The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hawthorne and His Circle, by Julian Hawthorne

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Title: Hawthorne and His Circle

Author: Julian Hawthorne

Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6982]
Posting Date: April 2, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE

By Julian Hawthorne

ILLUSTRATED

[IMAGE: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)]

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My
father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A
revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and shadows
of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's life and
mine

I

Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My
mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of
imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile
indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on
Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted
mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr.
Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the
ink butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second
floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my
aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of the
age

II

Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have
done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--The Unpardonable Sin
and the Death--less Man--The little red house--Materials of culture--Our
best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual
hen-fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the
ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--Nuts--Giants
and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes, ambrosial breath-My
first horseback ride--Herman Melville's stories--Another kind
of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and
melancholy-sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murde