red farm-house that you ever saw", and where the story is told of his
shyness, that, if he saw anybody coming along the road whom he must
probably pass, he would jump over the wall into the pasture, and so
give the stranger a wide berth; back again to Concord; then to
Liverpool as consul; travelling in Europe afterwards, and home at last
and forever, to "The Wayside" under the Concord hill. "The hillside,"
he wrote to a friend in 1852, "is covered chiefly with locust-trees,
which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and
smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms and some
white-pines and infant oaks, the whole forming rather a thicket than a
wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there; I
spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched
out at my lazy length with a book in my hand or an unwritten book in
my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the side
or the brow of the hill."

It is not strange, certainly, that a man such as has been described,
of a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of
the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely
psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial, and
sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his
intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest
passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, rather
than sympathizing. You cannot help feeling constantly that the author
is looking askance both at his characters and you, the reader; and
many a young and fresh mind is troubled strangely by his books, as if
it were aware of a half-Mephistophelean smile upon the page. Nor is
this impression altogether removed by the remarkable familiarity of
his personal disclosures. There was never a man more shrinkingly
retiring, yet surely never was an author more naively frank. He is