space beneath. His nose was straight, but the contour of his chin was Roman. He never wore a beard, and was without a mustache until his fifty-fifth year. His eyes were large, dark blue, brilliant, and full of fervid expression. Bayard Taylor used to say that they were the only eyes he had ever known to flash fire. Charles Reade in a letter written in 1876 declared that he had never before seen such eyes as Hawthorne's in a human head. While he was yet in college an old gypsy woman meeting him suddenly in a woodland path gazed at him and asked, "Are you a man or an angel1 ?"

XV

He was a tireless walker, and of great bodily activity. Up to the time he was forty years old he could clear five feet at a standing jump. His voice, which was low and deep in ordinary conversation, had astounding volume when he chose to give vent to it. With such a voice, and such eyes and presence he might have quelled a crowd of mutinous privateermen, at least as effectively as Bold Daniel, his grandfather; it was not a bellow, but had the searching and electrifying quality of the blast of a trumpet.

Silent in Company

211

He seldom exhibited this power. His wife says that when he rose in his might against a cabman who would not take him to the best hotel in Coventry, it was the only time she ever heard him raise his voice to a human being; though it is said that when overseeing the perverse and conscienceless coalshippers on the Boston wharves he made his voice heard and his indignation felt1.

XVI

Speaking of Emerson's life at Concord, Holmes says, with accustomed felicity:

He was surrounded by men who ran to extremes in their idiocyncrasies; Alcott in speculations which often led him into the fourth dimension of space; Hawthorne, who brooded himself into a dream-peopled solitude; Thoreau, the nullifier of civilization, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end. All of the Boston literary men speak of his silence in company, and he says himself:

For me there must first be a close and unembarrassed contiguity with my companion, or I cannot say one real word. I doubt whether I have ever really talked with half-a-dozen persons in my life, either men or women.

And again :

I suspect I am somewhat sterner stuff than many

romancers, and tougher of fibre; but the dark seclusion, the atmosphere without any oxygen of sympathy-in which I spent all the years of my youthful manhood, have enabled me to do almost as well without it1.

XVII

Yet he must have been keenly attentive to criticism, for in Rome in speaking of a call from Fredrika Bremer he says:

We found her very little changed from what she was when she came to take tea and spend the evening at our little red cottage among the Berkshire hills, and went away so dissatisfied with my conversational performance, and so laudatory of my brow and eyes, while so severely criticizing my poor mouth and chin2.

After a day with Mrs. Jameson he writes:

I bade her farewell with much good feeling on my own side and, I hope, on hers, excusing myself, however, from keeping the previous engagement to spend the evening with her, for, in point of fact, we had mutually had enough of one another for the time being.

And again of Miss Bremer:

I suspect, by the by, that she does not like me half so well as I do her; it is my impression that she thinks me unamiable, or that there is something or other not quite right about me. I am sorry if it

Not of Sanguiue Temperament

213

be so, because such a good, kindly, clear-sighted, and delicate person is very apt to have reason at the bottom of her harsh thoughts, when, in rare cases, she allows them to harbor with her.

XVIII

He was at no period of his life of sanguine temperament, and whether from philosophic determination or by force of nature he uniformly chose to anticipate the darker alternative of whatever event was developing1. Lowell tells with gusto that when his friend. Pierce had been nominated for the presidency, Hawthorne came to see him, sat down by him on a sofa, and after a melancholy silence, heaving a deep sigh, said, "Frank, what a pity!" Then after a pause, " But, after all, this world was not made to be happy in-only to succeed in !"

He elaborates this thought in the Marble Faun :

The once genial earth produces, in every successive generation, fewer flowers than used to gladden the preceding ones. Not that the modes and seeming possibilities of human enjoyment are rarer in our refined and softened era, -on the contrary, they never before were nearly so abundant,-but that mankind are getting so far beyond the childhood of

their race that they scorn to be happy any longer. A simple and joyous character can find no place for itself among the sage and sombre figures that would put this unsophisticated cheerfulness to shame. The entire system of man's affairs, as at present established, is built up purposely to exclude the careless and happy soul. The very children would upbraid the wretched individual who should endeavor to take life and the world as-what we might naturally suppose them meant for-a place and opportunity for enjoyment.

It is the iron rule in our day to require an object and a purpose in life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than we were born in. It insists upon everybody's adding somewhat-a mite, perhaps, but earned by incessant effort-to an accumulated pile of usefulness, of which the only use will be, to burden our posterity with even heavier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own. No life now wanders like an unfettered stream; there is a mill-wheel for the tiniest rivulet to turn. We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution to go all right.

XIX

His son says that he does not remember his father's ever attending church; but he says again :

In Nathaniel Hawthorne the sentiment of reverence was very highly developed, and I do not know