The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne E-Book

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 307

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne' is a collection of poetry that showcases the author's incredible skill in weaving dark and allegorical tales through verse. Known primarily for his novels such as 'The Scarlet Letter' and 'The House of the Seven Gables', Hawthorne's poetic works delve into similar themes of sin, guilt, and the human psyche. His lyrical style and vivid imagery leave a lasting impact on readers, inviting them to explore the hidden depths of the human experience through the power of poetry. The collection provides a unique glimpse into Hawthorne's creative mind and his ability to craft haunting and thought-provoking narratives in a different form of writing. Each poem is a testament to his mastery of language and his profound understanding of the darker aspects of human nature. Through his poetry, Hawthorne offers a rich tapestry of emotions and insights that resonate with readers long after they have turned the final page. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - An Introduction draws the threads together, discussing why these diverse authors and texts belong in one collection. - Historical Context explores the cultural and intellectual currents that shaped these works, offering insight into the shared (or contrasting) eras that influenced each writer. - A combined Synopsis (Selection) briefly outlines the key plots or arguments of the included pieces, helping readers grasp the anthology's overall scope without giving away essential twists. - A collective Analysis highlights common themes, stylistic variations, and significant crossovers in tone and technique, tying together writers from different backgrounds. - Reflection questions encourage readers to compare the different voices and perspectives within the collection, fostering a richer understanding of the overarching conversation.

Leseprobe

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Enriched edition. Address to the Moon, The Darken'd Veil, Earthly Pomp, Forms of Heroes, Go to the Grave, The Ocean…

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Cedric Haynes

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Edited and published by Musaicum Press, 2017

ISBN 978-80-272-3180-5

Table of Contents

Introduction

Historical Context

Synopsis (Selection)

The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Analysis

Reflection

Introduction

Table of Contents

Curatorial Vision

These works gather Nathaniel Hawthorne’s poems alongside responses by other poets, with a biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop to frame the poet within a life. The selection emphasizes Hawthorne’s lyric meditations—on night, sea, mortality, humility, and remembrance—while placing them in conversation with poems that address Hawthorne as subject. The through-line is the tension between interior conscience and public image, between secrecy and illumination. Bringing these pieces together foregrounds Hawthorne’s seldom-emphasized verse and the ways others interpreted his presence. The result is a compact panorama of voice and echo, self-expression and tribute, that clarifies enduring patterns in his moral and aesthetic imagination.

Address to the Moon and The Ocean cast the natural world as a reflective surface for mind and conscience, while The Darken’d Veil contemplates mystery and concealment. Earthly Pomp and Go to the Grave measure worldly display against the leveling certainty of death. Forms of Heroes weighs reputation and the shapes we give to valor. My Low and Humble Home turns inward, honoring plainness and quiet attachment. Together these poems trace a lyric arc from immensity to intimacy, from spectacle to sobriety, shaping a compact poetics of moral attention that is at once contemplative, restrained, and quietly resonant.

Power Against Power by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop and Greatness by Florence Earle Coates consider ethical force and stature, sharpening questions Hawthorne’s poems raise. At Hawthorne’s Grave by Charlotte Fiske Bates, and Hawthorne by H. W. Longfellow, address the commemorative and elegiac dimensions of his legacy. James Russell Lowell’s Hawthorne: A Fable for Critics adds a brisk, appraising portrait that complicates idealization. These works were gathered to juxtapose interior lyric with external address, allowing Hawthorne’s themes to reverberate through differing temperaments. As a set, they present a composite figure: artist, moral inquirer, and cultural presence viewed from multiple poetic vantage points.

Rather than isolating either Hawthorne’s poems or a biographical account, the collection brings lyric, portrait, and remembrance into one continuous exchange. The aim is to highlight recurrence and variation: how sea, moon, veil, home, grave, and fame migrate across voices and intents. By pairing Hawthorne’s compact meditations with tributes and assessments, the volume maps an arc from self-articulation to cultural memory. It differs from presentations that treat each element separately by foregrounding the relational texture among them, so that readers may perceive not only individual poems, but the evolving image they collectively form around the name Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay

The Darken’d Veil introduces secrecy as a moral condition; its poise and reserve find echoes in At Hawthorne’s Grave, where quiet address meets the stillness of memorial space, and in Longfellow’s Hawthorne, which shapes reflection into public remembrance. Across these poems, the movement from hiddenness to commemoration is palpable: a veil that withholds, a grave that discloses through silence, a name spoken into common memory. The tonal progression—meditative, then solemn, then ceremonially reflective—creates a dialogue about what the inner life yields to history, and what remains intractably private even under the gaze of honor and mourning.

