omancer
had laid his spell upon me everlastingly. Even as I walked homeward to
my lunch, I read. I ate with the book beside my plate. I neglected my
classes that afternoon, and as soon as I had absorbed this volume I
secured the other and devoted myself to it with almost equal intensity.
The stately diction, the rich and glowing imagery, the mystical
radiance, and the aloofness of the author's personality all united to
create in me a worshipful admiration which made all other interests pale
and faint. It was my first profound literary passion and I was dazzled
by the glory of it.

It would be a pleasant task to say that this book determined my
career--it would form a delightful literary assumption, but I cannot
claim it. As a realist I must remain faithful to fact. I did not then
and there vow to be a romantic novelist like Hawthorne. On the contrary,
I realized that this great poet (to me he was a poet) like Edgar Allan
Poe, was a soul that dwelt apart from ordinary mortals.

To me he was a magician, a weaver of magic spells, a dreamer whose
visions comprehended the half-lights, the borderlands, of the human
soul. I loved the roll of his words in _The March of Time_ and the
quaint phrasing of the _Rill from the Town Pump_; _Rappacini's Daughter_
whose breath poisoned the insects in the air, uplifted me. _Drowne and
His Wooden Image_, the _Great Stone Face_--each story had its special
appeal. For days I walked amid enchanted mist, my partner--(even the
maidens I most admired), became less appealing, less necessary to me.
Eager to know more of this necromancer I searched the town for others of
his books, but found only _American Notes_ and _the Scarlet Letter_.

Gradually I returned to something like my normal interests in baseball
and my classmates, but never again did I fall to the low level of _Jack
Harkaway_. I now possessed a literary touchstone with which I tested the
quality of other books and other minds, and my intellectual arrogance, I
fear, sometimes made me an unpleasant companion. The fact that Ethel did
not "like" Hawthorne, sank her to a lower level in my estimation.

CHAPTER XIX

End of School Days

Though my years at the Seminary were the happiest of my life they are
among the most difficult for me to recover and present to my readers.
During half the year I worked on the farm fiercely, unsparing of myself,
in order that I might have an uninterrupted season of study in the
village. Each te