n he said that Thoreau
prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other
human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near
the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not
displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next
neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That
surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention,
that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he
entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not
be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the
immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is
still strange to his countrymen.

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to
pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent
together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his
words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would
have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a
great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy
kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case,
where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves,
and said, coldly, "This is my library." I knew that men were his books,
and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that
he should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own
romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my
finger on the 'Blithedale Romance' and said that I preferred that to the
others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans
liked that best too.

Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take
leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me
come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I
liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things;
and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got
away, to be, "I find this young man worthy." The quaintness, the little
stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was
not without his sense o