Ch. 2 - Early Manhood

The twelve years that followed were not the happiest or most brilliant
phase of Hawthorne's life; they strike me indeed as having had an
altogether peculiar dreariness. They had their uses; they were the
period of incubation of the admirable compositions which eventually
brought him reputation and prosperity. But of their actual aridity the
young man must have had a painful consciousness; he never lost the
impression of it. Mr. Lathrop quotes a phrase to this effect from one
of his letters, late in life. "I am disposed to thank God for the
gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of
adversity came then, when I bore it alone." And the same writer
alludes to a touching passage in the English Note-Books, which I shall
quote entire:--

"I think I have been happier this Christmas (1854) than ever
before--by my own fireside, and with my wife and children
about me--more content to enjoy what I have, less anxious
for anything beyond it, in this life. My early life was
perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life;
it having been such a blank that any thereafter would
compare favourably with it. For a long, long while, I have
occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have
an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been
in England. It is, that I am still at college, or,
sometimes, even, at school--and there is a sense that I have
been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to
make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I
seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and
depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when
awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or
thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy
seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after
leaving college, when everybody moved onward and left me
behind. How strange that it should come now, when I may call
myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy too."

The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the young man's
positive choice at the time--or into which he drifted at least under
the pressure of his natural shyness and reserve. He was not expansive,
he was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse, he
was not, personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general
impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his
character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him
as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault. He
was silent, diffident, more inclined to hesitate, to watch and wait
and meditate, than to produce himself, and fonder, on almost any
occasion, of being absent than of being present. This quality