wholly _make_ its own influences, but it fights to the death before
it will give up the effort to lay itself open to these; that is, to get
into a proper surrounding. The surrounding may be as far as possible
from what we should prescribe as the fit one; but the being in whom
perception and receptivity exist in that active state which we call
genius will adapt itself, and will instinctively discern whether the
conditions of life around it can yield a bare nourishment, or whether it
must seek other and more fertile conditions. Hawthorne had an ancestry
behind him connected with a singular and impressive history, had
remarkable parents, and especially a mother pure and lofty in spirit;
lived in a suggestive atmosphere of private sorrow and amid a community
of much quaintness; he was also enabled to know books at an early age;
yet these things only helped, and not produced, his genius. Sometimes
they helped by repression, for there was much that was uncongenial in
his early life; yet the clairvoyance, the unconscious wisdom, of that
interior quality, _genius_, made him feel that the adjustment of
his outer and his inner life was such as to give him a chance of
unfolding. Had he gone to sea, his awaking power would have come
violently into contact with the hostile conditions of sailor-life: he
would have revolted against them, and have made his way into literature
against head-wind or reluctant tiller-rope alike. It may, of course, be
said that this prediction is too easy. But there are evidences of the
mastering bent of Hawthorne's mind, which show that it would have ruled
in any case.

As we have seen, he returned to Salem in 1819, to school; and on March
7, 1820, he wrote thus to his mother:--

"I have left school, and have begun to fit for College under Benjm. L.
Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in great danger of having one learned man in