who have distinguished themselves than
their juvenile promise; though it must be added that Mr. Lathrop has
made out, as he was almost in duty bound to do, a very good case in
favour of Hawthorne's having been an interesting child. He was not at
any time what would be called a sociable man, and there is therefore
nothing unexpected in the fact that he was fond of long walks in which
he was not known to have had a companion. "Juvenile literature" was
but scantily known at that time, and the enormous and extraordinary
contribution made by the United States to this department of human
happiness was locked in the bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne,
therefore, like many of his contemporaries, was constrained to amuse
himself, for want of anything better, with the _Pilgrim's Progress_
and the _Faery Queen_. A boy may have worse company than Bunyan and
Spenser, and it is very probable that in his childish rambles our
author may have had associates of whom there could be no record. When
he was nine years old he met with an accident at school which
threatened for a while to have serious results. He was struck on the
foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept at home for a
long time, and had not completely recovered before his twelfth year.
His school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New
England--the primary factor in that extraordinarily pervasive system
of instruction in the plainer branches of learning, which forms one of
the principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he was
fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of
an uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond,
near Lake Sebago, in the State of Maine. The immense State of Maine,
in the year 1818, must have had an even more magnificently natural
character than it possesses at the present day, and the uncle's
dwelling, in consequence of being in a little smarter style than the
primitive structures that surrounded it, was known by the villagers as
Manning's Folly. Mr. Lathrop pronounces this region to be of a "weird
and woodsy" character; and Hawthorne, later in life, spoke of it to a
friend as the place where "I first got my cursed habits of solitude."
The outlook, indeed, for an embryonic novelist, would not seem to have
been cheerful; the social dreariness of a small New England community
lost amid the forests of Maine, at the beginning of the present
century, must have been consummate