unchanging value than the mutual impressions of young men at college:
they meet at a moment when the full meaning of life just begins to
unfold itself to them, and their fresh imaginations build upon two or
three traits the whole character of a comrade, where a maturer man
weighs and waits, doubts and trusts, and ends after all with a like or
dislike that is only lukewarm. Far on toward the close of life,
Hawthorne, in speaking of something told him by an English gentleman
respecting a former classmate of the latter's, wrote: "It seemed to be
one of those early impressions which a collegian gets of his
fellow-students, and which he never gets rid of, whatever the character
of the person may turn out to be in after years. I have judged several
persons in this way, and still judge them so, though the world has come
to very different opinions. Which is right,--the world, which has the
man's whole mature life on its side; or his early companion, who has
nothing for it but some idle passages of his youth?" The world,
doubtless, measures more accurately the intrinsic worth of the man's
mature actions; but his essential characteristics, creditable or
otherwise, are very likely to be better understood by his classmates. In
this, then, we perceive one of the formative effects on Hawthorne's mind
of his stay at Brunswick. Those four years of student life gave him a
thousand eyes for observing and analyzing character. He learned then,
also, to choose men on principles of his own. Always afterward he was
singularly independent in selecting friends; often finding them even in
unpopular and out-of-the-way persons. The affinity between himself and
Bridge was ratified by forty years of close confidence; and Hawthorne
never swerved from his early loyalty to Pierce, though his faithfulness
gave him severe trials, both public and private, afterward. I am not of
those who explain this steadfastness by a theory of early prepossession
on Hawthorne's part, blinding him to Pierce's errors or defects. There
is ample proof in the correspondence between Bridge and himself, which I