bright semicircle of
the sun. Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we
turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a
mile above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on
earth--nowhere indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's
imagination.... It comes flowing softly through the midmost 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...." While Hawthorne was
looking at these beautiful things, or, for that matter, was writing
them, he was well out of the way of a certain class of visitants whom he
alludes to in one of the closing passages of this long Introduction.
"Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of
queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon
themselves to be important agents of the world's destiny, yet were
simply bores of a very intense character." "These hobgoblins of flesh
and blood," he says in a preceding paragraph, "were attracted thither by
the wide-spreading influence of a great original thinker who had his
earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our village.... People that
had lighted on a new thought or a thought they fancied new, came to
Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to
ascertain its quality and value." And Hawthorne enumerates some of the
categories of pilgrims to the shrine of the mystic counsellor, who as a
general thing was probably far from abounding in their own sense (when
this sense was perverted), but gave them a due measure of plain
practical advice. The whole passage is interesting, and it suggests that
little Concord had not been ill-treated by the fates--with "a great
original thinker" at one end of the village, an exquisite teller of
tales at the other, and the rows of New England elms between. It
contains moreover an admirable sentence about Hawthorne's
pilgrim-haunted neighbour, with whom, "being happy," as he says, and
feeling therefore "as if there were no question to be put," he was not
in metaphysical communion. "It was good nevertheless to meet him in the
wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual
gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one;
and he so q