The time had now come when he must make some further step in establishing himself in some means of livelihood. He never showed much power of initiative, and at every stage was materially aided by his friends in obtaining employment and position. In this instance it was Goodrich again who gave him opportunity. It was not a great chance, but it was doubtless all Goodrich had to offer. He procured for him the editorship of a small publication which undertook to disseminate popular information, called "The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge," and published by the Bewick Company, at Boston, with which Goodrich had some connection through his interests in engraving. His salary was to be five hundred dollars, and he entered on his duties about the beginning of 1836. The change was welcomed by his friends, or such of them as were still near enough to him to know of his affairs; and from this time his college mates, Pierce, Cilley, and especially Bridge, interested themselves in his fortunes. Bridge, writing from Havana, February 20, 1836, congratulated him, as did also Pierce from Washington, on the intelligence concerning his "late engagement in active and responsible business," and particularly on his having got "out of Salem," which he credits with "a peculiar dulness;" and in later letters he continues to hearten him, subscribes for his magazine, reads and praises it, in the most cordial and cheering way. But the event did not justify these hopes and prognostications of a better fortune. The magazine was, after all, the merest hack-work. Hawthorne, with the aid of his sister Elizabeth, wrote most of it, compiling the matter from books or utilizing his own notes of travel. In it appeared, of such pieces as have found a place in his works, "An Ontario Steamboat," "The Duston Family," "Nature of Sleep," "Bells," besides much that has been suffered to repose in its scarce pages. The material, though conscientiously dealt with according to the measure of time at his disposal, is the slightest in interest, and the least re-worked from the raw state, of any of his writings. He had, however, little temptation to do more for the magazine than its limited scope required. He found great difficulty in collecting his salary, and for this he blames Goodrich, who had made promises of pay which he kept very imperfectly. Hawthorne states that of forty-five dollars he was to receive on coming to Boston he got only a small part, and on June 3, 1836, he received a notice, in answer to a dunning letter, that the Bewick Company had made an assignment, and he would have to wait until the settlement. Shortly after this he gave up the editorship, and returned to Salem. The incident was unfortunate, as in the course of it he developed a great deal of irritation toward Goodrich, who was his best friend in practical ways, and broke off communication with him. This, however, did not last long; and Goodrich offered him the job of compiling a "Peter Parley" book, for one hundred dollars. He wrote this, also with the aid of his sister Elizabeth, and gave her the money. The volume was "Peter Parley's Universal History on the basis of Geography," [Footnote: Peter Parley's Universal History on the basis of Geography. For the Use of Families. Illustrated by Maps and Engravings. Boston: American Stationers' Company. John B. Russell, 1837. 12mo, cloth. 2 vols., pp. 380, 374.] and was published in 1837, and had a very large sale, amounting finally, it is said, to more than a million copies.

In the mean time, Hawthorne had found cause of complaint also in his relations with "The New England Magazine." This periodical had come to an end in 1835, and at the close of that year was merged in "The American Monthly Magazine" of New York, whither Park Benjamin, its editor, went. It paid, according to its own statement, only one dollar a page for contributions, but it appears to have been in arrears with Hawthorne at the time of the change. Bridge states that when Hawthorne, in consequence, stopped writing for it, the editor "begged for a mass of manuscript in his possession, as yet unpublished, and it was scornfully bestowed. 'Thus,' wrote Hawthorne, 'has this man, who would be considered a Maecenas, taken from a penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain can supply.'" In this Hawthorne, if correctly reported, was scarcely just. Park Benjamin, who had a violent quarrel with Goodrich, exempted Hawthorne from any adverse criticism, even when writing a short notice of "The Token," and always spoke well of him. The manuscripts he carried to New York could have been but few and slight, unless they were burned in the fire which destroyed the archives of the "American Monthly Magazine" not long afterwards. At all events, the only paper by Hawthorne in that magazine appears to have been "Old Ticonderoga," a note of travel, published in February, 1836, unless "The Journal of a Solitary Man," which did not appear till July, 1837, be added as one of the left-over manuscripts, and also a paper, never yet attributed to him but which seems clearly from his pen, "A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather," anonymously published in May, 1836. Whatever the coolness was between Hawthorne and Benjamin, it was overcome by the end of the year, and the quarrel was made up. In 1836, too, he kept his temper with Goodrich sufficiently to allow him to contribute to "The Token" of 1837, published in the preceding fall, a group of tales, eight in number: "Monsieur du Miroir," as by the author of "Sights from a Steeple;" "Mrs. Bullfrog," as by the author of "The Wives of the Dead;" "Sunday at Home" and "The Man of Adamant," both as by the author of "The Gentle Boy," "David Swan, A Fantasy," "Fancy's Show Box, A Morality," and "The Prophetic Pictures," all anonymously; and "The Great Carbuncle," as by the author of "The Wedding Knell." These papers constituted one third of the volume, and for them he was paid a dollar a page, or one hundred and eight dollars, which may be regarded therefore as the normal price he received from Goodrich. Two of these tales are on subjects set down in his "Note-Book" of 1835; the others are perhaps earlier in conception. These tales were his substantial work for the year.

They gave occasion for what appears to have been the first public mention of Nathaniel Hawthorne as the author who had hitherto disguised himself under so many descriptions. It is not surprising that his name was unknown, for he had sedulously suppressed it. His sister, referring to these years, said, "He kept his very existence a secret so far as possible." He had never signed an article in the twelve years since leaving college. He had preferred to become known in "the author of Waverley" style, but the charm did not work. In "The Token" he was, in the main, the author of "Sights from a Steeple" or "The Gentle Boy;" in "The New England Magazine" he was the author of "The Gray Champion." But now his anonymity was to be dissipated in a friendly if rude way. It was, doubtless, Park Benjamin, in New York, who wrote thus of these last tales in "The Token," in "The American Monthly Magazine" for October, 1836:—

"The author of 'Sights from a Steeple,' of 'The Gentle Boy,' and of 'The Wedding Knell,' we believe to be one and the same individual. The assertion may sound very bold, yet we hesitate not to call this author second to no man in this country, except Washington Irving. We refer simply to romance writing; and trust no wise man of Gotham will talk of Dewey, and Channing, and Everett, and Verplanck. Yes, to us the style of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE is more pleasing, more fascinating, than any one's except their dear Geoffry Crayon! This mention of the real name of our author may be reprobated by him. His modesty is the best proof of his true excellence. How different does such a man appear to us from one who anxiously writes his name on every public post! We have read a sufficient number of his pieces to make the reputation of a dozen of our Yankee scribblers; and yet how few have heard the name above written! He does not even cover himself with the same anonymous shield at all times; but liberally gives the praise, which, concentrated on one, would be great, to several unknowns. If Mr. Hawthorne would but collect his various tales and essays into one volume, we can assure him that their success would be brilliant—certainly in England, perhaps in this country."

It was in this way that the world began to hear of Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Salem; but it was still long before the public knew him. Meanwhile, at the very moment of the disclosure, he was in the lowest ebb of discouragement, in spirits, that he ever knew. It is to this time that his gloomiest memories attached themselves. He had tried to enter the world, he had even tried to earn a living, and had failed. Cilley, his old college mate, was just elected to Congress from Maine, Pierce was just elected Senator from New Hampshire, and Longfellow had found the ways of literature as smooth as the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire. Hawthorne was of a noble disposition, and glad of the fortunes that came to these of his circle in boyhood at Bowdoin; but it was not in human nature to be oblivious of the difference in his own lot. To this mood must be referred the dream he described afterwards as one that recurred through life:—

"For a long, long while I have been occasionally visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college,—or, sometimes, even at school,—and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward, and left me behind."

Under another picture, he describes this same state in the preface to "The Snow Image," dedicated to Bridge:—

"I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity. And there, perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment, with the moss on the imprisoning tree-trunks, and the yellow leaves of more than a score of autumns piled above me, if it had not been for you. For it was through your interposition—and that, moreover, unknown to himself—that your early friend was brought before the public, somewhat more prominently than heretofore, in the first volume of 'Twice-Told Tales.'"