Address to the Moon and The Ocean present magnitude as a discipline of attention: immensity corrects human pride and steadies thought. In Florence Earle Coates’s Greatness, magnitude becomes an ethical measure, abstracted from landscape and attached to character. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power registers struggle, where moral energies contend rather than repose. Read together, these poems trace a spectrum from contemplative scale to active conscience. The shift in imagery—from cosmic and maritime to conceptual and ethical—reveals a shared pursuit: to weigh force not by noise or display, but by enduring capacity for restraint, clarity, and resolve.

Earthly Pomp, Go to the Grave, and Forms of Heroes examine fame and ceremony with skepticism, placing memory under moral audit. The poems addressed to Hawthorne often enact the very commemorative impulse his lyrics scrutinize. James Russell Lowell’s Hawthorne: A Fable for Critics adds a brisk, occasionally playful appraisal, counterbalancing hallowing gestures with wit. In the friction between internal critique and external homage, the volume locates a productive tension: reputation both constructed and questioned. The tonal contrasts—Hawthorne’s grave composure, Lowell’s quickened cadence, and the commemorative calm of Longfellow and Bates—compose a polyphony of respect, judgment, and reflection.

My Low and Humble Home anchors the set in domestic feeling, an inward counterpart to public remembrance. Its modest tone refracts the broader debate about stature, suggesting that moral gravity may arise from ordinary rooms and habits. The biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop complements this note by offering a narrative portrait against which the poems’ values can be gauged. Without repeating the poets’ judgments, it situates the lived texture that their images imply. The conversation that results—between intimate dwelling and outward commemoration—underscores how a writer’s presence is felt both in quiet affiliations and in the ceremonious speech of tribute.

Enduring Impact & Critical Reception

This collection remains vital because it reveals a writer’s double life: the lyric conscience speaking in concentrated images, and the social figure reflected by peers and admirers. In an age attentive to privacy, memory, and reputation, the dialogue among these poems models a careful ethics of attention. Hawthorne’s own pieces reward rereading for their clarity and restraint; the poems on Hawthorne demonstrate how literary presence circulates beyond authorship. By gathering self-utterance with commemoration, the volume provides a concise study in how art moves from solitary perception to shared symbol, without reducing either pole to simple sentiment or verdict.

The presence of H. W. Longfellow and James Russell Lowell signals a recognized place for Hawthorne within American letters; their poems serve as public indices of esteem as well as instruments of appraisal. Charlotte Fiske Bates and Florence Earle Coates add nuanced registers of commemoration and ethical meditation, broadening the lens through which Hawthorne is seen. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s contribution likewise reflects sustained engagement with his moral questions. While critical fashions shift, the convergence of these voices forms a durable benchmark of reception: a chorus that balances praise with criticism, intimacy with distance, and personal regard with cultural measure.

These materials also illuminate the broader afterlife of literary figures, in which graveside meditation, critical fable, and commemorative ode shape public understanding as powerfully as primary texts. The interplay here models patterns that recur in classrooms, civic observances, and artistic homage, where an author’s image is negotiated by peers, readers, and descendants in verse and narrative sketch. By tracing how Hawthorne’s poems meet the poems about him, the collection demonstrates how artistic identity becomes a shared construction. That process, shown without ornament, invites ongoing inquiry into the uses of legacy, the boundaries of admiration, and the discipline of thoughtful praise.

