had one without the other, and if the objectionable passages in his
poetry were expurgated, the life and genius of it would go with them.
His story of "The Birth-mark" is an allegory of the same description. He
did not agree with Shakspeare, that the best men are moulded out of
faults, but believed that as we are in the beginning, so we remain
essentially till the end.

He says that whenever Margaret Fuller heard of a rare virtue, she wished
to possess it and adorn herself with it; so that she finally became a
sort of brilliant external patchwork, dazzling to the eye, but
internally quite different. There is a certain truth in this, but it is
not a whole truth; for there is Socrates--a compendium of all the
ancient virtues, consistent throughout, and who formed himself in the
manner Hawthorne describes. It is true that in a search after rare and
exceptional virtues we are apt to lose sight of the more homely kind
which form the bone and sinew of human-life. But is not this effort a
virtue in itself? Is not all progress in this world accomplished as the
frog escaped from the well, by jumping up three feet and falling back
two? Is not the very crown of character that which we derive from
failure, penitence, and self-reproach? Human nature is a mysterious
labyrinth and the wisest have only found a partial clue to it.

George S. Hillard--a brilliant amateur sort of writer, orator and
editor--came to visit Hawthorne one of the last Sundays while he
remained in the Old Manse, and the two went together to spend the
forenoon in Walden woods, calling on Emerson by the way to inquire what
the best road might be. Emerson prudently detained them until after the
townspeople were safely in their churches, and then accompanied them. It
is a pleasant retrospect to think of those two mighty men, so like and
yet so unlike, together with their amiable and gifted friend, going off