he was never content to live long away from the salt air.

It was plainly the need of schooling that took him from his mother's
home at Raymond and brought him back to Salem by the summer of 1819,
when he was just fifteen years old. Even in the winter interval he seems
to have gone for a few weeks to the house of the Rev. Caleb Bradley,
Stroudwater, Westbrook, in the same county as Raymond, to be tutored. He
remained in Salem with his uncles for the next two years, and was
prepared for college, partly, at least, by Benjamin Oliver, a lawyer, at
the expense of his uncle Robert, and during a portion of this time he
earned some money by writing in the office of his uncle William; but he
was occupied chiefly with his studies, reading, and early compositions.
At the beginning of this period, in his first autumn letters, he
mentions having lately read "Waverley," "The Mysteries of Udolpho," "The
Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom," "Roderick Random," and a volume
of "The Arabian Nights;" and he has learned the easy rhyming of first
verses, and stuffs his letters with specimens of his skill, clever
stanzas, well written, modulated in the cadences of the time, with
melancholy seriousness and such play of sad fancy as youthful poets use.
He laid little store by his faculty for verse, and yet he had practiced
it from an early childish age and had a fair mastery of its simple
forms; and once or twice in mature life he indulged himself in writing
and even in publishing serious poems. In these years, however, verses
were only a part of the ferment of his literary talent, nor have any of
them individuality. He practiced prose, too, and in the next summer,
1820, issued four numbers of a boy's paper, "The Spectator," bearing
weekly date from August 21 to September 18, and apparently he had made
an earlier experiment, without date, in such adolescent journalism; it
was printed with a pen on small note-paper, and contained such serious
matter as belongs to themes at school on "Solitude" and "Industry," with