Chapter Nathaniel Hawthorne of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

find the key to let myself out, -- and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out. . . . For the last ten years, I have not lived, but only dreamed of living."¹

But the dreamer was already beginning to participate in the joy of life. Under romantic circumstances, Hawthorne had made acquaintance with Miss Sophia Peabody -- an acquaintance that soon ripened into love; and in the glow of this experience, the ice of diffidence and reserve was melted.

The Boston Custom-House.

As we have already seen, the administration of President Van Buren, in its appointments to official positions, was noticeably helpful to men of literary talents. George Bancroft, the historian, was at this time collector of the port at Boston; in 1839, Nathaniel Hawthorne was made a weigher and gauger in the Boston custom- house. It is pathetic to think of genius thus compelled to labor for existence in uncongenial employment while his pen remains idle, but this was the experience of Robert Burns, and many others. So for two years the author of the Twice-Told Tales discharged his duties faithfully, weighing cargoes of salt or measuring coal -- as he once described -- "on board a black little British schooner." Narrow though it was, the experience may have been not unhelpful in its opportunity for practical contact with men.

Brook Farm.

Then came the year spent in the idealistic community at Brook Farm. Hawthorne was not a transcendentalist in the strict sense of the term, but this experiment in simple living, conjoined with high thinking, appealed to him; association with those who formed the colony would be profitable, and possibly here he might find a congenial location for a permanent home after his marriage, which was to occur in the following year. With hearty zeal, he entered into the life of the community. He performed his share in all the labor of the farm -- and it was strenuous enough.

"At the first glimpse of fair weather," he writes to his sister, soon after arriving, "Mr. Ripley summoned us into the cowyard, and introduced me to an instrument with four prongs, commonly entitled a dung-fork. With this tool I have already assisted to load twenty or thirty carts. . . . Besides I have planted potatoes and pease, cut straw and hay for the cattle, and done various other mighty works."

His sister, sympathetic and practical, wrote, in reply to another letter of similar tenor, -- "What is the use of burning your brains out in the sun, if you can do something better with them?" Possibly Hawthorne himself became somewhat doubtful of the desirability of prolonging the experience; at all events, before the twelve-month was quite up he withdrew from this interesting circle of enthusiasts, whose characteristics and plans have been described in a former chapter.¹ In the American Note-Books, we find many picturesque details of this experience, and in his Blithedale Romance, written ten years later, the community life is presented as the background of the fiction.

The Old Manse.

In 1842, -- when Hawthorne was thirty-eight, -- occurred his marriage to Miss Peabody, and their settlement in the "Old Manse" at Concord. Here for four years they lived happy and hopeful, in spite of the really straitened circumstances, due to slender income from literary work. But Hawthorne wrote busily, encouraged by evidences that his work was recognized and appreciated more and more widely as its volume increased. The second collection of the Twice-Told Tales appeared in 1842. The Journal of an African Cruiser (1845) was edited for his friend Horatio Bridge, who had entered the American Navy and whose log- books supplied the material of this narrative. The stories and sketches produced during this period were published collectively in 1846, under the happily chosen title Mosses from an Old Manse. Although he never wholly lost his habit of reserve, -- the tendency to aloofness which was in his nature, -- Hawthorne was no longer a recluse. He met Emerson more or less frequently, although he "sought nothing from him as a philosopher." He listened courteously to the conversation of Margaret Fuller and the other members of that distinguished coterie; but he writes in his Note-Books most enthusiastically of excursions with Ellery Channing and Thoreau, "when we cast aside all irksome forms and straight-laced habitudes, and