Bridge had been, in fact, his only confidant from boyish days. To him he showed the misery of "hope deferred" that then was in his heart, and to him allowed himself to speak in words that went beyond his steady sense of the situation, though representing moments of low courage. "I'm a doomed man," he wrote to him, "and over I must go."

It was under the impulse of the sight of this deep discouragement in Hawthorne, in 1836, that this cheerful and sanguine friend made up his mind to find out why Hawthorne could not get a volume of tales published. He applied to Goodrich for information, and received an answer, October 20, 1836, in which it was stated that if a guarantee of two hundred and fifty dollars were furnished by Bridge, an edition of one thousand copies, costing four hundred and fifty dollars and paying Hawthorne a royalty of ten per cent, would be issued. Goodrich was not himself a publisher, at that time, and he elsewhere says that he had previously attempted to have the Stationers' Company, which now undertook the volume on Bridge's guarantee, publish it, but without success; he adds that he relinquished his own rights to Hawthorne, who had sold the tales to him so far as they had appeared in "The Token," and that he also joined in the bond given by Bridge; but in these remarks he seems to be taking credit to himself, for the tales were valueless to him and his property in them was of a sort not often claimed by an editor, while Bridge took the real risk. This transaction was unknown to Hawthorne at the time, and Bridge felt obliged to warn him not to be too grateful to Goodrich. A glance at the other letters of this month shows that Bridge was almost alarmed by Hawthorne's depression, and endeavoring in thoughtful ways to reassure him, as well as to bring him forward in public. "I have just received your last," he writes, October 22, 1836, "and do not like its tone at all. There is a kind of desperate coolness about it that seems dangerous. I fear you are too good a subject for suicide, and that some day you will end your mortal woes on your own responsibility." The prospect of the book, even, was not wholly an undoubted blessing to Hawthorne, now he had come to its realization, and in December, on Christmas Day, the work being then in proofs, Bridge writes to him again:—

"Whether your book will sell extensively may be doubtful; but that is of small importance in the first one you publish. At all events, keep up your spirits till the result is ascertained; and, my word for it, there is more honor and emolument in store for you, from your writings, than you imagine. The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept you back for many years; which, if you had improved by publishing, would long ago have given you what you must now wait a short time for. It may be for the best, but I doubt it.

"I have been trying to think what you are so miserable for. Although you have not much property, you have good health and powers of writing, which have made, and can still make, you independent.

"Suppose you get but $300 per annum for your writings. You can, with economy, live upon that, though it would be a tight squeeze. You have no family dependent upon you, and why should you 'borrow trouble'?

"This is taking the worst view of your case that it can possibly bear. It seems to me that you never look at the bright side with any hope or confidence. It is not the philosophy to make one happy.

"I expect, next summer, to be full of money, a part of which shall be heartily at your service, if it comes."

Before the new volume went to press Hawthorne had made a connection, apparently on the editor's initiative, with S. Gaylord Clark's "Knickerbocker Magazine," and contributed to it, in the January number, "The Fountain of Youth," now known as "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment"; and in the opening months of the year he was engaged in preparing his usual group of articles for the next "Token." Goodrich had also offered to him a new "Peter Parley" book, on the manners and customs of all nations, for three hundred dollars, but this Hawthorne seems to have declined.

"Twice-Told Tales" [Footnote: Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: American Stationers' Co. John B. Russell, 1837. 12mo, cloth. Pp. 334. It contained the following tales: The Gray Champion, Sunday at Home, The Wedding Knell, The Minister's Black Veil, The May-Pole of Merry Mount, The Gentle Boy, Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe, Little Annie's Ramble, Wakefield, A Rill from the Town Pump, The Great Carbuncle, The Prophetic Pictures, David Swan, Sights from a Steeple, The Hollow of the Three Hills, The Vision of the Fountain, Fancy's Show Box, Dr. Heidegger's Experiment.] appeared, under the author's name, from the press of the Boston American Stationers' Co., early in March, 1837. It contained eighteen pieces only, out of the thirty-six undoubtedly by Hawthorne published up to this time, to neglect all others which have been ascribed to him during this period; and it must reflect his own judgment of what was best in his work. Far as it was from being a complete collection, it was large and varied enough to afford an adequate experiment of the public taste, and it included all those articles, whether tale or essay, which had made him known in the circle of his readers. The reception of the volume was, he thought, cool, but it sold somewhat from the first, and within two months six or seven hundred copies had been disposed of. Goodrich states that it "was deemed a failure for more than a year, when a breeze seemed to rise and fill its sails, and with it the author was carried on to fame and fortune." Bridge was much pleased with the success of his venture, and when he met Goodrich, in April, some of his good feeling overflowed upon him: "I like him very much better than before," he wrote. "He told me that the book was successful. It seemed that he was inclined to take too much credit to himself for your present standing, on the ground of having early discovered and brought you forward. But, on the whole, I like him much." Hawthorne's view of Goodrich is contained in a letter written to his sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody, twenty years later:—

"As regards Goodrich's accounts of the relations between him and me, it is funny enough to see him taking the airs of a patron; but I do not mind it in the least, nor feel the slightest inclination to defend myself or be defended. I should as soon think of controverting his statement about my personal appearance (of which he draws no very lovely picture) as about anything else that he says. So pray do not take up the cudgels on my behalf; especially as I perceive that your recollections are rather inaccurate. For instance, it was Park Benjamin, not Goodrich, who cut up the 'Storyteller.' As for Goodrich, I have rather a kindly feeling towards him, and he himself is a not unkindly man, in spite of his propensity to feed and fatten himself on better brains than his own. Only let him do that, and he will really sometimes put himself to some trouble to do a good-natured act. His quarrel with me was, that I broke away from him before he had quite finished his meal, and while a portion of my brain was left; and I have not the slightest doubt that he really felt himself wronged by my so doing. Really, I half think so too. He was born to do what he did, as maggots to feed on rich cheese."

There is something too little generous in this. The record shows beyond any cavil that Goodrich was the first and most constant friend of Hawthorne in the way of helping him to get his work before the public; he was also interested in him, thoughtful for him, and gave him hack work to do, which, though it be a lowly is a true service, however unwelcome the task may be in itself; and he used such influence as he had in introducing Hawthorne to other employers and to publishers. During these twelve years it may fairly be said that Goodrich was the only person, not a relative, who cared for Hawthorne's genius or did anything for him until Park Benjamin appeared as a second in the periodical world and Horatio Bridge came to the rescue as a business friend. It is true that Goodrich did not succeed in exploiting his author; but he paid him the market price and gave him his chance, and after all those days were not for Goodrich what our days have since become for men of his calibre. Advertisement was not then the tenth Muse.

If the papers were "cool," as Hawthorne thought, there was a word of comfort here and there in the periodicals. "The American Monthly Magazine," recalling its announcement of Hawthorne as the author of these tales in the preceding fall, took occasion in a notice of "The Token" for 1838 to flatter itself that the new volume was due to its own suggestion; and the writer, who is presumably Park Benjamin, renews his old praise. A later notice of the book itself, ascribed by Mr. Lathrop to Charles Fenno Hoffman, appeared in March, 1838, and, while somewhat ineffective and sentimental, discovers at the end the right new word to say: "His pathos we would call New England pathos, if we were not afraid it would excite a smile; it is the pathos of an American, of a New Englander. It is redolent of the images, objects, thoughts, and feelings that spring up in that soil and nowhere else." It was, however, to Longfellow that both Bridge and Hawthorne looked to help his old college mate's book with the criticism that would have the accent of good taste and literary authority, and would carry weight in those higher social circles where fame was lost and won, at least as was then believed. Hawthorne sent him the volume as soon as it was issued, with a note regretting that they were not better acquainted at college and expressing his gladness in Longfellow's success as a writer, author of "Outre-Mer," and also in obtaining his Harvard professorship; and some three months later he followed this with a letter, so characteristic and valuable autobiographically that it cannot be passed over, and interesting also as beginning that easy and amiable friendliness which continued between them unbroken thereafter:—

"Not to burden you with my correspondence, I have delayed a rejoinder to your very kind and cordial letter, until now. It gratifies me that you have occasionally felt an interest in my situation; but your quotation from Jean Paul about the 'lark's nest' makes me smile. You would have been much nearer the truth if you had pictured me as dwelling in an owl's nest; for mine is about as dismal, and like the owl I seldom venture abroad till after dusk. By some witchcraft or other—for I really cannot assign any reasonable why and wherefore—I have been carried apart from the main current of life, and find it impossible to get back again. Since we last met, which you remember was in Sawtell's room, where you read a farewell poem to the relics of the class,—ever since that time I have secluded myself from society; and yet I never meant any such thing, nor dreamed what sort of life I was going to lead. I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out,—and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out. You tell me that you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been, but I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in this world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that there have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in thinking that future years can hardly fail to be more varied and therefore more tolerable than the past.

