were thought to be alive ages after their disappearance. So with private
individuals. I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the
beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour. But
as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up
the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons
whose descriptions answered to his. Some people actually affirmed that
they had seen him in various parts of the world. Thus, so far as her
belief was concerned, he still walked the earth. And even to this day I
never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that
this may be the lost uncle." At the time of that loss Hawthorne was but
eight years old; he wrote this memorandum at fifty; and all that time
the early impression had remained intact, and the old semi-hallucination
about the uncle's being still alive hung about his mind through forty
years. When we change the case, and replace the uncle in whom he had no
very distinct interest with the father whose decease had so overclouded
his mother's life, and thwarted the deep yearnings of his own young
heart, we may begin to guess the depth and persistence of the emotions
which must have been awakened in him by this awful silence and absence
of death, so early thrown across the track of his childish life. I
conceive those lonely school-boy walks, overblown by shadow-freighting
murmurs of the pine and accompanied by the far-off, muffled roll of the
sea, to have been full of questionings too deep for words, too sacred
for other companionship than that of uninquisitive Nature;--questionings
not even shaped and articulated to his own inner sense.

Yet, whatever half-created, formless world of profound and tender
speculations and sad reflections the boy was moulding within himself,
this did not master him. The seed, as time went on, came to miraculous
issue; but as yet the boy remained, healthily and for the most part
happily, a boy still. A lady who, as a child, lived in a house which