so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could impart." At another period, he says, "I, too, might have asked of this prophet the master word that would solve me the riddle of the universe, but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no question to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher."
This deep happiness of the Hawthornes, as nearly perfect as any recorded in literature, this happiness that asked little of friends or fortune or metaphysical philosophy, was in truth for both of them the fruit of solitude, the reward of a prolonged silent discipline in living, as the Transcendentalists would say, "in the Ideal," a discipline that determined the level of their meeting and enabled them, when they were united, to maintain without effort their ideal relations. To her in 1839, in the days of their engagement, he had written: "I never, till now, had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and, whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine. Then I feel that there is a Now, and that Now must be always calm and happy, and that sorrow and evil are but phantoms that seem to flit across it."[1] Of him, in October, 1842, she writes to her mother: "His will is
- ↑ Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, vol. I, p. 203.