"You give me more credit than I deserve, in supposing that I have led a studious life. I have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so desultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it left me the fruits of study. As to my literary efforts, I do not think much of them, neither is it worth while to be ashamed of them. They would have been better, I trust, if written under more favorable circumstances. I have had no external excitement,—no consciousness that the public would like what I wrote, nor much hope nor a passionate desire that they should do so. Nevertheless, having nothing else to be ambitious of, I have been considerably interested in literature; and if my writings had made any decided impression, I should have been stimulated to greater exertions; but there has been no warmth of approbation, so that I have always written with benumbed fingers. I have another great difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a lifelike semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes through a peep-hole I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others.

"I have now, or shall soon have, a sharper spur to exertion, which I lacked at an earlier period; for I see little prospect but that I shall have to scribble for a living. But this troubles me much less than you would suppose. I can turn my pen to all sorts of drudgery, such as children's books, etc., and by and by I shall get some editorship that will answer my purpose. Frank Pierce, who was with us at college, offered me his influence to obtain an office in the Exploring Expedition; but I believe that he was mistaken in supposing that a vacancy existed. If such a post were attainable, I should certainly accept it; for, though fixed so long to one spot, I have always had a desire to run round the world.... I intend in a week or two to come out of my owl's nest, and not return till late in the summer,—employing the interval in making a tour somewhere in New England. You who have the dust of distant countries on your 'sandal-shoon' cannot imagine how much enjoyment I shall have in this little excursion."

Longfellow's notice of "Twice-Told Tales" appeared in the July number of "The North American Review," and gave perhaps more pleasure to Hawthorne than he had hoped for; and in acknowledging it he mentions, with a home-touch that carries more gratitude than a score of golden phrases, the happiness that "my mother, my two sisters, and my old maiden aunt" have had in it. The notice itself is elegant, kindly, warm even, with the old-fashioned academic distinction of manner, through which the young poet's picturesque fancy keeps playing, like a flutter of light; it gives one a strange sense of old-world youthfulness to read it now. Its characteristic passages, apart from this glamour, are its praise of the lucid style and of the home-bred quality, "the nationality" of the Tales: "The author has chosen his themes among the traditions of New England, the dusty legends of 'the good old colony times when we lived under a king.' This is the right material for story." But, notwithstanding the good-will of Hawthorne's few friends, and this handsome treatment by that one of them who had the greatest opportunity to applaud him, his place was not yet won.

Meanwhile, his political friends had not been idle. The problem of a livelihood, of an active share in the world's business, which Hawthorne now sincerely desired, was not likely to be much advanced by the publication of this volume. In any case, it would seem that Hawthorne's friends were agreed that what he needed was to be got into an entirely different set of surroundings, to have a change of scene. It was, perhaps, with some such idea that Pierce suggested to him to join the South Sea Exploring Expedition, then being planned by Reynolds, as historian. There is something humorous, unconscious though it was, in sending Hawthorne from the monotony and loneliness of Salem to seek society in the polar regions, though no hint of it appears in the correspondence. The scheme appealed to Hawthorne, however, and he was desirous to go; but though his friends were active in his interest, and brought the Maine and New Hampshire delegations to support his candidacy, success was doubtful, and, the expedition being temporarily abandoned, the plan came to nothing. On its failure Hawthorne went to visit Bridge at his home in Augusta, Maine, and passed the month of July with him very happily, as he tells at large in his Note-Books of that period.

On his return to Salem at midsummer he could hardly have flattered himself on any perceptible change in his position. He fell into the old life of rambling about the country and writing new tales; and, except that he was in communication with his old friends, Bridge, Pierce, and Cilley, and occasionally saw them in Boston, he was as much isolated and without prospects as ever. The connection he had established with "The Knickerbocker Magazine" he had kept up by contributing to it "A Bell's Biography" as by the author of "Twice-Told Tales," in March, and he now published, in the September issue, "Edward Fane's Rosebud" anonymously. The publication of the book had attracted to him the notice of the new "Democratic Review," edited by John O'Sullivan, a young fellow of enterprise, spirits, and an Irish charm, who had solicited Hawthorne to contribute to it, early in April. In reply to this application, presumably, "A Toll Gatherer's Day," as by the author of "Twice-Told Tales," appeared in the October number. The stories which Hawthorne had prepared in the spring for "The Token" of 1838 now came out in the fall of 1837, five in number: two of them, "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure" and "The Shaker Bridal" as by the author of the "Twice-Told Tales," and three anonymously, "Night Scenes under an Umbrella," "Endicott and the Red Cross," and "Sylph Etheredge." He still persistently neglected to put his own name to his work. There was a reason for his anonymity in "The Token," but elsewhere he continued his old custom, and was to be known habitually only under the style "The Author of 'Twice-Told Tales,'" which he adopted henceforth. To this time belong some further traces of a more varied mixing with society in Salem than he had hitherto shown. He attended the meetings of a club at Miss Burley's, where the transcendental group appears to have gathered, and among them Jones Very. The most singular episode of the time, however, is one that would hardly be credited, had it not been mentioned by those who should have known the truth. It is said that Hawthorne's sympathies were so engaged by a lady who confided to him the injurious treatment she alleged she had suffered from an acquaintance that he challenged the man to a duel; he went to Washington for the purpose, and was only withdrawn from the affair, under the advice of Cilley and Pierce, by the discovery that he had been practiced upon by the lady, who had been led on by a spirit of mischief or malice to deceive him, there being no basis for the affair. A dark turn is given to the incident by the suggestion that it was the citing of this example of Hawthorne's to his friend Cilley which persuaded the latter to enter on the duel with Graves, in which he lost his life not long after these events. Bridge, however, denies that this was the case, and he should have known. Just when this incident occurred is not stated; but Hawthorne's solitude in Salem must have been less complete than has been represented in order for it to occur at all; and it must be believed that he had at all times associates, whom he met in one way and another, both men and women, however small the circle.

The period of twelve years which he used to refer to as the time of his isolation in Salem had now come to an end; but he remained in the old house for some time longer, though with a difference in his mood and life. The habit of seclusion and the sense of separation from the world had been somewhat broken up by the rally that his college friends, led by Bridge, had made for him and the feeling of renewed companionship with them, as well as by his appearance before the public in his own right as the author of "Twice-Told Tales;" the old state of affairs, however, was not ended by these things, but by a more vital matter. There can be no doubt that in his own mind the acquaintance and growing intimacy which now sprang up between himself and Sophia Peabody coincided with the disappearance of the solitary depression of these years,—for him the twelve years ended when he first saw this small, graceful, intensely alive invalid, dressed in a simple white wrapper, who had come down from her room to meet him in the family parlor. She might seem, indeed, like himself, rather a "visitant" than an inhabitant of this planet, and their courtship not unlike one of his own stories of half immaterial lovers who go hand in hand, with sentiments for sentences and great heedlessness of mortal matters, to an idyllic union of hearts. He rose, on her entrance, to greet her, and looked at her with great intentness; and it immediately occurred to her sister that he would fall in love with her.