Finally, the collection encourages a balanced reading practice: attention to craft within Hawthorne’s lyrics, and attention to the interpretive acts that surround a writer’s name. The poems by Hawthorne establish touchstones of imagery and conscience; the biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop and the poems by Bates, Coates, Longfellow, Lowell, and Rose Hawthorne Lathrop refract those touchstones through memory and evaluation. In presenting these perspectives together, the volume offers a compact resource for thinking about influence, tribute, and judgment. It preserves a conversation in which art, character, and remembrance inform one another without collapsing into sentimentality or mere verdict.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

Socio-Political Landscape

Composed and memorialized during a century that carried New England from Puritan afterglow into mass democracy and sectional fracture, the poems gathered here move within volatile civic weather. The Introduction and George Parsons Lathrop’s biographical sketch stage Nathaniel Hawthorne amid shifting authority—church, party, market, and nation—while the poems, brief yet pointed, weigh public spectacle against private conscience. Address to the Moon and The Darken'd Veil turn from noise to inward measure; Earthly Pomp distrusts aggrandizement; My Low and Humble Home cherishes modesty that resists restless ambition. Political noise never disappears; it hums beneath quiet cadences, shaping the anthology’s moral pitch.

Antebellum reform—temperance, abolition, prison and asylum overhaul, women’s rights—pressed every writer to declare or withhold allegiance. Hawthorne’s poems, as presented here, register the era obliquely, testing the rhetoric of uplift against the stubbornness of human motive. Earthly Pomp rebukes vaunting improvement; Go to the Grave counsels humility before limits that no campaign can repeal. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power, written later, distills the same tension as a contest of authorities—conscience, state, wealth—after war remade the polity. Florence Earle Coates’s Greatness converts status into service, suggesting a civic ethic compatible with restraint. Together, these poems measure reform by the soul’s temperature.

Industrial acceleration transformed New England mill towns, while canals, railways, and seaports braided the region into a national market. The Ocean answers this upheaval with an older, unmastered power, sounding limits to commerce, conquest, and calculation. My Low and Humble Home protects local affections against restless speculation, while Earthly Pomp exposes the brittleness of new fortunes. Lathrop’s biographical sketch, attentive to places and livelihoods, frames this poetic reticence as a cultural posture: a citizenry courting prosperity yet haunted by moral cost. Even when particular policies recede from view, economic modernity furnishes the stage on which these brief meditations perform.

Expansion intensified questions of honor and memory, from the Mexican conflict to ongoing reckonings with Revolutionary legacy. Forms of Heroes interrogates the grammar of commemoration—statues, laurel, parade—asking what, precisely, a polity remembers when it carves a name in stone. James Russell Lowell’s fable-portrait of Hawthorne, included here in its Hawthorne passage, balances praise with wit, implying that satirical scrutiny is itself a civic duty. H. W. Longfellow’s Hawthorne, by contrast, models an elegiac heroism, a public voice softened by private esteem. Between them, the anthology situates courage less in trumpet and banner than in temperate judgment before history.

Religion remained the most durable power in New England towns, though revivals and schisms reconfigured allegiance. The Darken'd Veil trusts the image of hiddenness to acknowledge both faith’s consolations and its inscrutabilities. Address to the Moon translates sermonic awe into cosmic address, finding moral scale in the heavens. Charlotte Friske Bates’s At Hawthorne's Grave sanctifies civic mourning through quasi-liturgical tones, blending churchyard and common green. Lathrop’s biographical sketch, too, treats congregational memory as a civic archive, where private character becomes public exemplar. In this context, the anthology’s meditations on death and secrecy register as political acts of communal self-definition.

War, culminating in the national cataclysm of the eighteen-sixties, altered the register in which elegy could be heard. Though many lyrics predate that crisis, readers have long received them through a postwar hush. Longfellow’s Hawthorne, written as tribute, teaches a rhetoric of national mourning without martial noise. Power Against Power articulates the conscience’s resistance within systems hardened by conflict and victory—suggesting that peace, too, disciplines the citizen. Go to the Grave, heard against regimental losses and shattered families, becomes a rite for the republic’s bereaved. The anthology thus nests personal lament within a widened, chastened civic sensibility.

Gendered authority shifts within the period also mark the collection. As daughter, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop writes into the public square from a familial threshold, testing how kinship can ground civic claim. Charlotte Friske Bates and Florence Earle Coates enlarge commemorative discourse, their poems asserting that women’s voices may define national virtues of steadfastness, humility, and service. Lathrop’s biographical sketch secures the private person for public pedagogy, fashioning Hawthorne as exemplar while guarding his recesses. In this interplay, the household becomes a laboratory of citizenship, and commemoration a negotiation of power among memory-keepers who were once relegated to the margins.

Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents

These texts inhabit an American Romantic temper that cherishes symbol, parable, and the suggestive image. The Introduction and George Parsons Lathrop’s biographical sketch cast Hawthorne as a poet of moral shading rather than manifesto, inclined to veil and emblem over declamation. The Darken'd Veil embodies that impulse, treating opacity as a form of truth-telling. Earthly Pomp adapts the old emblem-book reflex—worldly grandeur as vanitas—while Go to the Grave renews the contemplative memento mori. In this economy, brevity is not evasion but method, allowing a charged stillness to withstand the period’s flamboyant oratory and doctrinal certainties.

Scientific and technological novelties—steam propulsion, electrified news, expanding astronomy—reshaped metaphors that poets could trust. Address to the Moon faces an empirical age without surrendering reverence, translating observation into moral scale. The Ocean, attentive to depth and force, dialogues with maritime science yet refuses to become mere description; it insists on the sublime as a civic educator. Lathrop’s biographical sketch situates Hawthorne within reading habits sharpened by such changes, yet emphasizes a temperament wary of technological hubris. The poems answer measurement with wonder, proposing that a republic preoccupied with instruments still needs languages for awe, limit, and conscience.

The anthology also maps stylistic negotiation among contemporaries represented within it. Longfellow’s Hawthorne offers high-finish lyric tribute, furnishing a canonizing voice of cultural stability. Lowell’s fable portrait sharpens the air with wit, his comic appraisal preserving ethical bite within urbane play. Charlotte Friske Bates supplies a graveyard meditation that aligns civic memory with ritual poise; Florence Earle Coates turns postbellum idealism toward ethical definition; Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power adopts an almost forensic rhetoric. Together, these modes articulate compatible yet rival claims for poetry’s task—ornament, counsel, correction, benediction—thereby staging an instructive debate about art’s public office.

Formally, the poems favor the occasion: graveside address, portrait, admonition, hymn-like reflection. My Low and Humble Home cultivates the domestic lyric as a moral argument about sufficiency and scale. Forms of Heroes enters the public monument debate through meditative measure rather than polemic, weighing sculptural fixity against living memory. Go to the Grave borrows the sermon’s cadence without its dogma, while Earthly Pomp channels emblematic brevity. The Introduction and biographical sketch provide readers with tutelage in decoding such forms, underscoring a period confidence that style itself—restraint, proportion, harmonic closure—could enact civility and thus answer the intensities of the age.

Print culture supplies the enabling infrastructure for these aesthetic choices. Occasional poems thrived in newspapers and memorial volumes; tributes like Longfellow’s and Lowell’s could circulate quickly, becoming civic texts. Bates and Coates worked within a periodical world that rewarded decorum and clarity, even as it permitted pointed critique by tone. The Poetical Works consolidates that dispersed record, with the Introduction and Lathrop’s biographical sketch arranging reception through a biographical lens. Anthologizing converts momentary utterance into an archive of public feeling, setting the solitary lyric alongside civic portrait and parenetic verse, and thereby coupling taste to an ethic of memory.

Legacy & Reassessment Across Time

From the outset, the poet’s reputation was shaped by friendly canonizers within this volume. Longfellow’s Hawthorne supplies a model of tasteful commemoration; Lowell’s satiric fable fixes an image of inwardness and scruple; the biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop translates life into exemplary narrative. The poems, though fewer than the prose in fame, have lingered as touchstones of moral temperament: a preference for measured statement, a distrust of blare. As the collection traveled through reprintings, these paratexts guided readers to hear quiet in a loud nation, a guidance that would itself become a subject of later scholarly scrutiny.

Industrial consolidation and the Gilded Age prompted critics to reread Earthly Pomp as an indictment of display and speculative excess. My Low and Humble Home gained currency as a domestic ideal in tension with public graft. Florence Earle Coates’s Greatness, in this climate, answered the era’s question—what makes a citizen admirable?—with a moral calculus against mere wealth. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Power Against Power found new pertinence as corporate and political entities tested the limits of conscience and law. Thus the anthology’s ethical vocabulary proved elastic, absorbing later conflicts while preserving its nineteenth-century cadence of modesty and measure.

