The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Appendix to Volume XII: Tales, Sketches, and other Papers by Nathaniel Hawthorne with a Biographical Sketch by George Parsons Lathrop: Biographical Sketch of Nathaniel Hawthorne — John Shaqi
The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Appendix to Volume XII: Tales, Sketches, and other Papers by Nathaniel Hawthorne with a Biographical Sketch by George Parsons Lathrop: Biographical Sketch of Nathaniel HawthorneLathrop, George Parsons
General
The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Appendix to Volume XII: Tales, Sketches, and other Papers by Nathaniel Hawthorne with a Biographical Sketch by George Parsons Lathrop: Biographical Sketch of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Lathrop, George Parsons
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
the other hand we have the traits of sensitiveness, great delicacy,
reserve and reverie, drawn from both his father and his mother. Captain
Hathorne had been a man of fine presence, handsome, kindly, and rather
silent; a reader, likewise; and his son's resemblance to him was so
marked that a strange sailor stopped Hawthorne on the steps of the Salem
Custom House, many years afterward, to ask him if he were not a son or
nephew of the Captain, whom he had known.
His mother belonged to an excellent family, the Mannings, of English
stock, settled in Salem and Ipswich ever since 1680, and still well
represented in the former place. She, too, was a very reserved person;
had a stately, aristocratic manner; is remembered as possessing a
peculiar and striking beauty. Her education was of that simple, austere,
but judicious and perfected kind that--without taking any very wide
range--gave to New England women in the earlier part of this century a
sedate freedom and a cultivated judgment, which all the assumed
improvements in pedagogy and the general relations of men and women
since then have hardly surpassed. She was a pious woman, a sincere and
devoted wife, a mother whose teachings could not fail to impress upon
her children a bias towards the best things in life. Nathaniel's sister
Elizabeth, although a recluse to the end of her days, and wholly unknown
to the public, gave in her own case evidence indisputable of the fine
influences which had moulded her own childhood and that of her brother.
She showed a quiet, unspoiled, and ardent love of Nature, and was to the
last not only an assiduous reader of books but also a very discriminating
one. The range of her reading was very wide, but she never made any more
display of it than Hawthorne did of his. An intuitive judgment of
character was hers, which was really startling at times: merely from the
perusal of a book or the inspection of a portrait, she would arrive at
accurate estimates of character which revealed a power of facile and
comprehensive insight; and her letters, even in old age, flowed
spontaneously into utterance of the same finished kind that distinguished
Nathaniel Hawthorne's epistolary style. How fresh and various, too, was
her interest in the affairs of the world! For many years she had not
gone farther from her secluded abode in a farm-house at Montserrat, than
to Beverly or Salem; yet I remember that, only six months before her
death, she wrote a letter to her niece, a large part of which was
devoted to the campaign of the English in Egypt, then progressing: with
a lively and clear comprehension she discussed the difficulties of the
situation, and expressed the utmost concern for the success of the
English army, at the same time that she laughed at herself for
displaying, as an old woman, so much anxiety about the matter. Now, a
mother who could bring up her daughter in such a way as to make all this
possible and natural, must be given much credit for her share in
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