The narrative of this love-making has been very fully told, and in the most lifelike way, since the characters have been allowed to speak for themselves in their diaries and letters. It is a story so touched with delicacies, and with such shades of humor, too, as to defy any re-telling; even to outline it seems crude, because the effect lies all in the details of trifles, phrases, and spontaneous things. The Peabody family was of a type that flourished in that period, as good as was ever produced on this soil, with the most sterling qualities, and blending an intellectual culture of transcendental kinship with practical and hospitable duties. The home, which was one of very moderate means, was characterized by a moral high-mindedness pervading its life, and by those literary and artistic tastes then spreading in the community, which, though it is easy to smile at them in a vein of latter-day superiority, were everywhere the signs of a nascent intellectual life among our people. In this case, the fruits are the best comment on the home, for of the three daughters, the eldest, Elizabeth, passed a much honored and long life as a teacher in Boston, the friend of every good cause; the second, Mary, became the wife of Horace Mann; and the third, Sophia, the wife of Hawthorne. The Peabodys had been neighbors of the Hawthornes in much earlier years, and the elder children had been little playmates together; but the family had removed from Salem, and came back again in 1828. It was not, however, till 1837, on the publication of "Twice-Told Tales," that Elizabeth Peabody recognized in the author the same person she had known as a child. She took steps to renew the acquaintance with his sisters, and so to meet him again, till by many little attentions, notes, books, walks, flowers, and whatever she could invent, she succeeded in establishing an interchange of social civility between the two houses. She affords, in her recollections, the best glimpse of Hawthorne's mother. "Madame Hawthorne," she says, "always looked as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her antique costume, and a face of lovely sensibility and great brightness—for she did not seem at all a victim of morbid sensibility, notwithstanding her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She was a woman of fine understanding and very cultivated mind. But she had very sensitive nerves." Elizabeth, Hawthorne's sister, was strong-minded but abnormally retired, jealous of her brother, and not much disposed to have him stolen out of the house. Louisa was more companionable, and with his mother would sit with Hawthorne after tea; and there was an old maiden aunt flitting about in the little garden, apparently as recluse as the rest. With these feminine members of the household Elizabeth Peabody made friends, and though a year elapsed in the process, she then had her reward in receiving Hawthorne and his sisters, who one evening came to call. She ran upstairs to her sister, exclaiming, "Oh, Sophia, you must get up and dress and come down! The Hawthornes are here, and you never saw anything so splendid as he is,—he is handsomer than Lord Byron!" But Sophia did not come down, and it was only on the second call that the two met as has been described.

Sophia Peabody was at this time twenty-six years old, having been born in 1811, and had been an invalid through her girlhood; she was afflicted with an acute nervous headache which lasted uninterruptedly, says her son, from her twelfth to her thirty-first year, though the pain was not so severe, her sister remarks, but that she could sometimes read. She had received her education at home, mainly from her sister, who kept a school in the house, and in spite of her ill-health had many and varied acquisitions. She read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was somewhat familiar with history. Passages in her journal show the character and range of her reading, which was of that strangely mixed sort that belonged to the notion of culture in those days; thus, for instance, in her twentieth year, she records having read on one day De Gerando, Fenelon, St. Luke and Isaiah, Young, Addison, and four comedies of Shakspere, besides doing some sewing. She was a good French and Italian scholar. Filled with intellectual enthusiasm and ambition as she was, her sensibilities seem rather to have been roused by natural beauty, effects of sky and weather and color, and her active powers took the direction of art; she sketched, painted, and modeled in clay. In 1832 she had gone to Cuba with her mother for three years, and received some benefit from the climate. She had especially practiced horseback-riding there, of which she was fond. No permanent improvement, however, had followed, on her return to Salem in 1835. When Hawthorne came to know her, she was living a half-invalid life, taking her meals in her own room, which she had fitted up with artistic prettiness, and yet suffering the full transcendental tide of culture and emotion. Perhaps no single passage can better illustrate her mind and feelings than a description of Emerson's call in the spring of 1838, which she writes to her sister, whom, at an earlier time, he had taught Greek:—

"We had an exquisite visit from Waldo. It was the warbling of the Attic bird. The gleam of his diffused smile; the musical thunder of his voice; his repose, so full of the essence of life; his simplicity—just think of all these, and of my privilege in seeing and hearing him. He enjoyed everything we showed him so much! He talked so divinely to Raphael's Madonna del Pesce! I vainly imagined I was very quiet all the while, preserving a very demure exterior, and supposed I was sharing his oceanic calm. But the next day I was aware that I had been in a very intense state. I told Mary, that night after he had gone, that I felt like a gem; that was the only way I could express it. I don't know what Mary hoped to get from him, but I was sure of drinking in that which would make me paint Cuban skies better than even my recollections could have made me, were they as vivid as the rays of the sun in that sunniest of climates. He made me feel as Eliza Dwight did once, when she looked uncommonly beautiful and animated. I felt as if her beauty was all about the room, and that I was in it, and therefore beautiful too. It seemed just so with Waldo's soul-beauty."

She had been in communication with others of the leading spirits of that day besides Emerson. Dr. Channing and Allston sent her messages, kindly and flattering, about her drawings and painting. She had copied some of Allston's pictures. Her studio was the centre of her life; and there her friends "glided in," to use her phrase, with roses and columbines, little girls came to take peeps at its wonders, and from it came the sunshine of the house. Here, to give some further trifling indications, she described herself, after a visit of Hawthorne, as feeling "quite lark-like, or like John of Bologna's Mercury;" or she indulged one of her "dearest visions," which was "to get well enough to go into prisons and tell felons I have sympathy for them, especially women;" or, when Hawthorne called, lamented that she should have to smooth her hair, and dress, "while he was being wasted downstairs." She felt his attractive power from the first, and was happy in his attentions, in the walks they took, in their visits to Miss Burley's weekly meetings, in the picture of Ilbrahim, "The Gentle Boy," which she made for him, in her story, "Edward Randolph's Portrait," which he wrote for her, in the columbines and tulips that strewed the way of love-making, and, in brief, in the thousand trifles of the old story. Hawthorne, on his part, was equally attracted in his different ways, and responded to the vivacity and ebullience of this intense feminine nature disclosed to him in the live woman who had met him, as if coming out of a vision, on life's road. The spring budded and flowered into summer, and when he took his habitual journey into the world,—this time into Berkshire and Vermont, from July 23 to September 24,—meaning, as he told her, to cut himself wholly away from every one, so that even his mother should not know his whereabouts, it is not unlikely that he was desirous of this solitude to think it all over.

They became engaged at the close of the year, though the matter was kept a profound secret, there being apparently some apprehension that his mother would not approve of it. His sister Elizabeth, was, perhaps, not very cordial about it, also, but there was, as it proved, no occasion for anxiety. It might well have seemed imprudent for Hawthorne, whose worldly success had been slight, to marry an invalid wife. Fortune, however, was not wholly unkind, and George Bancroft, whose attention had been called to Hawthorne's needs, gave him an appointment at the Boston Custom House as weigher and gauger, at a salary of twelve hundred dollars. It was this opportunity, possibly, which emboldened Hawthorne to take the final step; and marriage would be hoped for, should this experiment of entering on a fixed employment prove successful.

During the progress of this courtship, to complete the chronicle of Hawthorne's literary publications, he had written the carrier's address, "Time's Portraiture," for "The Salem Gazette," January 2, 1838, the home paper which had made him known to his fellow-townsmen by reprinting "The Fountain of Youth," in the preceding March; and for the same paper he wrote the address for the following year, January 1, 1839, "The Sister Years." He had also contributed to "The American Monthly Magazine," for January, 1838. an article under his own name on his friend, Thomas Green Fessenden, a Maine politician who had recently died; and to the same periodical, for March, "The Three-fold Destiny" under the old pseudonym of Ashley Allen Royce. It was, however, "The Democratic Review" which served as the principal channel of publication. It contained successively "Footprints on the Beach," January; "Snowflakes," February; "Howe's Masquerade," May; "Edward Randolph's Portrait," July; "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," "Chippings with a Chisel," and a sketch of Jonathan Cilley, his friend who had just been shot by Graves in a duel, all in September; and these tales he signed as by The Author of "Twice-Told Tales." The Province House series was concluded by "Old Esther Dudley," in this same periodical, April, 1839, and to this he affixed his own name for the first time. "The Lily's Quest" had appeared, January 19, 1839. in "The Southern Rose," published at Charleston, South Carolina. Here the first stage of his literary career ended.

