Chapter II

'Oh, who, in the enthusiasm of a daydream has not wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer wilderness...'
--Hawthorne, "Roger Malvin's Burial."( )

Grandfather Manning bequeathed to his heirs both a sizable estate and his dream of cultivating the wilderness and shaping a new community. Among his books (valued at fourteen dollars at his death), may have been the early copy of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, with "its thick leathern cover'' which had "...flooted down to [Hawthorne] from a remote ancestry ...." and which he nearly wore out with forty years of industrious reading. Arcadia, written in the pastoral tradition, might well have appealed to a man who invested his money miles away from crowded urban Salem in a virgin land. The Mannings thought of Maine as the land of bountiful plenty, "the almost uncultivated woods" which could be transformed into a pastoral paradise. Nathaniel's mother came to share the contagious enthusiasms of her brother, Robert, who had written from Maine, "Besides the loss of the society of our friends, which all the charms of Raymond cannot repair, we have to regret being deprived of many conveniences which we enjoyed in Salem however we are we satisfied with our bread a milk & contented with our situations which you know is the very essence of happiness ....I intend writing N[athaniel] a long letter, & one to Louisa about the Lambs & one to E E[lizabeth] about the many romantic views on which she could employ her pencil ...." Hawthorne knew that the Mannings regarded Raymond as "this paradise;" it was the focus of their conversation and energy for many years.

Nathaniel's trip from Salem down to Maine was an adventure in itself. The stage-coach would have lumbered through miles of dark forests, its large iron wheels making ruts in the narrow dirt road. At Newburyport, the Hathornes left the Manning stagecoaches and crossed the Merrimack River on a chain bridge, a "bold undertaking." (It was here, at an island inn, that Grandfather Manning had died on his way to Maine in 1813.) Their next stagecoach continued to Portsmouth and then rattled on to Kennebunk. The next day the Hathornes stopped in Westbrook before they arrived in the important seaport of Portland. The following days the weary Hathornes made their final stage from Portland on through the tall Maine forests to Raymond, on the shores of Sebago Lake.

As they neared Raymond, the stage-coach would have bumped along as its horses slowed down to negotiate a sharp bend in the road known as "Gay's Pinch." At this bend Farmer Gay's hundred-foot timber lengths, which were being hauled to Portland for ships' masts, had gotten trapped or "pinched" in the bend because they were too long. Beyond Gay's Pinch, as the road began to descend, the Hathorne children could watch out the stage-coach windows for a glimpse of awesome Sebago, then called the great Sebago pond. Almost twenty miles long, its waters reflected the mood of the sky, and the White Mountains were barely visible beyond it. Then the Hathornes would have lost the view of the lake as the horses climbed another hill. High above the road to the right stood a huge boulder, later known as "Pulpit Rock."

Then after crossing a small brook and climbing another hill, the

Dingley Brook in Raymond, Maine (courtesy of Dr. Melinda Ponder)

Uncle Richard and his new wife, Susan Dingley Manning, would have greeted the Hathornes. (Uncle Richard had moved to Raymond permanently both to oversee the Manning property and to act as the agent for the proprietors back in Salem.) Nathaniel's imaginative Aunt Priscilla, writing from the Manning house in Salem which then seemed empty and quiet without the three children, described the feelings of the Mannings left behind. "Mother [Grandmother Manning] can scarce be reconciled to having so few in family, and at first she went

The entrance hall of the Richard Manning house in Raymond, Maine (courtesy of Dr. Melinda Ponder)

To the left was the sitting room or library. Here Nathaniel could share Uncle Richard's great pleasure in newspapers, journals and books. Richard often wrote to the Mannings in Salem requesting them to send him reading material. He had once written asking for "...the Cottage Girl a Novel, Anecdotes Historical & Literary, Herriott's Travels in Canada, & Witchcraft or the art of fortune telling." "Don't Laugh at my whims," he had written after the last title. At the windows of this room were "Indian" shutters, possibly used for protection against occasional Indian renegades, but more importantly for protection against the bitter cold winds of the long Maine winters. The window glass which Richard had chosen had been hand-made in Belgium.

