Probably the
ancestral curse hanging over _The House of the Seven Gables_ would not have
been so vividly conceived, if such a curse had not been traditional in the
Hawthorne family.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the sixth in descent from the first New England
ancestor, and the first of his family to add a "w" to his name, was born in
Salem in 1804. His father, a sea captain, died of a fever at a foreign port
in 1808. Hawthorne's mother was twenty-seven years old at this time, and
for forty years after this sad event, she usually took her meals in her own
room away from her three children. Everybody in that household became
accustomed to loneliness. At the age of fourteen, the boy went to live for
a while on the shore of Sebago Lake, Maine. "I lived in Maine," he said,
"like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was
there I got my cursed habits of solitude." Shyness and aversion to meeting
people became marked characteristics.
His solitariness predisposed him to reading, and we are told that Bunyan's
_Pilgrim's Progress_ and Shakespeare's plays were special favorites.
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ was the first book that he bought with his own
money.
Pages:
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265