United States or Uzbekistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Dill, although except you, I hardly know of anybody from whom a letter would be likely to come. Isn't it strange, how easily one may slip aside and drop out of everything? We heard of this place from some people who bad been to Sebago Lake and Pleasant Mountain, and up from there across the country to Gorham, and so round to Conway through the Glen.
In 1818, when he was fourteen years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of an uncle, her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond, near Lake Sebago, in the State of Maine.
The little settlement, only a mill and a country store and a few scattered houses, lay on a broad headland making out into Sebago Lake, better known as the Great Pond, a sheet of water eight miles across and fourteen miles long, and connected with other lakes in a chain of navigable water; to the northwest the distant horizon was filled with the White Mountains, and northward and eastward rose the unfrequented hill and lake country, remarkable only, then as now, for its pure air and waters, and presenting a vast solitude.
Longfellow also had tried his hand on the Sebago region, and was fond of the woods and of a gun; but he was too precocious to adapt himself easily to persons of his own age, or even somewhat older. He had no sooner arrived at Bowdoin than he became the associate and favorite of the professors.
We cannot refrain from quoting one more extract from the last entry in the Sebago diary, so beautifully tender and considerate as it is of his mother's position toward her only son.
He became a shy boy, and avoided the company of other children. His health began to suffer from the effects of such an unnatural state of affairs, and at the age of ten he was sent to live on a farm belonging to the family, on the shore of Sebago Lake, in Maine.
We will now consider some of the distinguished personages who were Hawthorne's friends and associates during these four years of his apprenticeship to actual life; and there were rare characters among them. Pierce was the right man to bring Hawthorne out of his hard shell of Sebago seclusion.
He said the child died a few days after its evil treatment, and the thought of it made his heart bitter; that he had tried to live peaceably with the white men, but they had driven him into the war. "On one occasion," said the sick soldier, "as we lay side by side in his hut, on the shore of the Sebago Lake, Squando, about midnight, began to pray to his God very earnestly.
Louisa wrote another warm and beautiful letter on June 11, recalling the days when they used to go fishing together on Lake Sebago, and adds: "Elizabeth Cleveland says she saw Mr. George P. Bradford was the masculine complement to Elizabeth Peabody flitting across the paths of Emerson and Hawthorne throughout their lives.
It was to save the body of Polan from such a fate, after the fight on Sebago Lake in 1756, that his brothers placed it under the root of a sturdy young beech that they had pried out of the ground.
Word Of The Day