Aunt Susan's parlor across the front hall has even more formal. Its walls were covered with a dado of pumpkin pines boards running from the floor to the window sills and capped with a chair-rail hand carved in a diamond shaped pattern. The wallpaper above the chair-rail had come from England, its design block printed on large sheets and stitched together. Even in the wilderness, Uncle Richard had found a master craftsman to plane the smooth woodwork and make the perfect bead-like border over the fireplace.

Down the hallway behind tie door was the wide kitchen, with its large fireplace where the cooking pots hung from cranes. A deep beehive oven was built into the edge of the fireplace wall where the bread was baked after its flour had been ground at Susan's father's mill at the foot of the hill.

In the hallways the children could hear Uncle Richard's stately tall clock strike the hours. Brought by wagon to Raymond, its case was polished mahogany, its face enameled and elaborately trimmed with gilt. One of Richard's most valued possessions was a drawing which his sister, Maria, had made shortly before her death. Priscilla had framed it and sent it by sleigh for him to have in Raymond.

Uncle Richard's artistic taste was evident in every detail of his home. The molding along the risers of the long front stairway was ornamented with decorative scrollwork. Each scalloped curve had been cut by hand. The floors downstairs, where guests came, had been made of selected cut boards, carefully laid to match, but the upstairs floors were of random width planking whose size indicated the size of the tree from which they had been cut, and were as wide as ten inches.

Uncle Richard and Aunt Susan slept in the formal front bedrooms. The southwest bedroom got the late afternoon sun and looked down toward Dingley Brook while the darker, chillier bedroom on the south east side of the house was more somber.

Over the kitchen, behind a door paneled as a "Christian'' door in the front and a country door in the back, were the servants' quarters. This area, which had its own set of back stairs up from the kitchen below, was where the weaving was done since its exposure took advantage of the long surer twilight hours.

Nathaniel and his sisters could run out the kitchen door to the large barn, now empty of its stock of winter hay. Among the ploughs and oxen-yokes was the lathe which had been used for all the decorative wood in Uncle Richard's house. In a few years the lathe would be set up again to fashion the wood for Mrs. Hathorne's houses which would be built in a style similar to that of Richard Manning's house.

Nathaniel could see that Uncle Richard's house was very different from his Grandfather Manning's austere and functional house in crowded, noisy Salem. Richard had succeeded in creating a home filled with grace and beauty in the midst of a vast land being cleared for farms--a home which would have appealed to Nathaniel. Always fascinated by architectural structures, he would later write wonderfully detailed descriptions of interior spaces which help situate his "romances" in a tangible world. He also felt that houses could embody the qualities of the people they sheltered, likening the weathered house which takes on a central symbolic role in The House of the Seven Gables to a human face. "The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within."

Their house that summer was filled with story-telling and laughter as Aunt Susan entertained Elizabeth Nathaniel and Louisa with tales of "her early life in that wild region." Susan was the granddaughter of Joseph Dingley, Raymond's first settler, the cunning hero of a story handed down in the Dingley family. In 1770, when the proprietors in Salem had wanted to attract settlers to their land in Raymond, they offered an extra hundred acre lot to the first person who could settle there before December 1, 1770. Joseph Dingley of Duxbury and Dominicus Jordan of Cape Elizabeth were racing each other for this prize when they reached the southern shore of Sebago at night. According to his descendants, Dingley took a canoe which he fund there and paddled across the water in the darkness to win the prize." (Another version of this race tells of Dingley waking before Jordan and taking the canoe they shared, leaving Jordan far behind and still asleep." )

Several years later, the wily Dingley again outsmarted poor Dominicus Jordan when he wanted to reach Beverly, Massachusetts ahead of Jordan in order to acquire a particular piece of land. Along their route they stopped at a tavern for a meal when sly Dingley put a piece of cutlery into the pocket of unaware Jordan while a scullery maid was watching. They had, not gone far when a sheriff galloped up insisting that they return with him to the tavern. Dingley quickly proved his innocence and rode off, once more, to acquire the land he wanted. Nathaniel must have loved these stories and would later build the plot of his first novel, Fanshawe, around the hot pursuit of a villain past the village tavern.

