essay, such as "Sights from a Steeple," or else in the way of humorous
description. The scenes he looked down on, in fancy, in this first
paper, were the roof-tops and streets and horizon of Salem; but he had
wandered in other parts of his native land also, though not widely, and
he used these journeys in his compositions. It is noticeable that
Hawthorne always used all his material, consumed it, and made stories,
essays, and novels of it, except the slag. It was his characteristic
from youth. There is the same dubiousness about these journeys, his
earliest ventures in the world, as about his first attempts in the field
of authorship. He himself says, in the autobiographical notes he
furnished to Stoddard, that he left Salem "once a year or thereabouts,"
for a few weeks; and in his sketches there are traces of these
excursions, as at Martha's Vineyard, for example; but their times and
localities are verifiable only to a slight degree. It is stated that the
fact that his uncles, the Mannings, were interested in stage-lines gave
him some privileges as a traveller, or perhaps this only gave occasion
for a journey now and then, in which he joined his uncles on some
convenient business; thus, it was in company with his uncle Samuel, that
he was in New Hampshire in 1831, and visited the Shaker community at
Canterbury. Another known journey was in 1830, and took him through
Connecticut; and it is said, probably on conjecture, that it was at this
time that he went on, by the canal, to Niagara, and visited Ticonderoga
on his return. If his writings, in which he described these places, are
to be taken literally, he even embarked for Detroit; but information in
respect to the whole Niagara excursion is of the scantiest. All that is
known is that in some way, during his long stay at Salem in these years,
he made himself acquainted with portions of Connecticut, Vermont, New
York, and New Hampshire, to add to his knowledge of Massachusetts and
Maine; within this rather limited circle his wanderings were confined;
and the period when he went about with most freedom and vivacity of