less bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude, . . . but living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . . used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! . . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us—then we begin to be—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . . .[1]
By the time he was appointed weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House, in 1839, Hawthorne had learned to live, somewhat according to the Emersonian injunction, in business, if not in society, with his hands and in solitude with his head and heart. One who reads in the American Note-Books his memoranda of that period cannot fail to be impressed with the fact that his thraldom and drudgery and the sordidness of his daily occupation intensified his delight in his inner freedom and perfected it. All day long he measures coal in a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. He thinks that his profession is somewhat akin to that of a chimney-sweeper. He grieves
- ↑ American Note-Books, October 4, 1840.