As a child, Nathaniel had always been fascinated by stories, listening to the stage-coach drivers, and then creating his own tales, often shocking his audience with his sense of the dramatic. Elizabeth remembered him "...repeating with vehement emphasis and gestures certain stagy lines from Shakespere's Richard III, which he had overheard from older persons about him...he would start up on the most unexpected occasions and fire off in his loudest tone, 'Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pass." His childhood, so filled with separations and deaths, may have caused Nathaniel to pretend that he was the person leaving his own home, and the invention of his stories may have provoked the reassurance he sought that his family would never let him abandon them. Elizabeth recalled that Nathaniel "...used to invent long stories, wild and fanciful, and tell where he was going when he grew up, and of the wonderful adventures he was to meet with, always ending with, 'And I'm never coming back again,' in quite a solemn tone, that enjoined upon us the advice to value him the more while he stayed with us."

Nathaniel loved a good story for its own sake and had a wonderful sense of humor. His long time friend and publisher, James Fields, remembered seeing him "marvellously moved to fun" "[No] man laughed more heartily over a good story .... Hawthorne ...always had the talismanic faculty of breaking up that thoughtfully sad face into mirthful waves." Aunt Susan could have regaled the children with the jingles that her grandfather had thought up:

If you will but hark
Here is Mr. Clark;
And he has come to borrow your side saddle;
And as true as you are born;
When he is gone;

You will have to ride bareback a-straddle.

If to this house you do resort
I hope your visit wilt be short. ( )

Aunt Susan also loved to tell her new nieces and nephew the story of her own pet bear, "Cubby." One rainy night when he had been left out of doors, he climbed on the roof, then down into the great chimney, being drenched with water and covered with soot, crept into the bed with [her] and her, little sister without waking them and was not discovered until morning."

Aunt Susan and Uncle Richard made the Hathornes welcome in Raymond, and with his father's fowling- piece at his side Nathaniel soon was busy exploring the world down the paths from Uncle Richard's house. As he walked down the hill to the west he passed the Dingley mills--the gristmill with its whirling millstones and meal troughs and the lumbermill with its large saws and the hogsheads being steamed and then taken apart and laid up as stages to be shipped as shooks. In Cuba, the casks would be reassembled, filled with molasses, and shipped back to such towns as Melrose and Medford for the rum industry

Over the hill, and around the bend to the right, Nathaniel came to the inviting waters of huge Sebago Lake. There in a sheltered bay where Dingley Brook flowed into the lake, the Dingleys launched their boat to ferry their goats and sheep out to the nearby Dingley Islands. Protected by the water from hungry bears and wolves, the animals could graze safely. In the little inlets Nathaniel could also watch the loggers riding their gigantic rafts of logs along the lake to the mills at Presumpscot. Several miles farther to the north was the outlet of the Songo River, which Longfellow, who had also spent his childhood in Maine, remembered:

Nowhere such a devious stream,
Save in fancy or in a dream,
Winding slow through bush and brake
Links together lake and lake. ( )

When Nathaniel ran down the path which went over the hill to the west from the mills, he had the whole Raymond Cape to explore. A large land area which extended out into Sebago lake, it was full of farms. he climbed along the rocky shoreline of Sebago, whose nane meant "big stretch of water" to the Indians. As frightening as the limitless ocean to a child, it was also magnificent. High above the water, the trees filtered the sunlight onto the lichen-covered boulders below. Under the giant pines was a soft layer of pine needles and among the rocks were huckleberries, sweet enough to eat by August. Nathaniel's sister, Elizabeth, later remembered, "The walks by the Sebago were delightful, especially in a dry season, when the pond was low, and we could follows as we once did, the windings of the shore, climbing over the rocks until we reached a projecting point, from which there was no resisting the temptation to go on to another, and then still further, until one were stopped by a deep brook impossible to be crossed; though he could swim, but I could not and he would not desert me." (Hawthorne's boundless energy was later recalled by his son who wrote that Hawthorne had been a tireless walker and, "...of great. bodily activity; up to the time he was forty years old, he could clear a height of five feet at a standing jump." Nathaniel thrived out of doors in Maine; he grew "tall and strong." He learned to fish sometimes with his little sisters Louisa, tagging along. Twenty-five years later when he was at bucolic Brook Farm she wrote to him "Do not you remember how you and I used to go a-fishing together in Raymond? Your mention of wild-flowers and pickerel has given me a longing for the woods and waters again; and I want to wander about as I used to in old times ...." In Fanshawe Hawthorne wrote with the first-hand knowledge of an experienced angler of a pool in a stream, where the current "...had worn a hollow under the roots of an old bare oak-tree-- a most delicate retreat for a trout." Elizabeth later described their days in Maine to Hawthorne's daughter, saying "We enjoyed it exceedingly...."