He was now to leave that chamber under the eaves, in which these years, lengthened to fourteen now, had been spent, but not without a farewell. Here he had written, in 1835, "In this dismal chamber fame was won." A dismal sort of fame he thought it then. It was on returning to it in 1840 that he penned the well-known passage:—

"Here I sit in my old, accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by.... Here I have written many tales,—many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all,—at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,—at least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth,—not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,—and forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now.... And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fullness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.... I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!... Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."

This sentiment always continued to play about this room, and whenever he returned to it he was apt to set down some word of memory. In one passage he even describes it as a shrine of literary pilgrimage, and mentions, with that well-known touch, half fantastic, half grotesque, its various articles of furniture,—the washstand, the mahogany-framed glass, the pine table, the flag-bottomed chair, the old chest of drawers, the closet, the worn-out shoe-brush, imagining the thoughts of the pilgrim on beholding these relics. It was the type for him of the old life of loneliness, of disappointment, of household gloom; but it was also the place where he had spent those "tranquil and not unhappy years," of which he afterwards said these early tales were the memorials; and, however the room might darken in comparison with the happiness of his married life, his last thought in regard to it was that contained in a letter written late in life: "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone."



III.

WEIGHER, GAUGER, AND FARMER.

Early in January, 1839, Hawthorne took up his new duties as weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom House. He wrote very cheerfully to Longfellow that he had no reason to doubt his capacity to fulfill his duties, since he had not yet learned what they were, and he indulges his humor in fancying imaginary little essays which he will write in the unoccupied time he pleasantly anticipates will be his lot. He was glad to have a material task to do, something with the stubbornness of fact in its resistance, a practical duty such as belongs in the ordinary lives of men. This desire to come out of his old way of existence, with its preoccupation with the imaginary world, had become a strong and rooted feeling, a fixed idea. "If I could only make tables," he said, "I should feel myself more of a man." In the bustle of the wharves he felt himself in touch with the world's business, and he took hold of his work with interest and vigor as well as with that conscientious fidelity which belonged to his character. Bancroft, a few months later, told Emerson that he was "the most efficient and best of the Custom House officers," and Mr. Lathrop says that he "used to make it a point in all weathers to get to the wharf at the earliest possible hour," so that the laborers, who were employed by the hour, might not lose their time. The life he led is fully described in his own journals, with all its details of shipping business, of the sailors and laborers and their tasks, of the salt, salt fish, oil, iron, molasses, and other inelegant merchandise, and the day's work in its various aspects of character, things, and weather. Hawthorne's powers of observation, which he had previously exercised in the taverns of New England and along his native roadside and beaches, were now fully occupied and newly animated with the novelty of the scene and his part in it. He made these careful notes almost by instinct, but after all, they were of curiously little use to him; it would seem rather that they gave his mind occupation in the intervals of his imaginative creation; they were a resource to him like the recreation of a walk; they represent the vacant and idle times of his genius; and for this reason his observations, which are in the main a kind of admirable reporting, afford a well-nigh complete setting for his life, and constitute an external autobiography. He is hardly to be truly seen apart from them.

At the end of six months he had begun to feel the wearisome drag upon his spirits which was to be expected from toilsome days. Practical life as a sort of vacation was welcome, but as it became the continuing business of his time, and that other world of the artistic faculty was now, in turn, known only by visiting glimpses, the look of the facts changed. "I do not mean to imply," he writes, "that I am unhappy or discontented, for this is not the case. My life only is a burden in the same way that it is to every toilsome man; and mine is a healthy weariness, such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." At first, no doubt, the outdoor occupation and the having to do with sea and harbor life, for which he had an hereditary affection, were important elements in his happiness; and the association with rough and hardy men, whose contact with life was primitive and had the genuineness and health of such occupations, was the kind of human companionship which he felt most naturally and pleasurably. But the wearing in of the facts upon him is seen in the way in which the blackness of coal and the whiteness of salt begin to color the page, until it would seem as if he handled and saw no other objects, and also in the comfort that the cold sea-wind, and freshening waves, and the horizon of cloud and green are to him. At the end of a year the signs of weariness come out clear in a well-known passage of the "Note-Books," as a condensed picture of these two years of life:—

"I have been measuring coal all day, on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for the wind (northeast, I believe) blew up through the dock, as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water, and covered with ice, which the rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill monument; and, what interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts,—my olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe, which the captain or some one of his crew was smoking. But at last came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release."

He soon began to "pray that in one year more I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom House; for it is a very grievous thralldom;" and beginning now to write again, he feels as if "the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition or had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my own keeping." Yet he tries to be just to his experience, and adds what he thought the good of it had been:—

"It is only once in a while that the image and desire of a better and happier life makes me feel the iron of my chain; for, after all, a human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House. And, with such materials as these, I do think and feel and learn things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there, so that the present portion of my life shall not be quite left out of the sum of my real existence.... It is good for me, on many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know much more than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man among men. I have gained worldly wisdom, and wisdom also that is not altogether of this world. And, when I quit this earthly cavern, where I am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind."

The rebellion, nevertheless, continued, and as the spring came on the Custom House is a "darksome dungeon," where he "murders the joyful young day," quenching the sunshine; when he shall be free again, he thinks, he will enjoy all things anew like a child of five, and "go forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon." He goes to the Common, to the highest point, where he could "see miles and miles into the country. Blessed be God for this green tract, and the view which it affords, whereby we poor citizens may be put in mind, sometimes, that all his earth is not composed of blocks of brick houses, and of stone or wooden pavements. Blessed be God for the sky, too, though the smoke of the city may somewhat change its aspect,—but still it is better than if each street were covered over with a roof. There were a good many people walking the mall,—mechanics apparently, and shopkeepers' clerks, with their wives; and boys were rolling on the grass, and I would have liked to lie down and roll too."

He looks out over the waters. "The footsteps of May can be traced upon the islands in the harbor, and I have been watching the tints of green upon them gradually deepening, till now they are almost as beautiful as they ever can be." He is convinced that "Christian's burden consisted of coal," and he takes comfort in salt: "Salt is white and pure—there is something holy in salt." Yet this tone was not constant, and from time to time he shows something of his first appreciation and enjoyment of the element of labor and reality in the experience. Almost at the end of his life on the wharf, after more than two years of it, he exemplifies his later feeling perhaps most justly:—

"I have been busy all day, from early breakfast-time till late in the afternoon; and old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily than is his wont when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom House. It has been a brisk, breezy day, an effervescent atmosphere, and I have enjoyed it in all its freshness,—breathing air which had not been breathed in advance by the hundred thousand pairs of lungs which have common and invisible property in the atmosphere of this great city. My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the wilderness of ocean.... It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is this,—'disgorge,' quotha, as if the vessel were sick) on the wharf, and everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased me to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence. Nevertheless, I must not pride myself too much on my activity and utilitarianism. I shall, doubtless, soon bewail myself at being compelled to earn my bread by taking some little share in the toils of mortal men."

The truth was that Hawthorne led a life apart in his own genius, and this life of the spirit rose out of his daily and habitual existence, or flowed through it like a hidden stream, and did not mingle with the tide of the hours as they passed. He felt the need of a fuller, earthly, practical life, a real life, as he would have called it by contrast with the impalpable things of his genius, and sought it in outward employments; but in these, when his spirit awoke, he felt himself a captive, and defrauded of that higher life of the soul; and after the day's work or the year's labor was over, he could not be content with the fact that it had been, and had served its purpose, and was gone, but he still was compelled to ask how it had served this higher life, in what ways it had fed the spirit which should be master of all the days of one's life, and he found no satisfactory answer except the crude one that possibly his experience and observation might be useful, though doubtfully, as material for the books that were to be. After all he was not content with practical life as an end; it was a means only, such was the necessity of his constitution; he felt its interference with his creative faculty and he was far from being convinced that he had gained anything from it which would be fruitful when he should find time and strength to write again. The leisure he had fondly anticipated was only a dream. He had to work too hard.

