" This weird and woodsy ground of Cumberland became
the nurturing soil of Hawthorne for some years. He stayed only one
twelvemonth at Sebago Lake, returning to Salem after that for college
preparation. But Brunswick, where his academic years were passed, lies
less than thirty miles from the home in the woods, and within the same
county: doubtless, also, he spent some of his summer vacations at
Raymond. The brooding spell of his mother's sorrow was perhaps even
deepened in this favorable solitude. I know not whether the faith of
women's hearts really finds an easier avenue to such consecration as
this of Mrs. Hathorne's, in Salem, than elsewhere. I happen lately to
have heard of a widow in that same neighborhood who has remained
bereaved and uncomforted for more than seventeen years. With pathetic
energy she spends the long days of summer, in long, incessant walks,
sorrow-pursued, away from the dwellings of men. But, however this be, I
think this divine and pure devotion to a first love, though it may have
impregnated Hawthorne's mind too keenly with the mournfulness of
mortality, was yet one of the most cogent means of entirely clarifying
the fine spirit which he inherited, and that he in part owes to this
exquisite example his marvellous, unsurpassed spirituality. A woman thus
true to her highest experience and her purest memories, by living in a
sacred communion with the dead, annihilates time and is already set in
an atmosphere of eternity. Ah, strong and simple soul that knew not how
to hide your grief under specious self-comfortings and maxims of
convenience, and so bowed in lifelong prostration before the knowledge
of your first, unsullied love, be sure the world will sooner or later
know how much it owes to such as you!
More than once has Nathaniel Hawthorne touched the delicate fibres of
the heart that thrill again in this memorial grief of his mother's; and,
incongruous as is the connection of the following passage out of one of
the Twice-Told Tales, it is not hard to trace the origin of the
sensibility and insight which prompted it: "It is more probably the
fact," so it runs, "that while men are able to reflect upon their lost
companions as remembrances apart from themselves, women, on the other
hand, are _conscious that a portion of their being has gone with the
departed, whithersoever he has gone_" [Footnote: "drippings with a
Chisel," in Vol.
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