I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble
sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his
younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is
without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid
him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did
nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps
very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything,
for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early
life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not
the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan
quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or
unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not
quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of
potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in
you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good
hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if
they knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this
about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I
thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes
had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the
Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the world
the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from
his hand; the 'Marble Faun' had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer
interval than usual, the 'Blithedale Romance', and the 'House of Seven
Gables', and the 'Scarlet Letter', and had, perhaps carried his name
higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading
it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him
that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his
life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches
more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were