further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has
received from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new
Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that
they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference
from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his
difference from all men evermore.

I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image
of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of
shame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it
would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would
be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be
sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging
into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there
was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling,
but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept
Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his
intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing
teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne's impalpability, such as I
afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no
fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of
contact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom
without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
veridical for all that.




XVI.