ning of a little barefooted boy, coming up unheard, and dashing
swiftly past us, and showing us the soles of his naked feet as he ran
adown the path and up the opposite side." In another place he devotes
a page to a description of a dog whom he saw running round after its
tail; in still another he remarks, in a paragraph by itself--"The
aromatic odor of peat-smoke, in the sunny autumnal air is very
pleasant." The reader says to himself that when a man turned thirty
gives a place in his mind--and his inkstand--to such trifles as these,
it is because nothing else of superior importance demands admission.
Everything in the Notes indicates a simple, democratic,
thinly-composed society; there is no evidence of the writer finding
himself in any variety or intimacy of relations with any one or with
anything. We find a good deal of warrant for believing that if we add
that statement of Mr. Lathrop's about his meals being left at the door
of his room, to rural rambles of which an impression of the temporary
phases of the local apple-crop were the usual, and an encounter with
an organ-grinder, or an eccentric dog, the rarer, outcome, we
construct a rough image of our author's daily life during the several
years that preceded his marriage. He appears to have read a good deal,
and that he must have been familiar with the sources of good English
we see from his charming, expressive, slightly self-conscious,
cultivated, but not too cultivated, style. Yet neither in these early
volumes of his Note-Books, nor in the later, is there any mention of
his reading. There are no literary judgments or impressions--there is
almost no allusion to works or to authors. The allusions to
individuals of any kind are indeed much less numerous than one might
have expected; there is little psychology, little description of
manners. We are told by Mr. Lathrop that there existed at Salem during
the early part of Hawthorne's life "a strong circle of wealthy
families," which "maintained rigorously the distinctions of class,"
and whose "entertainments were splendid, their manners magnificent."
This is a rather pictorial way of saying that there were a number of
people in the place--the commercial and professional aristocracy, as
it were--who lived in high comfort and respectability, and who, in
their small provincial way, doubtless had pretensions to be exclusive.
Into this delectable company Mr. Lathrop intimates that his hero was
free to penetrate. It is ea