This term of service in Boston was of course irksome to Hawthorne, and
entirely suspended literary endeavors for the time. Yet "my life only is
a burden," he writes, "in the same way that it is to every toilsome
man.... But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons
of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing
that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the
midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." He
need not always have made the employment so severe, but the wages of the
wharf laborers depended on the number of hours they worked in a day, and
Hawthorne used to make it a point in all weathers, to get to the wharf
at the earliest possible hour, solely for their benefit. For the rest,
he felt a vast benefit from his new intercourse with men; there could
not have been a better maturing agency for him at this time; and the
interval served as an apt introduction to the Brook Farm episode.
That this least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a
socialistic community, seems at first inexplicable enough; but in
reality it was the most logical step he could have taken. He had
thoroughly tried seclusion, and had met and conquered by himself the
first realization of what the world actually is. Next, he entered into
the performance of definite duties and the receipt of gain, and watched
the operation of these two conditions on himself and those about him; an
experiment that taught him the evils of the system, and the necessity of
burying his better energies so long as he took part in affairs.
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