. American lands and letters. ake, in there, he says — under a whiff of thatimpatient self-crimination which sometimes blewover him in his later years — that I caught mycursed habit of solitude. But he was not whollyright; there was an heirshij) from close-lippedPuritan ancestors, that — as much as the wilds ofMaine — put him into those solitary moods, fromwhich flashed the splendors of his literary con-quests. Nor can there be a doubt that he caughtin those boyish days in the forests that throwtheir shadow on Sebago, a knowledge and an ex-perience of woody solitude, which afterward
. American lands and letters. ake, in there, he says — under a whiff of thatimpatient self-crimination which sometimes blewover him in his later years — that I caught mycursed habit of solitude. But he was not whollyright; there was an heirshij) from close-lippedPuritan ancestors, that — as much as the wilds ofMaine — put him into those solitary moods, fromwhich flashed the splendors of his literary con-quests. Nor can there be a doubt that he caughtin those boyish days in the forests that throwtheir shadow on Sebago, a knowledge and an ex-perience of woody solitude, which afterward gave * Robert Manning, b. 1784; d. 1842, was a widely knownPomologist; contributed largely to the costs of Hawthorneseducation, and was one of the founders of the Massachu-setts Horticultural Society. HA WTHORNE. 207 sombre coloring to some of the wonderful forestpictures belonging to Twice-told Tales, or theScarlet Letter. A dozen or more of the most impressible of hisyounger years he passed there ; coming back odd-. On the Shores of Sebago Lake. whiles, for special schooling (which he did notlove) to Salem, and to the tall, gaunt house of hisgrandfather Manning, still lifting that cumbrousroof to the weather — under which, at a later day,our necromancer put little Pearl and HesterPrynne into their glorified shapes. There are stories of an illness and of a lameness 2o8 AMERICAN LANDS &- LETTERS. in the new Salem home ; and of a beguilement ofenforced imprisonment by the penning of a boy-isli journal— Tl/e SjJectator. I had the privilegemany years since of looking over some numbersof the journal — then in the keej^ing of one ofthe Manning family — carefully penned in print-lettering, and setting forth among other things,that Nathaniel Hathorne [so spelled by him atthat date] proposes to publish by subscription anew edition of the Miseries of Authors/ to whichwill be added a sequel containing facts and re-marks drawn from his own exi^erience. Andagain — soundi
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