discover any advantage from waiting longer. Emerson, in his lecture on
heroism, has signalled especially the heroism of the scholar, and
selected as an example the Frenchman Anquetil Duperron, who worked his
passage on a vessel to India, and then worked his way, mostly on foot,
through Afghanistan and Persia, learning languages as he went, in order
to obtain copies of the sacred books of the Persians, which were then
unknown in Europe. Were it not for fear of giving offence he might have
found a finer heroism in literary genius, and selected an example from
his own village.

For fifteen years Hawthorne had been like a ship detained from port by
adverse winds. The handsomest and most gifted man in America had nearly
reached to forty years without being married or finding a home of his
own. It was a life of hardship; of social starvation almost like exile.
It tested his courage, his faith in human nature, to the utmost. How
difficult were the earlier years of Irving and Bryant and Longfellow.
That he remained always true to himself and never lost sight of that
ideal of excellence which was his guiding-star.

We are not surprised to learn that his difficulties were rather
augmented than diminished by matrimony. Even in plain, rural Concord he
found at the end of three years, that his expenses had exceeded his
income by what seemed to him quite a formidable debt. This distressed
him the more because he had not yet learned that all men must lose in
some manner, and that the whole community is bound to take a share in
such losses as are honestly incurred. This is what charity and
philanthropy, as well as the various forms of insurance, finally result
in. But Hawthorne was the last man to apply such a principle to his own
case. He had continually hoped that when a balance-sheet was drawn up at
Brook Farm some portion of his investment there would be returned to