During these two years, from January, 1839, to April, 1841, the other part of Hawthorne's life lay in his companionship with Sophia Peabody. At first, communication was mostly by letters; but the Peabodys removed from Salem to Boston in 1840, and after that the two lovers—for they were lovers in the most simple sense—met constantly. The memorials of the time, touching as they are in their intimacy of feeling, have that essential privacy which best bespeaks a noble nature. The exchanges of confidences, the little gifts, such as the two pictures which she sent him and which he always held so preciously in his affection, the trifles of lovers' talk, like his confession that he always washed his hands before reading her letters, the quiet, firm advice, the consolations, the happy praise he renders her,—all these belong to the love-story, if it must needs be told. But, besides this, Hawthorne felt toward this love of his married life in a peculiar way not often so purely disclosed; there were touches of solemnity in it, something not of this world; there was that sense of what can be described only as sacredness, which he intimates and in part reveals as a thing never absent from his heart, whether with her or away from her. Love had come to him, not in his youth, but after the years of solitude had ripened both heart and imagination,—a man's love; it filled his whole nature, and with it went a feeling of glad release from the past, of the coming of a freeing power bringing new life, which gave something of heavenly gratitude to his bosom. How deep, serious, truly sacred, his love was, can be read in all the lines of his writing that even remotely allude to it; and at this time he gave expression to it with a sincerity so unconscious that in reading his letters—and there are many of them, though happily he destroyed his wife's—one looks straight into his heart. It is strange, he thinks, that "such a flower as our affection should have blossomed amid snow and wintry winds;" and in all ways this love had the singularity that deep natures feel in their own experiences. "I never till now," writes Hawthorne, "had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine." So one might weave the chain of lovers' phrases, linking the old words over; but here, at least, it will be enough to let one or two separate passages stand for his abiding mood. In June, 1840, he writes to her when she is at Concord:—

"My heart thirsts and languishes to be there, away from the hot sun, and the coal-dust, and the steaming docks, and the thick-pated, stubborn, contentious men, with whom I brawl from morning till night, and all the weary toil that quite engrosses me, and yet occupies only a small part of my being, which I did not know existed before I became a measurer. I do think I should sink down quite disheartened and inanimate if you were not happy, and gathering from earth and sky enjoyment for both of us; but this makes me feel that my real, innermost soul is apart from all these unlovely circumstances, and that it has not ceased to exist, as I might sometimes suspect, but is nourished and kept alive through you. You know not what comfort I have in thinking of you amid those beautiful scenes and amid those sympathizing hearts. If you are well and happy, if your step is light and joyous there, and your cheek is becoming rosier, and if your heart makes pleasant music, then is it not better for you to stay there a little longer? And if better for you, is it not so for me likewise? Now, I do not press you to stay, but leave it all to your wisdom; and if you feel it is now time to come home, then let it be so."

Similarly, in the fall of the same year, from Boston, and again from Salem, he sums in memory what this new life had been to him now for nearly two years:—

"Sometimes, during my solitary life in our old Salem house, it seemed to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive; for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But, at length, you were revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own. I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm and renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have a heart,—you only have thrown a light, deep downward and upward, into my soul. You only have revealed me to myself; for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow,—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions....

"Whenever I return to Salem, I feel how dark my life would be without the light that you shed upon it,—how cold, without the warmth of your love. Sitting in this chamber, where my youth wasted itself in vain, I can partly estimate the change that has been wrought. It seems as if the better part of me had been born since then. I had walked those many years in darkness, and might so have walked through life, with only a dreamy notion that there was any light in the universe, if you had not kissed my eyelids and given me to see. You, dearest, have always been positively happy. Not so I,—I have only not been miserable."

To turn to other matters, the preoccupation of Hawthorne's mind with his business, together with the distraction of his courtship, proved unfavorable to imaginative work. It may be, too, that the impulse to create had been somewhat exhausted by the rapid production of his later tales in the year or two preceding. Only one original story appeared in this period of labor and love, "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving," which was published in the "Democratic Review" for March, 1840, as by the Rev. A. A. Royce. An interesting edition of "The Gentle Boy," [Footnote: The Gentle Boy. A Thrice Told Tale. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. With an Original Illustration. Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 121 Washington Street. New York & London: Wiley & Putnam. 1839. 4to. Pp. 20.] under Hawthorne's name, had been issued in 1839 at his own expense; it contained the original sketch of Ibrahim, by Sophia Peabody, engraved by J. Andrews, and was evidently intended only as a kind of lover's gift to her, to whom it was dedicated. He gave his attention now to writing some children's books, partly under the influence of his old "Peter Parley" instruction and experience, and partly, no doubt, under the encouragement and advice of Elizabeth Peabody, who was interested in such literature. The Peabodys, on removing to Boston, had opened a shop, a library and book-store and homoeopathic drug-store, all in one, of which she was the head, and with her name Hawthorne associated his new ventures. He had contemplated writing children's books, as a probable means of profit, before he received his appointment in the Custom House, as he said in his letter to Longfellow; and he merely stuck to the plan under the new conditions. The result was three volumes of historical tales for young people, drawn from New England in the colonial and revolutionary times, under different titles, but making one series: "Grandfather's Chair," [Footnote: Grandfather's Chair. A History for Youth. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 140. The preface is dated Boston, November, 1840.] "Famous Old People," [Footnote: Famous Old People. Being the Second Epoch of Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 158. The preface is dated December 30, 1840.] and "Liberty Tree." [Footnote: Liberty Tree. With the Last Words of Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 160. The preface is dated Boston, February 27, 1841.] They appeared in rapid succession in 1841, and were successful. But notwithstanding the high character of these little books as entertainment for children, it will hardly be thought that literature had profited much by the devotion of genius to coal and salt and the oversight of day laborers.

In the spring of 1841, immediately after the change of administration in March, Hawthorne lost his place in the Custom House, and he at once betook himself to Brook Farm, in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, or, to give its full name, "The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education." The place, the celebrities who gathered there in their youth, and their way of life, have all been many times described, so that there is no occasion to renew a detailed account, especially as Hawthorne's interest in the scheme was purely incidental. He must have had his plans already made in preparation for a change in his life. The shop of the Peabodys in Boston was a centre of transcendentalism, "The Dial" being published there; and Hawthorne's attention may have been drawn to the movement for a practical application of the new social ideas by this circumstance, and he may well have made the acquaintance of Ripley, the chief projector, through these family friends. It is to be remembered, too, that he had been interested previously in the community idea, in the case of the Shakers, and had twice written tales on motives suggested by their life. But an experiment in the regeneration of society by a group of radicals would hardly have given him much practical concern, had it not fallen in with some peculiarities of his private position. Something, it is true, is to be allowed for the infection of the time, which would touch a morally speculative mind such as Hawthorne's to some degree; he would have observed these dreamers, breaking out new paths in the hardened old world of custom and inheritance, and would have followed the fortunes of the dream in its effects on individual lives, for it would appeal to the moral imagination and to his general sentiment about human life; but to become one of the promoters would require, in a man so wary, so hard-headed and cool as he naturally was in one half of his brain at least, a certain pressure of fact upon him. No man was less of a reformer than Hawthorne; he was constitutionally phlegmatic about society, a party man in politics, and an ironical critic of all "come-outers," as these people were then popularly named; and, in this instance, which is the only apparently freakish action of his life, he was certainly swayed by what he supposed to be his own interest. He was merely prospecting for a home in which to settle. He was anxious to be married; he was thirty-seven years old, and Sophia was thirty, and the engagement had already lasted two years and more. In this new community hopes were held out that there would be cottages for families, and the whole business of supporting a family was to be simplified and made easier by the joint arrangements of the community, in an economical sense; moreover, that blessed union of manual toil with intellectual labor was a prime part of the enterprise, and something akin to this Hawthorne still very much desired in his own mind. To have some material work to do, to sustain a practical relation with men and their general life, to have daily contact with matter of fact as a means of escape from the old life of shadows, were still very definite and prized ends with him. He was fairly possessed with this idea for some years. It may fairly be believed that he had no ulterior purpose or belief in the affair, but merely for his personal convenience desired on the one hand to solve the old problem of living in the world while not of it, and to provide a house for his wife to come to. He was willing to try the new scheme, nothing else seeming so feasible at the time to accomplish his immediate purpose; and he put into it all his savings, one thousand dollars, but with the idea of withdrawing this capital in case he was dissatisfied with the results, and should return to the ordinary ways of the world.

