When the details at last reached the town, many days afterward, Captain
George Crowninshield fitted out a flag of truce, sailed for Halifax with
ten shipmasters on board, and obtained the bodies of Lawrence and his
lieutenant, Ludlow. Late in August they returned, and the city gave
itself to solemnities in honor of the lost heroes, with the martial
dignity of processions and the sorrowing sound of dirges. Cannon
reverberated around them, and flags drooped above them at half-mast,
shorn of their splendor. Joseph Story delivered an eloquent oration over
them, and there was mourning in the hearts of every one, mixed with that
spiritualized sense of national grandeur and human worth that comes at
hours like this. Among the throngs upon the streets that day must have
stood the boy Nathaniel Hawthorne; not too young to understand, and
imbibing from this spectacle, as from many other sources, that profound
love of country, that ingrained, ineradicable American quality, which
marked his whole maturity.

I have not found any distinct corroboration of the report that Nathaniel
again lost the use of his limbs, before going to Maine to live. In
another brief, boyish letter dated "Salem, Monday, July 21, 1818" (all
these documents are short, and allude to the writer's inability to find
anything more to say), he speaks of wanting to "go to dancing-school a
little longer" before removing with his mother to the house which his
uncle is building at Raymond. He has also, he says, been to Nahant,
which he likes, because "fish are very thick there"; both items seeming
to show a proper degree of activity. There has been a tendency among
persons who have found nothing to obstruct the play of their fancies, to
establish a notion of almost ill-balanced mental precocity in this
powerful young genius, who seems to have advanced as well in muscular as
in intellectual development.