deal of him has related how in the very last year of his life Hawthorne
reverted with fondness, perhaps with something of a sick and sinking
man's longing for youthful scenes, to these early days at Sebago Lake;
"Though it was there," he confessed, "I first got my cursed habits of
solitude." "I lived in Maine," he said, "like a bird of the air, so
perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the moonlight nights of
winter he would skate until midnight all alone upon Sebago Lake, with
the deep shadows of the icy hills on either hand. When he found himself
far away from his home and weary with the exercise of skating, he would
sometimes take refuge in a log-cabin, where half a tree would be burning
on the broad hearth. He would sit in the ample chimney, and look at the
stars through the great aperture through which the flames went roaring
up. "Ah," he said, "how well I recall the summer days, also, when with
my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine!... Everything is
beautiful in youth, for all things are allowed to it then!" The same
writer mentions the author's passion for the sea, telling how, on the
return from England in 1860, Hawthorne was constantly saying in his
quiet, earnest way: "I should like to sail on and on forever, and never
touch the shore again." I have it from his sister that he used to
declare that, had he not been sent to college, he should have become a
mariner, like his predecessors. Indeed, he had the fresh air and the
salt spray in his blood.

Still it is difficult to believe that by any chance he could have missed
carrying out his inborn disposition toward literature. After we have
explained all the fostering influences and formative forces that
surround and stamp a genius of this sort, we come at last to the
inexplicable mystery of that interior impulse which, if it does not find
the right influences at first, presses forth, breaks out to right and
left and keeps on pushing, until it feels itself at ease. It cannot