Little Daffydowndilly, and other stories. Nathaniel Hawthorne

      ​

      A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF

      NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

       Table of Contents

      The old town of Salem, in Massachusetts, was once a famous seaport, and ships sailed out of its harbor to the ends of the world. In the East Indies so many merchant vessels bore the word Salem on the stern that people there supposed that to be the name of some powerful country, and “Mass.,” which was sometimes added, to be the name of a village in Salem. As Boston and New York grew more important, they drew away trade from the smaller towns, and Salem became less busy. It still has wharves, and large, roomy houses where its rich merchants lived, and shows in many streets the signs of its old prosperity; but one living in Salem is constantly reminded how famous the old town once was rather than how busy it now is.

      In an old house in Union Street, in Salem, was born Nathaniel Hawthorne, July 4, 1804, and in one near by, in Herbert Street, he spent his boyhood. The town had already begun to decline when he was a boy there; and as he walked about the streets and listened to the talk of people, he seemed always to be in the company of old men, hearing about old times, and watching the signs of decay. There were strange stories of what had happened in former days, especially since Salem was the place where, more than a hundred years ​before, there had been a terrible outbreak of superstition; men and women had been charged with witchcraft, and had been put to death for it. One of Hawthorne’s own ancestors had been a judge who had condemned innocent people to death because he believed them guilty of witchcraft.

      His father died before he could know him. He was a sea-captain, and so was his father before him, who was a privateersman in the Revolutionary War. When Hawthorne was a boy of fourteen, he went with his mother to live for a year in a lonely place in Maine. He spent much of his time by himself in the open air. In summer he took his gun and roamed for hours through the woods. On winter nights he would skate by moonlight, all alone, upon the ice of Sebago Pond, and sometimes rest till morning by a great camp-fire which he built before a log-cabin. He led a strange, solitary life, and formed habits of being by himself which he never shook off; but he learned also to observe the world about him, and his eye and ear were trained like those of an Indian.

      He went back to Salem at the end of the year, and, when he was ready, went to Bowdoin College, in Maine, where he was a classmate of the poet Longfellow. Another of his college friends was Franklin Pierce, who afterward was President of the United States. Hawthorne had already begun to show that he was to be a writer. “While we were lids together at a country college,” he wrote once to his friend, Horatio Bridge, an officer in the navy, “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 and 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 river ward 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 had been the worse for us—still it was your prognostic of your friend’s destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction.”

      After he graduated, in 1825, Hawthorne went back to Salem, and lived there, with only occasional excursions into the country, until 1838. He took long walks in the fields, along the country roads and the neighboring sea-beaches, but much of his time was spent in an upper chamber in the old Herbert Street house. Here he read many books, and sat for hours pondering and writing. Many of the tales which he wrote he destroyed, but one novel called Fanshawe was published; it was quite unlike what he afterward wrote, and was so little regarded that very few copies could be traced when, years afterward, the interest which people had come to have in everything of Hawthorne’s led to a reprint of it. He sent little stories to magazines, and here and there a reader was found who wondered at their strange beauty, but most passed them by. At length, through the help of his old friend Bridge, some of the stories were collected and published in a volume called Twice-Told Tales. It is from that volume that Little Annie's Ramble is taken. It is pleasant to notice that Longfellow was one of the first to welcome the book, and to give it hearty praise in an article in the North American Review. Hawthorne wrote also at this time some short sketches of biography and history.

      While leading this quiet, uneventful life, he began ​to keep note-books, in which he recorded what he saw on his walks, what he heard other people say, and thoughts and fancies which came to him through the day and night. He did not make these note-books for publication; they held the rough material out of which he made books and stories, but they had also much that never reappeared in his writings. He jotted down what he said for his own use and pleasure, and thus sometimes he did not make complete sentences. He was like an artist who takes his pencil and draws a few lines, by which to remember something which he sees, and afterwards paints a full and careful picture from such notes. The artist’s studies are very interesting to all who like to see how a picture grows, and often the sketch itself is very beautiful, for one who paints well can scarcely help putting beauty into his simplest outlines; then, by drawing constantly, he acquires the power of putting down what he sees in few but vivid lines. After Hawthorne's death, selections from his Note-Books were published. One may learn by them how to write carefully, just as one may learn to draw by studying an artist’s sketches.

      These thirteen years meant much to Hawthorne. He was learning to write; he was steadily using the power which had been given him, and it was growing stronger every year. Yet they were lonely and often discouraging years to him. He could earn but little by his pen. Very few people seemed to care for what he did, and he loved his own work so well that he longed to have others care for it and for him. He went back afterward to the chamber where he had read and written and

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