Twentieth-century wars, dislocations, and memorial cultures altered the timbre of elegy across the volume. Go to the Grave acquired liturgical resonance at commemorations; At Hawthorne's Grave offered a script for civic mourning that felt portable to other losses. The Ocean’s imagery of depth and force met anxieties of submarine warfare, migration, and planetary peril, reframing natural sublimity as a register of vulnerability. Longfellow’s Hawthorne persisted as a decorous model of tribute in an era wary of bombast. Through these appropriations, the collection became a toolkit for public feeling, its restrained diction lending dignity to grief-laden ceremonies.

Later decades reopened questions of voice and authority within the volume. Scholars and readers turned renewed attention to Charlotte Friske Bates and Florence Earle Coates, recognizing their commemorative poise as a form of political speech that had been minimized by earlier taste. Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s authorship, poised between kinship and public claim, became a case study in how familial framing shapes reception. George Parsons Lathrop’s biographical sketch, once taken as neutral guidance, was reread as a shaping instrument that both protects and limits. These reassessments diversified the anthology’s center of gravity, distributing authority across its chorus of tributes.

Digital recovery and renewed civic argument have kept the collection active. Variant texts and annotations clarify the social references that once felt self-evident; Forms of Heroes now intersects debates about monuments and memory; The Ocean invites ecological readings that turn wonder toward stewardship. The Introduction and biographical sketch, placed alongside memorial poems by Bates, Coates, Longfellow, Lowell, and Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, frame an ongoing question: how should a community speak of virtue and grief? Few answers are final. The anthology endures as a rehearsal space where private consolation and public duty meet, sometimes uneasily, under a changing historical sky.

Synopsis (Selection)

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Introduction situates the volume by proposing why Hawthorne’s seldom-noted verse merits attention alongside his fiction. It signals recurring motifs—moral twilight, veiled perception, mortality, and the natural sublime—and prepares readers for the conversation between Hawthorne’s poems and the contemporaneous tributes that interpret his legacy.

Biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop

This sketch outlines Hawthorne’s life and artistic development, linking personal experiences and temperament to the subjects and moods touched in his poetry. It emphasizes the tension between Puritan inheritance and humane sympathy, framing the introspective tone of the lyrics and the commemorative responses that follow.

Poems by Hawthorne (Address to the Moon; The Darken'd Veil; Earthly Pomp; Forms of Heroes; Go to the Grave; My Low and Humble Home; The Ocean)

These short lyrics move from public show to private conscience and from domestic quiet to the immensity of sea and sky. Pieces such as Address to the Moon, The Darken'd Veil, and Earthly Pomp consider transience and the limits of human sight, while Forms of Heroes, Go to the Grave, My Low and Humble Home, and The Ocean meditate on heroism, mortality, homeliness, and elemental grandeur. The prevailing tone is reflective and austere, with melancholy threaded through moral inquiry.

Poems 'On Hawthorne' (Power Against Power by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop; At Hawthorne's Grave by Charlotte Friske Bates; Hawthorne by H. W. Longfellow; Hawthorne: A Fable for Critics by James Russell Lowell; Greatness by Florence Earle Coates)

Written by admirers and interlocutors, these poems form a chorus that reads Hawthorne’s character and art through elegiac, laudatory, and critically playful lenses. From familial and memorial gestures (Rose Hawthorne Lathrop; Charlotte Friske Bates) to classic tribute (H. W. Longfellow), a witty critical portrait in verse (James Russell Lowell), and distilled praise (Florence Earle Coates), they crystallize his image as an American moral imagination shaped by shadow and light. Their varied registers—reverent, meditative, incisive—echo and debate the volume’s through-lines of darkness, conscience, and enduring stature.

The Poetical Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Main Table of Contents

Introduction

Biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop

Poetry:

Poems By Hawthorne:

Address to the Moon

The Darken'd Veil

Earthly Pomp

Forms of Heroes

Go to the Grave

My Low and Humble Home

The Ocean

Poems 'On Hawthorne':

Power Against Power by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

At Hawthorne's Grave by Charlotte Friske Bates

Hawthorne by H. W. Longfellow

Hawthorne: A Fable for Critics by James Russell Lowell

Greatness by Florence Earle Coates

Introduction

Table of Contents

Biographical sketch by George Parsons Lathrop

Table of Contents

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

I.