Hawthorns remembered this time as the "happiest period'' of his life. "I lived in Maine...like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed....I recall the summer days also, when, with my gun I roamed at will through the woods of Maine." On his walks, he had time to listen to the sounds of the wind and the trees. His knowledge of a forest setting would add lifelike detail to the descriptive passages in some of his earliest tales, such as that in the following passage from "Roger Malvin's Burial": "Whenever the rustling of the branches or the creaking of the trunks made a sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber Reuben instinctively raised the musket that rested on his arm, and cast a quick, sharp glance on every side ...." Nathaniel's visual and auditory experiences in Maine remained in his memory, and he could call them forth later when he wanted to depict with intensity a natural world which is responsive to men's actions:

The tangled and gloomy forest through which the personages of my tale were wandering differed widely from the dreamer's land of fantasy ....The darkened gloomy pines looked down from them and as the wind swept through their tops, a pitying sound was heard in the forest; or did those old trees groan in fear that men were come to lay the axe to their roots at last. ( )

Characteristically Hawthorne placed the following climactic scene of The Scarlet Letter in which his characters reveal their deepest feelings to each other, in a live, natural setting:

Here [Hester and Pearl] sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss, which, at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine with its roots and trunk in the dark-some shades and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere. It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a leaf-strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves. The trees impending over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which choked up the current and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passage, there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and sparkling sand .... All these giant trees and bowlders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing perhaps that with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool." (119)

Hawthorne would later fondly recall how this world looked to him as a boy: "Those were delightful days; for that part of the country was wild then with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods." The settlers in Maine often cleared the land by cutting down the trees and then burning them. Hawthorne describes such a fire in the following powerful simile used to heighten the eerie tension in "Young Goodman Brown"--"Thus sped the demoniac Brown on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight."

The stumps of the trees which remained in the ground after their trunks were cut had to be pulled out of the fields by oxen. These "earthy roots" of uptorn trees were sometimes used to make fences, as were the hundreds of stones, also pulled out of the ground. The walls made from the stones were certainly more picturesque than the stump fences whose ugliness gave rise to the local expression, "Homely as a stump fence!"

Fascinated by all he saw in Maine, Hawthorne wrote in 1836 of a particular "vivid picture" which he remembered clearly:

The first habitations of the hardy settlers of our country were constructed of the ruins of the forest, which had fallen beneath their axes. The log-house was a rude, but comfortable dwelling, homely and substantial, like the characters of those who built it. In our memory, there is a vivid picture of such an edifice, which we used to visit in our boyhood, while running wild on the borders of a forest-lake. It had a little square window, the size of four panes of glass; the chimney was built of sticks and clay, like a swallow's nest; the hearth was a huge, flat, unhewn stone; and the fire place, where sat an old Revolutionary pensioner and his dame, occupied nearly the whole breadth of the house. ( )

Nathaniel enjoyed running wild in the forest, but he also responded to the human desire to domesticate the wilderness and to establish homes. He wrote later of Roger Malvin's futile desire to return home after a battle with the Indians in northern New England: "There is many and many a long mile of howling wilderness before us yet; nor would it avail me anything if the smoke of my own chimney were but on the other side of that swell of land." The possibility of death was never out of Nathaniel's mind; even in Raymond he could see the family graveyard out beyond Uncle Richard's house in the field ;which overlooked Dingley Brook. Its gravestones were silent reminders of the power of the unseen world over human lives. Although Raymond was not a center of trade, the road which passed through it linked New Hampshire, Vermont and parts of Maine with the commercial seacoast town of Portland. Nathaniel could watch farmers from the remote clearings far beyond Raymond haul their produce on carts and wagons to the Portland market. Raymond itself was a farming community, set in an extraordinarily beautiful landscape on the edge of the wilderness. On the farm where the Hathornes boarded during the summer of 1816, vegetables and grains were grown, cattle were slaughtered for their meat, butter was churned and cheese was made. When Mrs. Hathorne had her own houses several years later, she kept a cow which was fed with hay cut from the surrounding fields.

