her boating on the large, quiet Concord River. Thoreau
was a great voyager in a canoe which he had constructed himself (and
which he eventually made over to Hawthorne), as expert indeed in the use
of his paddle as the redman who had once haunted the same silent stream.

Of the beauties of the Concord River Hawthorne has written a few
sentences that will live while the silver stream continues to flow: "It
comes creeping softly through the mid-most privacy and deepest heart of
a wood which whispers it to be quiet, while the stream whispers back
again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one
another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of
the sky and the clustering foliage...."

Concerning the visitors attracted to Concord by the great original
thinker who was Hawthorne's near neighbour, the romancer speaks with
less delicate sympathy: "Never was a poor little country village
infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved
mortals, most of whom look upon themselves to be important agents of the
world's destiny, yet are simply bores of a very intense character." A
bit further on Hawthorne speaks of these pilgrims as "hobgoblins of
flesh and blood," people, he humourously comments, who had lighted on a
new thought or a thought they fancied new, and "came to Emerson as the
finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary to ascertain its
quality and value." With Emerson himself Hawthorne was on terms of easy
intimacy. "Being happy," as he says, and feeling, therefore, "as if
there were no question to be put," he was not in any sense desirous of
metaphysical intercourse with the great philosopher.

It was while on the way home from his friend Emerson's one day that
Hawthorne had that encounter with Margaret Fuller about which it is so
pleasant to read because it serves to take away the taste of other less
complimentary allusions to this lady to be found in Hawthorne's works:

"After leaving Mr. Emerson's I returned through the woods, and entering
Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends
along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole
afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with
some strange title which I did not understand and have forgotten. She
said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance
to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Holl