Table of Contents

The lives of great men are written gradually. It often takes as long to construct a true biography as it took the person who is the subject of it to complete his career; and when the work is done, it is found to consist of many volumes, produced by a variety of authors. We receive views from different observers, and by putting them together are able to form our own estimate. What the man really was not even himself could know; much less can we. Hence all that we accomplish, in any case, is to approximate to the reality. While we flatter ourselves that we have imprinted on our minds an exact image of the individual, we actually secure nothing but a typical likeness. This likeness, however, is amplified and strengthened by successive efforts to paint a correct portrait. If the faces of people belonging to several generations of a family be photographed upon one plate, they combine to form a single distinct countenance, which shows a general resemblance to them all: in somewhat the same way, every sketch of a distinguished man helps to fix the lines of that typical semblance of him which is all that the world can hope to preserve.

This principle applies to the case of Hawthorne, notwithstanding that the details of his career are comparatively few, and must be marshalled in much the same way each time that it is attempted to review them. The veritable history of his life would be the history of his mental development, recording, like Wordsworth's "Prelude," the growth of a poet's mind; and on glancing back over it he too might have said, in Wordsworth's phrases:—

"Wisdom and spirit of the universe! .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . By day or star-light thus from my first dawn Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me The passions that build up the human soul; Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, But with high objects, with enduring things— With life and nature, purifying thus The elements of feeling and of thought, And sanctifying by such discipline Both pain and fear, until we recognize A grandeur in the beatings of the heart."

But a record of that kind, except where an autobiography exists, can be had only by indirect means. We must resort to tracing the outward facts of the life, and must try to infer the interior relations.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on the Fourth of July, 1804, at Salem, Massachusetts, in a house numbered twenty-one, Union Street. The house is still standing, although somewhat reduced in size and still more reduced in circumstances. The character of the neighborhood has declined very much since the period when Hawthorne involuntarily became a resident there. As the building stands to-day it makes the impression simply of an exceedingly plain, exceedingly old-fashioned, solid, comfortable abode, which in its prime must have been regarded as proof of a sufficient but modest prosperity on the part of the occupant. It is clapboarded, is two stories high, and has a gambrel roof, immediately beneath which is a large garret that doubtless served the boy-child well as a place for play and a stimulant for the sense of mystery. A single massive chimney, rising from the centre, emphasizes by its style the antiquity of the building, and has the air of holding it together. The cobble-stoned street in front is narrow, and although it runs from the house towards the water-side, where once an extensive commerce was carried on, and debouches not far from the Custom House where Hawthorne in middle life found plenty of occupation as Surveyor, it is now silent and deserted.

He was the second of three children born to Nathaniel Hathorne, sea-captain, and Elizabeth Clarke Manning. The eldest was Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, who came into the world March 7, 1802; the last was Maria Louisa, born January 9, 1808, and lost in the steamer Henry Clay, which was burned on the Hudson River, July 27, 1852. Elizabeth survived all the members of the family, dying on the 1st of January, 1883, when almost eighty-one years old, at Montserrat, a hamlet in the township of Beverly, near Salem. In early manhood, certainly at about the time when he began to publish, the young Nathaniel changed the spelling of his surname to Hawthorne; an alteration also adopted by his sisters. This is believed to have been merely a return to a mode of spelling practised by the English progenitors of the line, although none of the American ancestors had sanctioned it.

"The fact that he was born in Salem," writes Dr. George B. Loring, who knew him as a fellow-townsman, "may not amount to much to other people, but it amounted to a great deal to him. The sturdy and defiant spirit of his progenitor, who first landed on these shores, found a congenial abode among the people of Naumkeag, after having vainly endeavored to accommodate itself to the more imposing ecclesiasticism of Winthrop and his colony at Trimountain, and of Endicott at his new home. He was a stern Separatist ... but he was also a warrior, a politician, a legal adviser, a merchant, an orator with persuasive speech.... He had great powers of mind and body, and forms a conspicuous figure in that imposing and heroic group which stands around the cradle of New England. The generations of the family that followed took active and prominent part in the manly adventures which marked our entire colonial period.... It was among the family traditions gathered from the Indian wars, the tragic and awful spectre of the witchcraft delusion, the wild life of the privateer, that he [Nathaniel] first saw the light."

