Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who divides with our
author the honour of being the most distinguished of American men of
letters. I know not whether Mr. Longfellow was especially intimate
with Hawthorne at this period (they were very good friends later in
life), but with two of his companions he formed a friendship which
lasted always. One of these was Franklin Pierce, who was destined to
fill what Hawthorne calls "the most august position in the world."
Pierce was elected President of the United States in 1852. The other
was Horatio Bridge, who afterwards served with distinction in the
Navy, and to whom the charming prefatory letter of the collection of
tales published under the name of _The Snow Image_, is addressed. "If
anybody is responsible at this day for my being an author it is
yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but while we were lads
together at a country college--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
grey 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 the Faculty never
heard of, or else it had been worse for us--still it was your
prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of
fiction." That is a very pretty picture, but it is a picture of happy
urchins at school, rather than of undergraduates "panting," as
Macaulay says, "for one and twenty." Poor Hawthorne was indeed
thousands of miles away from Oxford and Cambridge; that touch about
the blueberries and the logs on the Androscoggin tells the whole
story, and strikes the note, as it were, of his circumstances. But if
the pleasures at Bowdoin were not expensive, so neither were the
penalties. The amount of Hawthorne's collegiate bill for one term was
less than 4_l._, and of this sum more than 9_s._ was made up of fines.
The fines, however, were not heavy. Mr. Lathrop prints a letter
addressed by the President to "Mrs. Elizabeth C. Hathorne," requesting
her co-operation with the officers of this college, "in the attempt to
induce your son faithfully to observe the laws of this institution."
He has just been fined fifty cents for play