Hawthorne impressed all who met him with his reserve and shyness. Many
stories are told to illustrate this quality. Hawthorne was once a
visitor at a club where a number of literary men had gathered. The
taciturnity of Hawthorne was more impressive than the loquacity of the
witty Holmes. After Hawthorne had left Emerson said, "Hawthorne rides
his dark horse well." George William Curtis relates this anecdote:

"...I recall the silent and preternatural vigor with which, on one
occasion, he wielded his paddle to counteract the bad rowing of a
friend who conscientiously considered it his duty to do something and
not let Hawthorne work alone, but who with every stroke neutralized
all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he would have struggled until he
fell senseless rather than to ask his friend to desist. His principle
seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him, it
is quite useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man
understands or not."

Hawthorne's father was a man of the sea, a man of few words, and it is
sometimes said that the romancer inherited his shy and reserved
disposition from his father. But his mother was not behind the father
in reserve. After her husband's death she shut herself up in
Hindoo-like seclusion and lived the life of a hermit for more than
forty years.

Hawthorne gives us an interesting account of his boyhood in an
autobiographical note to his friend Stoddard. "When I was eight or
nine years old, my mother, with her three children, took up her
residence on the banks of the Sebago Lake, in Maine, where the family
owned a large tract of land; and here I ran quite wild ... fishing all
day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good
deal too, on the rainy days, especially in _Shakspere_ and _The
Pilgrim's Progress_."

More pertinent as to his habits of loneliness is the following account
of how he lived for nine or ten years after his graduation from
Bowdoin. "I had always," he writes, "a natural tendency (it appears to
have been on the paternal side) toward seclusion; and this I now
indulged to the utmost, so that, for months together, I scarcely held
human intercourse outside of my own family, seldom going out except at
twilight, or only to take the nearest way to the most convenient
solitude, which was oftenest the seashore.... Having spent so much of
my boyhood and youth from my native place, I had very few
acquaintances in Salem, and du