Nathaniel's friends in Raymond were children of farmers. Across the lane from Uncle Richard's house were the Dingleys (Aunt Susan's parents) whose son, Jacob, was close to Nathaniel's age. A few miles over to the east on Quaker Hill, with its breathtaking view of distant Mount Washington, lived Robinson Cook. He was the son of one of the early settlers of the small community of Quakers who had built their first meeting house on Quaker Hill in 1814. Robinson Cook later remembered swapping pocket knives with Nathaniel and a bear story about Henry Turner who had gone to the woods with his oxen to get birch bark to make sap buckets and discovered a den of three bears beneath the tree. Henry killed the bears with his axe, but his oxen "...were so badly frightened, that he was obliged to fasten them to a tree with chains until he had loaded the dead bears upon his sled. Then he let the oxen loose, jumped upon the sled, and was carried home at a furious pace by the maddenned animals."

Robinson and Nathaniel probably knew William Symmes, the mulatto son of "a leading member of the Massachusetts bar," who was raised as the foster son of Capt. Jonathan Britton of Otisfield because his own father had died. Nathaniel and his friends could walk along broad Dingley Brook as it flowed down from its source, Thomas Pond, a half mile away. On its shores was the brickyard run by Jacob Watkins which made the bricks necessary for the chimneys of the houses. From Thomas Pond, Nathaniel could see Rattlesnake Mountain, several miles away, a view which he loved. The mountain had been named for the huge number of snakes which lived in its rocks and had been so numerous that men had hunted them in groups, capturing up to a hundred in a day. From Thomas Pond which reflected the green leaves on his hillsides in its clear waters, the boys could climb up the hill that led to ''Pulpit Rock." It stood among other boulders at the top of a hill which ascended sharply from a boggy area, and was very much like the setting Hawthorne would later use for "Young Goodman Brown." Hidden on top of the boulder amongst the treetops, Nathaniel and his friends could hear the voices of people on the road below. A mile beyond Thomas Pond was Panther Pond, named for the wild animals which still occasionally roamed its banks. On Panther Pond the boys could watch the plaster mill which used limestone made in kilns like those in Hawthorne's story of "Ethan Brand" and those in the Estabrook Woods near his later home in Concord, Massachusetts.

Nathaniel also enjoyed visiting Uncle Richard's general store. Built on a rise of ground just east of his house, it was stocked with various staple items such as calico, sugar and a great deal of rum. This store and the Dingley mills were the gathering places for the farmers and teamsters. Here Nathaniel could watch Washington Longley's amazing displays of the drumming skills which he had acquired, along with his drummer's uniform, in the recent War of 1812. Nathaniel might spend a rainy day listening to the stories being swapped by the old-timers of Raymond as they mystified him with tales of such unexplainable events as the spiders whose web saved the life of a little girl from blood-thirsty Indians. Stories were told about local characters--everyone knew of Betty Welsh the first girl born in Raymond, who, while picking berries one day had killed a rattlesnake and a woodchuck. After finishing her berry-pickings she extracted the rattlesnake's oil to use for cooking and fixed the woodchuck for the family dinner. Another local story was of Eli Longley. While en route to the eternally good weather on the western frontier, Longley had awakened one spring morning in Pennsylvania to find the ground covered with frost, and so had returned to Maine to live more contentedly. Nathaniel also listened to these vigorous men discussing the many property and boundary disputes inevitable where land was being surveyed and cleared. He would later place a dispute over land in Maine in the background of the plot of The House of the Seven Gables.

Hawthorne undoubtedly remembered how he loved to listen to stories as a boy when in 1851, he sat down in the heat of the Berkshire summer to write the second of his three very appealing books of stories for children. (He had already written Grandfather's Chair in which he entertainingly told stories of New England history, structurally bound together by the presence of an ancient chair.) In his preface to A Wonder Book, Hawthorn, wrote: "[The] author has not always thought it necessary to write downward, in order to meet the comprehension of children. He has generally suffered the theme to soar, whenever such was its tendency, and when he himself was buoyant enough to follow without an effort. Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or feeling, so long as it is simple, likewise. It is only the artificial and complex that bewilders them."

