From this race of hardy sailors Hawthorne inherited the patience, courage, and endurance which were the basis of his character, a character touched besides by that melancholy and love of solitude which is apt to distinguish those born by the sea. It is this combination, perhaps, of Puritan steadfastness of purpose and wild adventurous life that descended to Hawthorne in the form of the most exquisite imagination tinctured with the highest moral aspirations. It was the sturdy, healthy plant of Puritanism blossoming into a beautiful flower.
In this old town of Salem, with its quaint houses, with their carved doorways and many windows, with its pretty rose-gardens, its beautiful overshadowing elms, its dingy court-house and celebrated town-pump, Hawthorne passed his early life, his picturesque surroundings forming a suitable environment for the handsome, imaginative boy who was to create the most beautiful literary art that America had yet known. Behind the town stood old Witch Hill, grim and ghastly with memories of the witches hanged there in colonial times. In front spread the sea, a golden argosy of promise, whose wharves and warehouses held priceless stores of merchandise. Between this haunting spirit of the past and the broader, newer life of the future, Hawthorne walked with the serene hope of the youth of that day. The old, intolerant Puritanism had passed away. Only the fine gold remained as the priceless treasure of the new generation.
Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town. He went to school and to church, loved the sea and prophesied that he should go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading, and ready to fight with any school-fellows who had, as he expressed it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, finding life a good thing whether he was roaming the streets, sitting idly on the wharves, or stretched on the floor at home reading a favorite author.
Almost all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and Hawthorne, like his fellows, lived in the magic world of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and Bunyan. _The Pilgrim's Progress_ was an especial favorite with him, its lofty spirit carrying his soul into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without understanding. For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Me., where the family lived for a time. Here, he says, he led the life of a bird of the air, with no restraint and in absolute freedom. In the summer he would take his gun and spend days in the forest, doing whatever pleased his vagabond spirit at the moment. In the winter he would follow the hunters through the snow, or skate till midnight alone upon the frozen lake with only the shadows of the hills to keep him company, and sometimes pass the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, warmed by the blaze of the fallen evergreens.