knew Mrs. Hawthorne found her possessed of great
fascination of manner, even in general society, where Hawthorne was
quite impenetrable. The story of his running down to the Concord River
and taking boat to escape his visitors has been long familiar to us all.
Mrs. Hawthorne, no doubt, with a woman's tact and a woman's generosity,
overcame her own shyness in order to receive those guests whom Hawthorne
ran away from, and through his life remained his better angel. It was
through this absence of expressed sympathy that English people became
very agreeable to Hawthorne. He describes, in his "Note-Book," a speech
made by him at a dinner in England: "When I was called upon," he says,
"I rapped my head, and it returned a hollow sound." He had, however,
been sitting next to a shy English lawyer, a man who won upon him by his
quiet, unobtrusive simplicity, and who, in some well-chosen words,
rather made light of dinner-speaking and its terrors. When Hawthorne
finally got up and made his speech, his "voice, meantime, having a
far-off and remote echo," and when, as we learn from others, a burst of
applause greeted a few well-chosen words drawn from that full well of
thought, that pellucid rill of "English undefiled," the unobtrusive
gentleman by his side applauded and said to him, "It was handsomely
done." The compliment pleased the shy man. It is the only compliment to
himself which Hawthorne ever recorded.

Now, had Hawthorne been congratulated by a sympathetic, effusive
American, who had clapped him on the back, and who had said, "O, never
fear--you will speak well!" he would have said nothing. The shy sprite
in his own eyes would have read in his neighbor's eyes the dreadful
truth that his sympathetic neighbor would have indubitably betrayed--a
fear that he would _not_ do well. The phlegmatic and stony Englishman
neither felt nor cared whether Hawthorne spoke well or ill; and,
although pleased that he did speak well, invested no particular sympathy
in the matter, either for or against, and so spared Hawthorne's shyness
the last bitter drop in the cup, which would have been a recognition of
his own moral dread. Hawthorne bitterly records his own sufferings. He
says, in one of his books, "At this time I acquired this accursed habit
of solitude." It has been said that the Hawthorne family were, in the
earlier generation, afflicted with shyness almost as a
disease--certainly a curious freak of nature in a family descended from