On the days when the rain fell "almost in a continual sheet; and occasional powerful gusts of wind drove it hard against the...windows..," Nathaniel could curl up with Uncle Richard's books--Shakespeare, The Pilgrim's Progress, and any "poetry or light books" within his reach. He enjoyed Thomson's "Seasons" " whose lines he recited years later, as James Fields recalled:

It was a sleepy, warm afternoon, and he [Hawthorne] proposed that we should wander up the banks of the river and lie down and watch the clouds float above and in the quiet stream. I recall his lounging, easy air as he tolled me long until we came to a spot secluded, and oftimes sacred to his wayward thoughts. He bade me lie down on the grass and hear the birds sing. As we steeped ourselves in the delicious idleness, he began to murmur some half-forgotten lines from Thomson's "Seasons," which he said had been favorites of his from boyhood. While we lay there, hidden in the grass, we heard approaching footsteps, and Hawthorne hurriedly whispered, "Duck! or we shall be interrupted by somebody." ( )

In Maine, Nathaniel was left alone to read and dream, probably more than he had been in Salem. He later wrote of the value of these quiet hours: "It is only a solitary child left much to such wild modes of culture as he chooses for himself while yet ignorant what culture means, standing on tiptoe to pull down books from no very lofty shelf, and then shutting himself up, as it were, between the leaves, going astray through the volume at his own pleasure, and comprehending it rather by his sensibilities and affections than his intellect--that child is the only student that ever gets the sort of intimacy which I am now thinking of, with a literary personage."

During this summer in Maine, Nathaniel was finally responsible to his mother alone. Away from the Manning uncles and aunts in Salem, with their constant worrying and rigorous standards, Nathaniel and his sisters flourished under their Mother's gentle guidance. A beautiful, refined, quiet woman, "...of singular purity of mind...," Nathaniel's mother was loving and thoughtful, remembered by her niece as welcoming visits from children, taking great pains to please them, and giving then nice things to eat. Much to Louisa's delight, Mrs. Hathorne even understood her daughter's concern for a little animal, as Louisa wrote her uncle, "There is a little squirrel runs about in our yard in the day time and sleeps in the shed at night Mother says she hopes he will stay here all winter." A sensitive and shy woman, Betsey Hathorne was delicate and frail, suffering from frequent illnesses and poor health. Ever responsive to beauty, she later loved the "most perfect force" of her first grandchild, Una Hawthorne, and she was very supportive of Hawthorne's early publishing ventures.

Nathaniel and his mother were linked to each other by strong bonds; her beauty was mirrored in his handsomeness, and he resembled her, also, in his "sensitiveness and capacity for placid enjoyment," as well as in his "gentle manners, reserve, and thoughtfulness." His resemblance to his father surely endeared him to his mother even more. Hawthorne would movingly describe her death many years later in his notebooks, as "the darkest hour'' he ever lived. In The Marble Faun, Hilda perhaps voices Hawthorne's feelings about his own mother when she exclaims, "Oh, my mother! --my mother! Were she yet living, I would travel over land and sea to tell her this dark secret, as I told all the little troubles of my infancy." Hawthorne's son, Julian, gave credit to Mrs. Hawthorne for the important role she played in Hawthorne's artistic development. It was his mother, who "...in spite of her unworldliness, had some wise views as to education, gave him books to read of romances poetry and allegory, which largely aided to develop the ideal side of his mind. Too much weight can hardly be given to the value of this imaginative training in a boy who united a high and sensitive organization to robust bodily powers. It provided him with a world apart from the material world."

Nathaniel's first full summer in Maine was an ideal time for him-- days of rambling in a beautiful setting and of listening to stories, reading, and dreaming. Elizabeth wrote later of its value--"It did him a great deal of good in many ways ....His imagination was stimulated, too, by the scenery and by the strangeness of the people; and by the absolute freedom he enjoyed." He also experienced the solitude and independence which later would be necessary for him as a writer. He would always feel that he needed " a room" of his own where he could live in the "world within." He would compare his stories to vegetables which had sprung up of their own accord in his receptive imagination-an imagination, which, in Maine, had begun absorbing images of natural beauty and of a home set in a pastoral, timeless world.

to Chapter 3