Bold Daniel, in due course of time, wedded Rachel Phelps, and they had seven children; the witch's curse seeming to take no effect upon the prosperity of the Hawthorne marriages as regarded offspring. The first son, Daniel, died in infancy; the first daughter, Sarah, was married to John Crowninshield; the fourth daughter, Ruth, died an old maid in 1847; Rachel, the fifth daughter, became the wife of Simon Forrester; and Nathaniel, the third son, who was born. in 1775, married, about the beginning of this century, Elizabeth Clarke Manning, a beautiful and highly gifted young lady, five years his junior. Nathaniel was a silent, reserved, severe man, of an athletic and rather slender build, and habitually of a rather melancholy cast of thought; but the marriage was a very happy one. It did not last long; he was a captain in the merchant marine, and in 1808, while at Surinam, he died of yellow fever, at the age of thirtythree. His wife had previously given birth to the three children already mentioned, one of whom was Nathaniel Hawthorne the romancer.

Madame Hawthorne came of a family who seem to have been as reserved and peculiar in their own way as the Hawthornes were in theirs; they possessed more than the Hawthorne sensibility, without sharing the latter's Puritan sternness and bodily strength. They were descendants of the stout-hearted widow of Richard Manning, of St. Petrox Parish, Dartmouth, England, who sailed for the New World with her seven children-four sons and three daughters

Robert,

in the ship "Hannah and Elizabeth," in 1679. Her son Thomas married a Miss Mary Giddings, and had six children; of whom the fifth, John (whose twin brother Joseph died a bachelor at the age of eightyone), more than maintained the matrimonial average of the family, by becoming the husband of three wives in succession: Jane Bradstreet being the first, Elizabeth Wallis the second, and Ruth Potter the third. Only the last marriage, however, was fruitful; it produced six children. The youngest son, Richard, born in 1775, married, at the age of twenty-one, Miss Miriam Lord, of Salem, and had by her nine children, of whom Elizabeth Clarke was the third. born in 1784, was the uncle who paid Hawthorne's way through college; and it was he who built the house in Raymond, which afterwards passed into the hands of his brother Richard. William Manning, born in 1778, employed Hawthorne as his private secretary, in the latter's boyhood; and this good gentleman continued to be alive down to 1864, when he expired at the age of eighty-six. A similar, or even greater, age was attained by Mr. John Dike, who married the fourth daughter, Priscilla Miriam; and the younger generation of the family are at this day respected citizens of the town in which they and their forefathers have lived for more than two hundred years.

This much must suffice concerning the ancestry of Nathaniel Hawthorne; and certainly it amounts to little more than an outline But, for manifest reasons,

it is difficult to obtain vivid and lifelike portraits of persons who have so seldom been in contact with the historical events of their time, and whose characters, therefore, have not developed in the daylight of public recognition. They kept their own counsel, and it is now too late to question them. Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, the sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, writes of them that they "were unsocial in their temper, and the family ran down in the course of the two centuries, in fortune and manners and culture. But Mr. Hathorne of Herbert Street was a gentleman whom I knew, and who was an exception. He was a neighbor of ours in 1819, and I have dined at his table. He died without children, before I knew your father, who told me he never knew personally any of the name. You alone bear up the name, I

think."

This Hathorne of Herbert Street was probably Nathaniel Hawthorne's uncle Daniel, the second son of that name born to Daniel the Privateersman. His birth took place in 1768, and he lived to be about sixty years old. Another relative, Ebenezer Hathorne, mentioned in the "American Note-Books," must have belonged to a collateral branch of the family, since there is no Ebenezer in the direct line of descent later than 1725.

CHAPTER II.

SOPHIA AMELIA PEABODY.

THE life of a man happily married cannot fail to be influenced by the character and conduct of his wife. Especially will this be the case when the man is of a highly organized and sensitive temperament, and most of all, perhaps, when his professional pursuits are sedentary and imaginative rather than active and practical. Nathaniel Hawthorne was particularly susceptible to influences of this kind; and all the available evidence goes to show that the most fortunate event of his life was, probably, his marriage with Sophia Peabody. To attempt to explain and describe his career without taking this event into considera tion would, therefore, be like trying to imagine a sun without heat, or a day without a sun. Nothing seems less likely than that he would have accomplished his work in literature independently of her sympathy and companionship. Not that she afforded him any direct and literal assistance in the composition of his books and stories; her gifts were wholly unsuited to such employment, and no one apprehended more keenly than she the solitariness and uniqueness of his genius, insomuch that she would have deemed

it something not far removed from profanation to have offered to advise or sway him in regard to his literary productions. She believed in his inspiration; and her office was to promote, so far as in her lay, the favorableness of the conditions under which it should manifest itself. As food and repose nourish and refresh the body, so did she refresh and nourish her husband's mind and heart. Her feminine intuition corresponded to his masculine insight; she felt the truth that he saw; and his recognition of this pure faculty in her, and his reverence for it, endowed his perception with that tender humanity in which otherwise it might have been deficient. Her lofty and assured ideals kept him to a belief in the reality and veracity of his own. In the warmth and light of such companionship as hers, he could not fall into the coldness and gloom of a selfish intellectual habit. She revived his confidence and courage by the touch of her gentle humor and cheerfulness; before her unshakable hopefulness and serenity, his constitutional tendency to ill-foreboding and discouragement vanished away. Nor was she of less value to him on the merely intellectual side. Her mental faculties were finely balanced and of great capacity; her taste was by nature highly refined, and was rendered exquisitely so by cultivation. Her learning and accomplishments were rare and varied, and yet she was always childlike in her modesty and simplicity. She read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew: she was familiar with history; and in drawing, painting, and sculpture she