He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the
stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring
up. "Ah," he said, "how well I recall the summer days, also, when with
my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!... Everything is
beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it then!" The same
writer mentions the author's passion for the sea, telling how, on the
return from England in 1860, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his
quiet, earnest way: "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never
touch the shore again." I have it from his sister that he used to
declare that, had he not been sent to college, he should have become a
mariner, like his predecessors. Indeed, he had the fresh air and the
salt spray in his blood.
Still it is difficult to believe that by any chance he could have missed
carrying out his inborn disposition toward literature. After we have
explained all the fostering influences and formative forces that
surround and stamp a genius of this sort, we come at last to the
inexplicable mystery of that interior impulse which, if it does not find
the right influences at first, presses forth, breaks out to right and
left and keeps on pushing, until it feels itself at ease. It cannot
wholly _make_ its own influences, but it fights to the death before
it will give up the effort to lay itself open to these; that is, to get
into a proper surrounding. The surrounding may be as far as possible
from what we should prescribe as the fit one; but the being in whom
perception and receptivity exist in that active state which we call
genius will adapt itself, and will instinctively discern whether the
conditions of life around it can yield a bare nourishment, or whether it
must seek other and more fertile conditions.
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