As if Hawthorne had not seen a sufficiently long “winter of discontent” already, his friends now proposed to obtain the position of secretary and chronicler for him on Commodore Jones’s exploring expedition to the South Pole! Franklin Pierce was the first to think of this, but Bridge interceded with Cilley to give it his support, and there can be no doubt that they would have succeeded in obtaining the position for Hawthorne, but the expedition itself failed, for lack of a Congressional appropriation. The following year, 1838, the project was again brought forward by the administration, and Congress being in a more amiable frame of mind granted the requisite funds; but Hawthorne had now contracted new ties in his native city, bound, as it were, by an inseparable cord stronger than a Manila hawser, and Doctor Nathaniel Peabody’s hospitable parlors were more attractive to him than anything the Antarctic regions could offer. We have now entered upon the period where Hawthorne’s own diary commences, the autobiography of a pure-minded, closely observing man; an invaluable record, which began apparently in 1835, and was continued nearly until the close of his life; now published in a succession of American, English and Italian note-books. In it we find records of what he saw and thought; descriptive passages, afterward made serviceable in his works of fiction, and perhaps written with that object in view; fanciful notions, jotted down on the impulse of the moment; records of his social life; but little critical writing or personal confessions,--although the latter may have been reserved; from publication by his different editors. It is known that much of his diary has not yet been given to the public, and perhaps never will be. In July, 1837, Hawthorne went to Augusta, to spend a month with his friend Horatio Bridge; went fishing with him, for what they called white perch, probably the saibling; [Footnote: The American saibling, or golden trout, is only indigenous to Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, and to a small lake near Augusta.] and was greatly entertained with the peculiarities of an idiomatic Frenchman, an itinerant teacher of that language, whom Bridge, in the kindness of his heart, had taken into his own house. The last of July, Cilley also made his appearance, but did not bring the Madeira with him, and Hawthorne has left this rather critical portrait of him in his diary: