lucrative episode in his life. A shameful misinterpretation of his acceptance of it, however, was inflicted on him; the emoluments of the office were shortly cut down by Congress; large drains were made on his private purse by unfortunate fellow-countrymen; and his diligence in office was sometimes questioned, with the greatest injustice, however, for he was a most conscientious public servant, and went beyond the necessities of his position, to make sure. At no time, unless in Italy, was he wholly free from the embarrassments of a small income. In addition to these more sordid annoyances, there were many grievances that cannot be touched upon here. In short, he lived the checkered life of most men who had their own way to make in the world, and had to suffer misconstruction which more politic men might have avoided, and less sensitive men would not have felt. But, with perfect supremacy, he saw that these things were not worthy to affect him in any visible way. He was rational, self-possessed, and simply manful. Not the less, to a person of his disposition and genius, such things made a constant warfare.

It was a silent battle; all the more admirable the victory, then. He did not crudely call upon the world to be miserable because he suffered or was taken advantage of. But this silent battle speaks most powerfully throughout his works; this drama of interior development has issued in the visible action of creatures who take their places among the most dramatically conceived in fictitious writing.

This is not the place for a complete survey of Hawthorne's genius, but we may draw some conclusions from our premises. So that, to sum up, we find Hawthorne taking the highest rank by virtue of his relation to the country, the largeness of his powerful individual development, his insight, and his dramatic feeling. If we pursue him through the delicate ramifications of literary art also, we find him unsurpassed among prosaists; and though there may be modes of expression, and more volatile movements of style, that we prefer, on occasion, to his, we must admit that no one outdoes him in perfection

of deep texture. "I think we have no romancer but yourself, nor have had any for this long time," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes to him in 1851. "The Yankee mind has for the most part budded and flowered in pots of English earth, but you have fairly raised yours as a seedling in the natural soil."* This is a generous statement of a large fact. But, now that we have before us the entire works of Hawthorne, we may add to this the opinionhardly a hazardous one-that he is as fresh and significant to the world at large as to America. As he asserted his own personality quietly, so does his influence spread in silence; but it is potent as it is subtle. Such purity and such profundity must work many revolutions, though noiseless ones. To us, Hawthorne seems perhaps the most eminently and deeply Christian of great fictionists, for he goes below all forms and shows, and bathes his mind in the clear and undivided current of the most humane of religions.

* From a letter hitherto unpublished. Mr. Hawthorne, however, paid Doctor Holmes's modesty the tribute of a lively interest in "Elsie Venner." Among the last books he read was this, taken up for a second perusal.

PARTING.

"SO FAR-so far!" Nay, Sweet! nor distant lands, Nor breadth of waters can avail to bar

My love from thee. Alas! 'tis ever far, To yearning hearts, the smallest space that stands Beyond the compass of out-stretching hands; And never near, how close soe'er to each True lovers be, if kisses may not reach Across the distance. Since harsh Fate commands, Darling! farewell! With tearful eyes I go, Unknowing when the glad return shall be; But I will think, to mitigate my woe,

How loving souls of time and tide are free; And oft to greet thee, dearest! mine, I know, Exultant will o'erleap the sundering sea!

BEDS AND TABLES, STOOLS AND CANDLESTICKS. IV.

MANTEL-PIECES, CORNER CUPBOARDS, HANGING SHELVES, ETC.

FAULT has been found, in the circle of readers who are interested in these papers, with the expensiveness of many of the things recommended; and many good-natured jests, and criticisms more or less acid, are tossed about on the want of consistency shown by the writer in preaching economy and simplicity, while he, at the same time, at once tempts and teases the people with short purses by showing them Mr. Lathrop's charming drawings of the prettiest and costliest furniture to be found.

Now, while admitting that his critics have a show of reason in their charges, the writer pleads in extenuation that he is really misunderstood, and that he does not mean any harm! He stands by all he has said about economy and simplicity, and the possibility of making our houses attractive without, at the same time, making ourselves uncomfortable by spending more money than we can afford in furnishing and decorating. But when it comes to giving illustrations that will support his propositions, he is met by a difficulty. Many of the pieces of furniture that in design and purpose answer to his notions are, in fact, expensive pieces. He takes them where he finds them, and has them

and display for display's sake. Nor is it a fact that all the things shown are expensive, that is, compared with the prices that would be paid for fashionable pieces of furniture intended for the same uses. One may well despair of getting anything cheap when he finds that even chairs so ostentatiously bare and matter-of-fact as those made by the

[graphic]

copied as faithfully as he can, and without any attempt to show them less elegant and costly

No. I. AN EVERY-DAY MANTEL-PIECE, SIMPLY TREATED.

than they really are. But whoever will | Shakers, or the Vienna bent-wood chairs,

be at the pains to look over the pictures in the articles thus far published will admit that, wherever the money goes to, it does not go to carving, and flourish,

cost as much as some to be found in the fashionable shops that make a good deal of show. People are slow to learn, it would seem, especially women, that the reverse of

VOL. XI.-52.

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