The progenitor here referred to is William Hathorne, who came to America with John Winthrop in 1630. He had grants of land in Dorchester, but was considered so desirable a citizen that the town of Salem offered him other lands if he would settle there; which he did. It has not been ascertained from what place William Hathorne originally came. His elder brother Robert is known to have written to him in 1653 from the village of Bray, in Berkshire, England; but Nathaniel Hawthorne says in the "American Note-Books" that William was a younger brother of a family having for its seat a place called Wigcastle, in Wiltshire. He became, however, a person of note and of great usefulness in the community with which he cast his lot, in the new England. Hathorne Street in Salem perpetuates his name to-day, as Lathrop Street does that of Captain Thomas Lathrop, who commanded one of the companies of Essex militia, when John Hathorne was quartermaster of the forces; Thomas Lathrop, who marched his men to Deerfield in 1675, to protect frontier inhabitants from the Indians, and perished with his whole troop, in the massacre at Bloody Brook. The year after that, William Hathorne also took the field against the Indians, in Maine, and conducted a highly successful campaign there, under great hardships. He had been the captain of the first military organization in Salem, and rose to be major. He served for a number of years as deputy in the Great and General Court; was a tax-collector, a magistrate, and a bold advocate of colonial self-government. Although opposed to religious persecution, as a magistrate he inflicted cruelties on the Quakers, causing a woman on one occasion to be whipped through Salem, Boston, and Dedham. "The figure of that first ancestor," Hawthorne wrote in "The Custom House," "invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember;" so that it is by no means idle to reckon the history of his own family as among the important elements influencing the bent of his genius. John, the son of William, was likewise a public character; he, too, became a representative, a member of the Governor's council, a magistrate and a military officer, and saw active service as a soldier in the expedition which he headed against St. John, in 1696. But he is chiefly remembered as the judge who presided over the witchcraft trials and displayed great harshness and bigotry in his treatment of the prisoners. His descendants did not retain the position in public affairs which had been held by his father and himself; and for the most part they were sea-faring men. One of them, indeed, Daniel—the grandfather of Nathaniel—figured as a privateer captain in the Revolution, fighting one battle with a British troop-ship off the coast of Portugal, in which he was wounded; but the rest led the obscure though hardy and semi-romantic lives of maritime traders sailing to Africa, India, or Brazil. The privateersman had among his eight children three boys, one of whom, Nathaniel, was the father of the author, and died of fever in Surinam, in the spring of 1808, at the age of thirty-three.

HATHORNE FAMILY OF SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS.

The founders of the American branch were men of independent character, proud, active, energetic, capable of extreme sternness and endowed with passionate natures, no doubt. But they were men of affairs; they touched the world on the practical side, and, even during the decline of the family fortunes, continued to do so. All at once, in the personality of the younger Nathaniel Hawthorne, this energy which persisted in them reversed its direction, and found a new outlet through the channel of literary expression. We must suppose that he included among his own characteristics all those of his predecessors; their innate force, their endurance, their capacity for impassioned feeling; but in him these elements were fused by a finer prevailing quality, and held in firm balance by his rare temperament. This must be borne in mind, if we would understand the conjunction of opposite traits in him. It was one of his principles to guard against being run away with by his imagination, and to cultivate in practical affairs what he called "a morose common sense." There has been attributed to him by some of those who knew him a certain good-humored gruffness, which might be explained as a heritage from the self-assertive vitality of his ancestors. While at Liverpool he wrote to one of his intimates in this country, and in doing so made reference to another acquaintance as a "wretch," to be away from whom made exile endurable. The letter passed into the hands of the acquaintance thus stigmatized long after Hawthorne was in his grave; but he declared himself to be in no wise disturbed by it, because he knew that the remark was not meant seriously, being only one of the occasional explosions of a "sea-dog" forcefulness, which had come into the writer's blood from his skipper forefathers. Hawthorne had, in fact, parted on friendly terms from the gentleman of whom he thus wrote. On the other hand we have the traits of sensitiveness, great delicacy, reserve and reverie, drawn from both his father and his mother. Captain Hathorne had been a man of fine presence, handsome, kindly, and rather silent; a reader, likewise; and his son's resemblance to him was so marked that a strange sailor stopped Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem Custom House, many years afterward, to ask him if he were not a son or nephew of the Captain, whom he had known.

