morning.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A
Minister I will not be." He adds, at the close of this epistle--"O how
I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a-gunning!
But the happiest days of my life are gone." In 1821, in his
seventeenth year, he entered Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine.
This institution was in the year 1821--a quarter of a century after
its foundation--a highly honourable, but not a very elaborately
organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning. I say it
was not impressive, but I immediately remember that impressions depend
upon the minds receiving them; and that to a group of simple New
England lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of
Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been, may have
seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple,
frugal, "country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp;
exerting within its limits a civilizing influence, working, amid the
forests and the lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the
amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering a
very sufficient education to the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen,
politicians, and editors, of the very active and knowledge-loving
community that supported it. It did more than this--it numbered poets
and statesmen among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call of its
sons it has several distinguished names. Among Hawthorne's
fellow-students was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who divides with our
author the honour of being the most distinguished of American men of
letters. I know not whether Mr. Longfellow was especially intimate
with Hawthorne at this period (they were very good friends later in
life), but with two of his companions he formed a friendship which
lasted always. One of these was Franklin Pierce, who was destined to
fill what Hawthorne calls "the most august position in the world."
Pierce was elected President of the United States in 1852. The other