. But for a boy with a relish for
solitude there were many natural resources, and we can understand that
Hawthorne should in after years have spoken very tenderly of this
episode. "I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the
freedom I enjoyed." During the long summer days he roamed, gun in
hand, through the great woods, and during the moonlight nights of
winter, says his biographer, quoting another informant, "he would
skate until midnight, all alone, upon Sebago Lake, with the deep
shadows of the icy hills on either hand."

In 1819 he was sent back to Salem to school, and in the following year
he wrote to his mother, who had remained at Raymond (the boy had found
a home at Salem with another uncle), "I have left school and have
begun to fit for college under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in
danger of having one learned man in your family.... I get my lessons
at home and recite them to him (Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the
morning.... Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A
Minister I will not be." He adds, at the close of this epistle--"O how
I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a-gunning!
But the happiest days of my life are gone." In 1821, in his
seventeenth year, he entered Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine.
This institution was in the year 1821--a quarter of a century after
its foundation--a highly honourable, but not a very elaborately
organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning. I say it
was not impressive, but I immediately remember that impressions depend
upon the minds receiving them; and that to a group of simple New
England lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of
Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been, may have
seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple,
frugal, "country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp;
exerting within its limits a civilizing influence, working, amid the
forests and the lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the
amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering a
very sufficient education to the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen,
politicians, and editors, of the very active and knowledge-loving
community that supported it. It did more than this--it numbered poets
and statesmen among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call of its
sons it has several distinguished names. Among Hawthorne's
fellow-students was