His mother belonged to an excellent family, the Mannings, of English stock, settled in Salem and Ipswich ever since 1680, and still well represented in the former place. She, too, was a very reserved person; had a stately, aristocratic manner; is remembered as possessing a peculiar and striking beauty. Her education was of that simple, austere, but judicious and perfected kind that—without taking any very wide range—gave to New England women in the earlier part of this century a sedate freedom and a cultivated judgment, which all the assumed improvements in pedagogy and the general relations of men and women since then have hardly surpassed. She was a pious woman, a sincere and devoted wife, a mother whose teachings could not fail to impress upon her children a bias towards the best things in life. Nathaniel's sister Elizabeth, although a recluse to the end of her days, and wholly unknown to the public, gave in her own case evidence indisputable of the fine influences which had moulded her own childhood and that of her brother. She showed a quiet, unspoiled, and ardent love of Nature, and was to the last not only an assiduous reader of books but also a very discriminating one. The range of her reading was very wide, but she never made any more display of it than Hawthorne did of his. An intuitive judgment of character was hers, which was really startling at times: merely from the perusal of a book or the inspection of a portrait, she would arrive at accurate estimates of character which revealed a power of facile and comprehensive insight; and her letters, even in old age, flowed spontaneously into utterance of the same finished kind that distinguished Nathaniel Hawthorne's epistolary style. How fresh and various, too, was her interest in the affairs of the world! For many years she had not gone farther from her secluded abode in a farm-house at Montserrat, than to Beverly or Salem; yet I remember that, only six months before her death, she wrote a letter to her niece, a large part of which was devoted to the campaign of the English in Egypt, then progressing: with a lively and clear comprehension she discussed the difficulties of the situation, and expressed the utmost concern for the success of the English army, at the same time that she laughed at herself for displaying, as an old woman, so much anxiety about the matter. Now, a mother who could bring up her daughter in such a way as to make all this possible and natural, must be given much credit for her share in developing an illustrious son. Let us not forget that it was to his mother that Goethe owed in good measure the foundation of his greatness. Mrs. Hathorne had large, very luminous gray eyes, which were reproduced in her son's; so that, on both sides, his parentage entitled him to the impressive personal appearance which distinguished him. In mature life he became somewhat estranged from her, but their mutual love was presumably suspended only for a time, and he was with her at her death, in 1849. She lived long enough to see him famous as the author of "Twice-Told Tales"; but "The Scarlet Letter" had not been written when she died.

She, as well as her husband, was one of a family of eight brothers and sisters; these were the children of Richard Manning. Two of the brothers, Richard and Robert, were living in Salem when she was left a widow; Robert being eminent in New England at that time as a horticulturist. She was without resources, other than her husband's earnings, and Robert undertook to provide for her. Accordingly, she removed with her young family to the Manning homestead on Herbert Street, the next street east of Union Street, where Nathaniel was born. This homestead stood upon a piece of land running through to Union Street, and adjoining the garden attached to Hawthorne's birthplace. At that time Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, a physician, occupied a house in a brick block on the opposite side of Union Street; and there in 1809, September 21st, was born his daughter, Sophia A. Peabody, who afterwards became Hawthorne's wife. Her birthplace, therefore, was but a few rods distant from that of her future husband. Sophia Peabody's eldest sister, Mary, who married Horace Mann, noted as an educator and an abolitionist, remembers the child Nathaniel, who was then about five years old. He used to make his appearance in the garden of the Herbert Street mansion, running and dancing about there at play, a vivacious, golden-haired boy. The next oldest sister, who was the first of this family to make the acquaintance of the young author some thirty years later on, was Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, who has taken an important part in developing the Kindergarten in America. There were plenty of books in the Manning house, and Nathaniel very soon got at them. Among the authors whom he earliest came to know were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Rousseau. The "Castle of Indolence" was one of his favorite volumes. Subsequently, he read the whole of the "Newgate Calendar," and became intensely absorbed in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which undoubtedly left very deep impressions upon him, traceable in the various allusions to it scattered through his works. He also made himself familiar with Spenser's "Faërie Queen," Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion."