A simple stone, with the single word "Hawthorne" cut upon it, was placed above him. He had wished that there should be no monument. He liked Wordsworth's grave at Grasmere, and had written, "It is pleasant to think and know that he did not care for a stately monument." Longfellow and Lowell and Holmes, Emerson and Louis Agassiz, and his friends Pierce, and Hillard, with Ellery Channing, and other famous men, assembled on that peaceful morning to take their places in the funeral train. Some who had not known him in life came long distances to see him, now, and ever afterward bore about with them the memory of his aspect, strong and beautiful, in his last repose. The orchards were blossoming; the roadside-banks were blue with violets, and the lilies of the valley, which were Hawthorne's favorites among the flowers, had come forth in quiet companies, to look their last on his face, so white and quiet too. So, while the batteries that had murdered him roared sullenly in the distant South, the rites of burial were fulfilled over the dead poet. Like a clear voice beside the grave, as we look back and listen, Longfellow's simple, penetrating chant returns upon the ear. In vain to sum up, here, the loss unspeakable suffered in Hawthorne's death; and no less vain the attempt to fix in a few words the incalculable gain his life has left with us. When one remembers the power that was unexhausted in him still, one is ready to impeach cold Time and Fate for their treason to the fair prospect that lay before us all, in the continuance of his career. We look upon these few great works, that may be numbered on the fingers of a hand, and wonder what good end was served by the silent shutting of those rich pages that had just begun to open. We remember the tardy recognition that kept the fountain of his spirit so long half concealed, and the necessities that forced him to give ten of his best years to the sterile industry of official duties. But there are great compensations. Without the youthful period of hopes deferred, Hawthorne, as we have seen, would not have been the unique force, the high, untrammelled thinker that he became through that fortunate isolation; wanting the uncongenial contact of his terms at Boston and Salem and Liverpool, it may be that he could not have developed his genius with such balance of strength as it now shows; and, finally, without the return to his native land, the national fibre in him would have missed its crowning grace of conscientiousness. He might in that case have written more books, but the very loss of these, implying as it does his pure love of country, is an acquisition much more positively valuable. There is a fitness, too, in the abrupt breaking off of his activity, in so far as it gives emphasis to that incompleteness of any verbal statement of truth, which he was continually insisting upon with his readers.