Hawthorne arrived at the farm among the first of the new settlers, in an April snowstorm, on the twelfth of the month, and began at once to make the acquaintance of the barnyard. He was entirely destitute of agricultural talents, original or acquired, a green hand in every sense of the word, with that muscular willingness to learn which exhibits itself by unusual destructive capacity upon implements of toil and the docility of patient farm animals. He had physical strength, and after attempting to chop, hay, and milk, he was given a dung-fork and set to work at a pile of manure. He writes about these details with a softening of the raw facts by elegancies of language, and much gentle fun, but from the start he shows a playfulness of disposition in regard to the whole affair, like a great boy on a vacation, as if the sense of it all being, so far as he was concerned, a surprising joke on a novel scale were in his mind and attitude all the time; and it is this humor, interlacing on the page like sunshine, that makes the life of his narrative. Occasionally there is the touch of true enjoyment out of doors, as when, under the clear blue sky on the hillside, it seemed as if he "were at work in the sky itself," and he notices the wild flowers coming into the chill world; but, as before at the wharf, so now at his farming, doubts assail his mind whether this manual labor is a satisfactory solution of his difficulties in adjusting himself to the world and opening communication with his fellow-men. The disillusion, if there really had ever been any true hope on his part, was effected even more quickly than before. Six weeks of manuring had brought him to enthusiastic thankfulness that it was near done:—

"That abominable gold-mine! Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its treasures in the course of two or three days! Of all hateful places that is the worst, and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money."

Ten weeks more finished the matter. "Joyful thought! in a little more than a fortnight I shall be free from my bondage, ... free to enjoy Nature,—free to think and feel!... Even my Custom House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so."

Shortly after this outburst he made a visit to his home at Salem, where he had been much missed. The few letters that his sister Louisa wrote to him after he first went to the farm afford the pleasantest, and almost the only glimpse of his place in the family. His experiment was plainly not welcome to them; his mother "groaned over it;" but, apart from that, in which there may have been some family pride, though there was also real personal solicitude, it is noticeable how his sister counts the weeks he has been gone, and expresses their vehement desires for his return, and shows the thoughtfulness of the family for him in many ways. "Mother apostrophizes your picture because you do not come home," she writes, after "nine weeks" of absence,—"a great deal too long." In that secluded home he must indeed have been missed, and doubtless it seemed to them day by day more certain that he had really gone out from them into another world of his own. When he was in Salem in September, however, he no sooner crossed the threshold than he felt the old deserted life fall on him again like an evil spirit. "How immediately and irrecoverably," he writes to Sophia, "should I relapse into the way of life in which I spent my youth! If it were not for you, this present world would see no more of me forever. The sunshine would never fall on me, no more than on a ghost. Once in a while people might discern my figure gliding stealthily through the dim evening,—that would be all. I should be only a shadow of the night; it is you that give me reality, and make all things real for me. If, in the interval since I quitted this lonely old chamber, I had found no woman (and you were the only possible one) to impart reality and significance to life, I should have come back hither ere now, with a feeling that all was a dream and a mockery."

Brook Farm seems to him now only another dream, and he gives his final judgment on that matter:—

"Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm; and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that my hands have, during the past summer, grown very brown and rough, insomuch that many people persist in believing that I, after all, was the aforesaid spectral horn-sounder, cow-milker, potato-hoer, and hay-raker. But such people do not know a reality from a shadow. Enough of nonsense."

Nevertheless he went back for a while, not now as a farmhand, but apparently as a boarder, though he was made a trustee of the association and chairman of the committee on finance. He took, from this time, little part in the working life of the community. He had made up his mind that there was to be no home for him there, though "weary, weary, thrice weary of waiting so many ages." He turns his mind to other plans of book-making, but does not have the seclusion he had found necessary for composition, and rather mournfully writes that he "must observe, and think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter." He did observe with his habitual closeness the people who came and went, and the life of the inmates, sitting himself apart a good deal with a book before his face. He made friends with a few, a very few, of whom George Bradford and Frank Farley remained to him in later times; but he was, as always, averse to literary society, and came nearer to men of a different type in his human intercourse. Sophia, who had seen him there amid the fraternity, described his relationship to the others accurately, one of "courtesy and conformableness and geniality;" but, she tells him, the expression of his countenance was "that of a witness and hearer rather than of comradeship." In the fall weather he spent much of his time rambling about, and the scarlet color of the pastures, the warmth of the autumn woods, and the fading of the blue-fringed gentian, last blossom of the year, made up the texture of his notable life, just as similar things had earlier done by the Salem shore. In the spring he left the community, and made ready to go to Concord, where a place had been found for him to settle.

In the production of literature, life at Brook Farm had proved as barren as the years on Long Wharf. He had contributed one story, "A Virtuoso's Collection," to "The Boston Miscellany" for May, 1842, and had added one more to his little books, "Biographical Stories [Footnote: Biographical Stories for Children. Benjamin West, Sir Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Cromwell, Benjamin Franklin, Queen Christina. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Author of Historical Tales for Youth, Twice-Told Tales, etc. Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 114 Washington St. 1842. 18mo. Pp. v, 161. "Historical Tales for Youth" was made up by binding the three Grandfather's Chair books in the 18mo second edition, 1842, together with this volume, and issued as four volumes in two, so labeled on the back.] for Children." The volume was added to the "Grandfather's Chair" series, which was brought out in a new edition in 1842. To the same year belongs the enlarged edition of "Twice-Told Tales," [Footnote: Twice-Told Tales. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: James Munroe and Company. 1842. 2 vols. 12mo. Pp. 331, 356. The first volume contained the same tales as the former edition, with The Toll-Gatherer's Day added. The second volume contained the following: Howe's Masquerade, Edward Randolph's Portrait, Lady Eleanore's Mantle, Old Esther Dudley, The Haunted Mind, The Village Uncle, The Ambitious Guest, The Sister Years, Snowflakes, The Seven Vagabonds, The White Old Maid, Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure, Chippings with a Chisel, The Shaker Bridal, Night Sketches, Endicott and the Red Cross, The Lily's Quest, Footprints on the Sea-Shore, Edward Fane's Rosebud, The Threefold Destiny.] in two volumes, in which the number of stories was doubled, but the collection still left out many titles which were afterwards gathered.

Hawthorne had now been practically idle, so far as his genius was concerned, for three years, and had experimented to his heart's content in other modes of life. He had decided on immediate marriage. Sophia had recovered from her invalidism, and the lifelong headache she had experienced disappeared. It remained only to inform Madam Hawthorne of the engagement which had been so long concealed. He felt some trepidation, since, he says, "almost every agitating circumstance of her life had cost her a fit of illness." But his fears were groundless; she came out of her chamber to meet him as soon as he arrived, looking better and more cheerful than usual, and full of kindness. "Foolish me," he writes happily to Sophia, "to doubt that my mother's love could be wise, like all other genuine love!... It seems that our mother had seen how things were a long time ago; at first her heart was troubled, because she knew that much of outward as well as inward fitness was requisite to secure our peace; but gradually and quietly God has taught her that all is good, and so we shall have her fullest blessing and concurrence. My sisters, too, begin to sympathize as they ought, and all is well. God be praised! I thank Him on my knees, and pray Him to make me worthy of the happiness you bring me." The quiet marriage took place on July 9, 1842, at the home of the Peabodys in Boston, and Hawthorne and his wife went to Concord to reside at the Old Manse.



