hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude. I do not say this for
the purpose of drawing any flattery from you, but merely to set mother
and the rest of you right upon a point where your partiality has led you
astray. I did hope that uncle Robert's opinion of me was nearer to the
truth, as his deportment toward me never expressed a very high
estimation of my abilities."

This has the ring of sincerity, like all his home letters, and it is
true that so far there had been nothing precocious, brilliant, or
extraordinary in him to testify of genius,--he was only one of hundreds
of New England boys bred on literature under the shelter of academic
culture; and yet there may have been in his heart something left
unspoken, another mood equally sincere in its turn, for the heart is a
fickle prophet. As Mr. Lathrop suggests in that study of his
father-in-law which is so subtly appreciative of those vital suggestions
apt to escape record and analysis, another part of the truth may lie in
the words of "Fanshawe" where Hawthorne expresses the feelings of his
hero in a like situation with himself at the end of college days:--

"He called up the years that, even at his early age, he had spent in
solitary study,--in conversation with the dead,--while he had scorned to
mingle with the living world, or to be actuated by any of its motives.
Fanshawe had hitherto deemed himself unconnected with the world,
unconcerned in its feelings, and uninfluenced by it in any of his
pursuits. In this respect he probably deceived himself. If his inmost
heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that
dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a
thousand realities."