NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

There came to the old town of Salem, in the Province of Massachusetts, in the early part of the seventeenth century, an English family named Hawthorne—­Puritans, like all the other inhabitants of that growing town.  They proved their fidelity to Puritan principles by entering readily into all the superstitions of the day, and became noted for the zeal with which they persecuted the Quakers and hung the witches.  The head of the family was a sea captain, and for many generations the men of the family followed the same avocation, “a gray-haired shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.”

[Illustration:  NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.]

Of such a race came NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, who was born at Salem, on the 4th, of July, 1804.  His father was a sea captain, and died of the yellow fever at Havana, in 1810.  His mother was a woman of great beauty and extreme sensibility, and it was from her that Nathaniel derived the peculiarities of character which distinguished him through life.  The death of her husband filled her with the profoundest grief, and though the violence of her sorrow subsided with time, she passed the remainder of her life in strict seclusion, constantly grieving in her quiet way for her departed lord.  Her son grew up to the age of ten in this sad and lonely house, passing four of the most susceptible years of his life in the society of his sorrowful mother.  He became a shy boy, and avoided the company of other children.  His health began to suffer from the effects of such an unnatural state of affairs, and at the age of ten he was sent to live on a farm belonging to the family, on the shore of Sebago Lake, in Maine.  The active out-door life which he led here entirely restored his health, which was naturally strong and vigorous; here, also, he acquired that fondness for boating which was his chief amusement in after years.  Returning to Salem, he completed his studies in the preparatory schools, after which he entered Bowdoin College, where he graduated in 1825, at the age of twenty-one.  He was a classmate of Longfellow and George B. Cheever, with whom he was only slightly acquainted; and he formed a warm and lasting friendship with Franklin Pierce, who was in the class next before him.  Longfellow has preserved a recollection of him in his student days as “a shy youth in a bright-buttoned coat, flitting across the college grounds.”