IV.

THE OLD MANSE.

The life upon which the Hawthornes now entered for a period of three years and more was one of village quiet and country happiness. Concord was a characteristic town of eastern Massachusetts, with woodland, pasture, and hill lying unevenly in a diversified landscape, and in the midst the little river winding its slow way along by the famous bridge. The neighbors were few, and for the most part were members of the literary group of residents or visitors which gave Concord its later distinction. Yet even here, amid this rural peace and in so restricted a society, life at the Old Manse had a still deeper seclusion, as of a place of retreat and inviolable privacy; there was an atmosphere of solitude about it, wrapping it round, a sense of life with nature, and only slight and distant contact with the world, the privacy of a house that is snow-bound, lasting on as if by enchantment through July heats as well as February drifts. Hawthorne enjoyed this freedom in the place that first seemed to him like real home; and he and his wife pleased their fancy with thinking of it as a native paradise, with themselves as the new Adam and Eve, a thought which he had held in prospect before marriage and now clung to with a curious tenacity, pursuing it through many changes of idea; and, on the level of fact, he used to write that he had never lived so like a boy since he really was a boy in the old days in Maine.

The situation of the house lent itself to his tastes and inclinations. It was set back from the street, toward which an avenue of trees led out, and in the rear was the apple orchard with the river on its edge. He could look from his windows on the life of the road, with its occasional passers-by, for it was seldom that any one turned up the avenue to call; and he could go down to the stream to bathe and fish in summer, and to skate in winter on the black ice. He would wander out over the fields and into the woods with Ellery Channing, and go boating with Thoreau, both of whom were companions he liked to be with; or if he met Margaret Fuller in the paths of Sleepy Hollow, he could spend an hour or two in such half transcendental, half-sentimental talk as he records from such a chance encounter. Emerson came, also, to talk and walk with a man who was so firm-set in his own ways, being attracted to him by the subtleties of personality, for he never could read Hawthorne's tales then or afterwards, so profound was the opposition of their genius. If visitors stayed at the manse, it would be George Bradford, whom Hawthorne respected in the highest degree which his appreciation of others ever reached, or Frank Farley, the half-crazy Brook Farmer, whom he gave himself to in a more self-sacrificing way to aid and comfort in his bewildered and imperfect state; or else Hillard would arrive, with much cheerfulness and news from Longfellow or others of the Cambridge men. But Hawthorne still kept the social world at a distance from his private and intimate self; these men, though he maintained kindly intercourse with them, never penetrated the shell of his true reserve; the contact was but superficial; and though they were good for company, he was often glad when they were gone and he was again alone with nature and his dreams, and the ways and things of household life.

In doors, and out doors, too, the new life was full of happiness. The gentle felicity of the literary recluse breathes through the description he gave of the place and time and habits of existence in the Manse, which he wrote out for his readers in the pleasantest of his autobiographical papers; and as for details to supply a more complete picture,—are they not written at large in the family letters? His wife worshiped him, and named him all the names of classic mythology and history,—Endymion, Epaminondas, Apollo,—glorying in his physical kinghood, as she saw it, when he glided skating in the rose-colored air of twilight, and also in the divine qualities of his spirit in doors, where he, on occasion—and the occasion grew more and more frequent—would wash the dishes, do the chores, cook the meals even, relieving her of every care of this kind in servant matters. He read to her in the evenings Macaulay, all of Shakspere, the Sermon on the Mount for Sunday, and generally the old books over, Thomson's "Castle," Spenser's faeryland, and the rest. She rejoiced in him and all that was his; and she painted and modeled a good deal and worked out her artistic instincts very happily for herself, and much to her husband's sympathetic pleasure. Una, the first child, was born March 3, 1844, and with this new revelation life went on in deeper and sweeter ways of feeling, thought, and service. The home is easily to be seen now, though it was then so private a place,—a home essentially not of an uncommon New England type, where refined qualities and noble behavior flourished close to the soil of homely duties and the daily happiness of natural lives under whatever hardships; a home of friendly ties, of high thoughts within, and of poverty bravely borne.

There is no other word for it. Into this paradise of the Manse at Concord, set in the very heart of outer and inward peace so complete, poverty had come. Hawthorne had never had any superfluity in the things that give comfort and ease to life even on a small scale. The years at Salem had been marked by strict economies always, it is plain; there was no more than enough in that house, and thence arose in part its proud instinct of isolation; and Bridge, it may be recalled, had cheered up Hawthorne's doubting spirits on one occasion by telling him that the three hundred dollars he earned, at the age of thirty, was sufficient to support him. On such a scale, he would not have called himself poor. But he was poor now, with that frank meaning that the word has to a man willing to do without, who cannot pay his small debts; in fact the smallness of the debt gives its edge to the misery. Hawthorne's whole New England nature rebelled against it; for there is nothing so deep-grained in the old New England character as the dislike to be "dependent," as the word is used. Hawthorne had gone through his training, too, in boyhood; he had never contracted debts till he had the money to pay them; and now he had miscalculated the "honesty"—as he doubtless named it in his thoughts—of other men. He had expected to draw out the thousand dollars invested at Brook Farm, and he supposed he would get it, especially if he really needed it, so unbusiness-like were his ideas; but as a matter of fact, he had lost that money in the speculation as much as if he had risked it in any other way. There was more to justify his irritation in the fact that "The Democratic Review," which had begun by paying five dollars a page, and had dropped to twenty dollars an article independent of length, had practically failed. He could not get paid for his work, and so he could not pay the small bills of household expenses. They were insignificant, in one sense, but the fact that they were not paid was independent of the amount. Emerson told him, so his wife writes, "to whistle for it, ... everybody was in debt, ... all worse than he was." There had been hardship almost from the first, as appears from Hawthorne's anger at Mr. Upham for telling tales in Salem of their "poverty and misery," on which his most significant comment, perhaps, is, "We never have been quite paupers." This was in March, 1843, and it is not unlikely that the modest ways of the house, and possibly that disregard for regular meals in which Hawthorne had long been experienced, may have given an impression of greater economy than there was need of; but, for all Hawthorne's natural disclaimer, the family plainly spent as little as possible, and he found the kitchen garden, whose fortunes he follows with such interest, gave him food as well as exercise. The "Paradisaical dinner," on Christmas Day, 1843, "of preserved quince and apple, dates, and bread and cheese, and milk," though of course its simplicity was only due to the cook's absence in Boston, indicates other difficulties of housekeeping, as also do a hundred half-amusing details of the household life. But the time of trouble came in dead earnest in the course of 1845, and in the fall of that year extremity is seen nigh at hand when Mrs. Hawthorne writes to her mother: "He and Una are my perpetual Paradise, and I besieged heaven with prayers that we might not find it our duty to separate, whatever privations we must outwardly suffer in consequence of remaining together."

The way out of all this trouble was found for Hawthorne by the same friends who had formerly rescued him in the time of his bitter discouragement before his engagement. In the spring of 1845, Bridge and Frank Pierce appeared on the scene, and finding Hawthorne at his daily task of chopping wood in the shed, they had a meeting of the old college-boy sort that brightens the page with one of those human scenes that, occurring seldom in Hawthorne's life, have such realistic effect.

"Mr. Bridge caught a glimpse of him, and began a sort of waltz towards him. Mr. Pierce followed; and when they reappeared, Mr. Pierce's arm was encircling my husband's old blue frock. How his friends do love him! Mr. Bridge was perfectly wild with spirits. He danced and gesticulated and opened his round eyes like an owl.... My husband says Mr. Pierce's affection for and reliance upon him are perhaps greater than any other person's. He called him 'Nathaniel,' and spoke to him and looked at him with peculiar tenderness."