rt of a man, and it exists only as one of the numberless
sorry makeshifts to which time constrains us, while we are waiting for
eternity and full communion.

It was a dreary day in the beginning of the second winter that we set
out on our eastward journey; but Hawthorne's face was brighter than the
weather warranted, for it was turned once more towards the sea. We were
destined, ere we turned back, to go much farther towards the rising
sun than any of us then suspected. We took with us one who had not been
present at our coming--a little auburn-haired baby, born in May. Which
are the happiest years of a man's life? Those in which he is too much
occupied with present felicity to look either forward or backward--to
hope or to remember. There are no such years; but such moments there may
be, and perhaps there were as many such moments awaiting Hawthorne as
had already passed.

His greatest work was done before he left his native land, and within
a year or two of his death he wrote to Richard Stoddard: "I have been a
happy man, and yet I cannot remember any moment of such happy conspiring
circumstances that I would have rung a joy-bell at it."

III

Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's
fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle
Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's
first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--
The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook
Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of
composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's
method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a
roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of
"The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President"--The most
homeless people in the world."

The sky that overhung Hawthorne's departure from Lenox was gray with
impending snow, and the flakes had begun to fall ere the vehicle in
which his family was ensconced had reached the railway station in
Pittsfield. Travel had few amenities in those days. The cars were
all plain cars, with nothing to recommend them except that they went
tolerably fast--from twenty to thirty miles an hour. They were chariots
of delight to the children, who were especially happy in occupying the
last car of the train, from the rear windows of which they could look
down upon the tracks, which seemed to slide miraculously away fr