Nathaniel Hawthorne

to fulfill his duties, since he had not yet learned what they were, and he indulges his humor in fancying imaginary little essays which he will write in the unoccupied time he pleasantly ant

n all weathers to get to the wharf at the earliest possible hour," so that the laborers, who were employed by the hour, might not lose their time. The life he led is fully described in his own journals, with all its details of shipping business, of the sailors and laborers and their tasks, of the salt, salt fish, oil, iron, molasses, and other inelegant merchandise, and the day's work in its various aspects of character, things, and weather. Hawthorne's powers of observation, which he had previously exercised in the taverns of New England and along his native roadside and beaches, were now fully occupied and

night's sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." At first, no doubt, the outdoor occupation and the having to do with sea and harbor life, for which he had an hereditary affection, were important elements in his happiness; and the association with rough and hardy men, whose contact with life was primitive and had the genuineness and

alf immersed in the water, and covered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill monument; and, what interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the

ldom;" and beginning now to write again, he feels as if "the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition or had decayed out of i

things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there, so that the present portion of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real existence.... It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know much

nce, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon." He goes to the Common, to the highest point, where he could "see miles and miles into the country. Blessed be God for this green tract, and the view which it affords, whereby we poor citizens may be put in mind, sometimes, that all his earth is not composed of blocks of brick houses, and of stone or

be." He is convinced that "Christian's burden consisted of coal," and he takes comfort in salt: "Salt is white and pure-there is something holy in salt." Yet this tone was not constant, and from time to time he shows something

he atmosphere of this great city. My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the wilderness of ocean.... It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is this,-'disgorge,' quotha, as if the vessel were sick) on the wharf,

elf a captive, and defrauded of that higher life of the soul; and after the day's work or the year's labor was over, he could not be content with the fact that it had been, and had served its purpose, and was gone, but he still was compelled to ask how it had served this higher life, in what ways it had fed the spirit which should be master of all the days of one's life, and he found no satisfactory answer except the crude one that possibly his experience and observation migh

f it must needs be told. But, besides this, Hawthorne felt toward this love of his married life in a peculiar way not often so purely disclosed; there were touches of solemnity in it, something not of this world; there was that sense of what can be described only as sacredness, which he intimates and in part reveals as a thing never absent from his heart, whether with her or away from her. Love had come to him, not in his youth, but after the years of solitude had ripened both heart and imagination,-a man's love; it filled his whole nature, and with it went a feeling of glad release from the past, of the coming of a freeing power bringing new life, which gave something of heavenly gratitude to his bosom. How deep, serious, truly sacred, his love was, can be read in all the lines of his writing that even remotely allude to it; and at th

and inanimate if you were not happy, and gathering from earth and sky enjoyment for both of us; but this makes me feel that my real, innermost soul is apart from all these unlovely circumstances, and that it has not ceased to exist, as I might sometimes suspect, but is nourished and kept alive through you. You know not what comfort I have in thinking of you amid those beautiful scenes and amid those sy

n, and again from Salem, he sums in memory what thi

ep as my own. I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm and renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have a heart,-you only have thrown a light, dee

, I can partly estimate the change that has been wrought. It seems as if the better part of me had been born since then. I had walked those many years in darkness, and might so have walked through life, with

o her, to whom it was dedicated. He gave his attention now to writing some children's books, partly under the influence of his old "Peter Parley" instruction and experience, and partly, no doubt, under the encouragement and advice of Elizabeth Peabody, who was interested in such literature. The Peabodys, on removing to Boston, had opened a shop, a library and book-store and homoeopathic drug-store, all in one, of which she was the head, and with her name Hawthorne associated his new ventures. He had contemplated writing children's books, as a probable means of profit, before he received his appointment in the Custom House, as he said in his letter to Longfellow; and he merely stuck to the plan under the new conditions. The result was three volumes of historical tales for young people, drawn from New England in the colonial and revolutionary times, under different titles, but making one series: "Grandfather's Chair," [Footnote: Grandfather's Chair. A History for

it not fallen in with some peculiarities of his private position. Something, it is true, is to be allowed for the infection of the time, which would touch a morally speculative mind such as Hawthorne's to some degree; he would have observed these dreamers, breaking out new paths in the hardened old world of custom and inheritance, and would have followed the fortunes of the dream in its effects on individual lives, for it would appeal to the moral imagination and to his general sentiment about human life; but to become one of the promoters would require, in a man so wary, so hard-headed and cool as he naturally was in one half of his brain at least, a certain pressure of fact upon him. No man was less of a reformer than Hawthorne; he was constitutionally phlegmatic about society, a party man in politics, and an ironical critic of all "come-outers," as these people were then popularly named; and, in this instance, which is the only apparently freakish action of his life, he was certainly swayed by what he supposed to be his own interest. He was merely prospecting for a home in which to settle. He was anxious to be married; he was thirty-seven years old, and Sophia was thirty, and the engagement had already lasted two years and more. In this new community h

of manure. He writes about these details with a softening of the raw facts by elegancies of language, and much gentle fun, but from the start he shows a playfulness of disposition in regard to the whole affair, like a great boy on a vacation, as if the sense of it all being, so far as he was concerned, a surprising joke on a novel scale were in his mind and attitude all the time; and it is this humor, interlacing on the page like sunshine, that makes the life of his narrative. Occasionally there is the touch of true enjoyment out of doors, as when, under the clear bl

places that is the worst, and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinio

l!... Even my Custom House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle wi

family for him in many ways. "Mother apostrophizes your picture because you do not come home," she writes, after "nine weeks" of absence,-"a great deal too long." In that secluded home he must indeed have been missed, and doubtless it seemed to them day by day more certain that he had really gone out from them into another world of his own. When he was in Salem in September, however, he no sooner crossed the threshold than he felt the old deserted life fall on him again like an evil spirit. "How immediately and irrecoverably," he writes to Sophia, "should I relapse into the way of life in which I spent my

another dream, and he gives his

ere has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that my hand

ent myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter." He did observe with his habitual closeness the people who came and went, and the life of the inmates, sitting himself apart a good deal with a book before his face. He made friends with a few, a very few, of whom George Bradford and Frank Farley remained to him in later times; but he was, as always, averse to literary society, and came nearer to men of a different type in his human intercourse. Sophia, who had seen him there amid the fraternity, described his relationship to the others accurately, one

s made up by binding the three Grandfather's Chair books in the 18mo second edition, 1842, together with this volume, and issued as four volumes in two, so labeled on the back.] for Children." The volume was added to the "Grandfather's Chair" series, which was brought out in a new edition in 1842. To the same year belongs the enlarged edition of "Twice-Told Tales," [Footnote: Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: James Munroe and Company. 1842. 2 vols. 12mo. Pp. 331, 356. The first volume contained the same tales as the former edition, with The Toll-Gatherer's Day added. The second

fe had cost her a fit of illness." But his fears were groundless; she came out of her chamber to meet him as soon as he arrived, looking better and more cheerful than usual, and full of kindness. "Foolish me," he writes happily to Sophia, "to doubt that my mother's love could be wise, like all other genuine love!... It seems that our mother had seen how things were a long time ago; at first her heart was troubled, because she knew that much of outward as well as inward fitness wa