but then, very likely, the Smiths and the Joneses, whom they did know,
were nearly as good.

After fifty years, of course, such prepossessions yield to experience.
My father was the best friend I ever had, and he will always stand in
my estimation distinct from all other friends and persons; but I can
now recognize that in addition to the immeasurable debt I owe him for
being to me what he was in his own person, he bestowed upon me a
privilege also immeasurable in the hospitality of these shining ones
who were his intimates. Did the gift cost him nothing? Nothing, in one
sense. But, again, what does it cost a man to walk upright and
cleanly during the years of his pilgrimage: to deal justly with all,
and charitably: diligently to cultivate and develop every natural
endowment: always to seek truth, tell it, and vindicate it: to
discharge to the utmost of his ability every duty that was intrusted
to him: to rest content, in the line of his calling, with no work
inferior to his best: to say no word and do no act which, were they
known, might weaken the struggle against temptation of any
fellow-creature? These qualities were the price at which Hawthorne
bought his friends; and in receiving those friends from him, his
children could not but feel that the bequest represented his
unfaltering grasp upon whatever is pure, lofty, and generous in human
life.

Yes, whatever it may cost a man of genius to be all his life a good
man, and to use and develop his genius to the noblest ends only, that
my father's friends cost him, and in that amount am I his debtor; and
the longer I myself live, and the more I see of other men, the higher
and rarer do I esteem the obligation. Moreover, in speaking of his
friends, I was thinking of those who personally knew him; but the