Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of
people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed
a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed
near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground
and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the
beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the
shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about
the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the
crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the
experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon
the character after the recollection of them has passed
away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and
the view from their summits; and about other matters of high
and low philosophy."

It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a
high relish for the very positive personality of this accomplished and
argumentative woman, in whose intellect high noon seemed ever to
reign, as twilight did in his own. He must have been struck with the
glare of her understanding, and, mentally speaking, have scowled and
blinked a good deal in conversation with her. But it is tolerably
manifest, nevertheless, that she was, in his imagination, the
starting-point of the figure of Zenobia; and Zenobia is, to my sense,
his only very definite attempt at the representation of a character.
The portrait is full of alteration and embellishment; but it has a
greater reality, a greater abundance of detail, than any of his other
figures, and the reality was a memory of the lady whom he had
encountered in the Roxbury pastoral or among the wood-walks of
Concord, with strange books in her hand and eloquent discourse on her
lips. _The Blithedale Romance_ was written just after her unhappy