was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had
no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or
Lowell had.

With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to
speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite
beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and
suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the
suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then
he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen
any of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself,
as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not
think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much
because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had
written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau
prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other
human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near
the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not
displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next
neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That
surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention,
that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he
entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not
be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the
immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is
still strange to his countrymen.

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to