We know, from brief allusions in his "Note-Books," that Hawthorne was perfectly well aware of his high quality as an artist. He speaks of having won fame in his dismal room in Herbert Street; and at Arezzo, in 1858, the well "opposite Petrarch's birth-house" which Boccaccio introduced into one of his stories, recalls to the American writer one of his own performances. "As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my towns-people would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. Oh, certainly not; but I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their tea-kettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score."[10] Such indications of the artistic consciousness are the merest ripples on the surface; the deeper substance of it, with Hawthorne, always remained out of sight. Letters, which are assumed to reveal so much of those who indite them, are, when we come to the fact, very insufficient exponents of character; as, for instance, we may observe in the letters of Michael Angelo, whose mood and manner vary according to the person addressed. Correspondence, it is true, is appetizing to readers, and should be prized for the help it gives in defining an individual, but it does not always do full justice to the larger being included in the whole personality. Hawthorne's letters are more representative of those faculties by which he came into association with his fellows, than of those which tended to separate him from them by making him single and phenomenal, in his function as writer of romance. But in his actual presence there was a something which did most noticeably correspond to the hidden sources of his power, and visibly express them. There was the hale and vigorous port of a man well fitted by his physical constitution to meet the rudest emergency; but there was also a temperament of which the reserve, the delicacy, the tremulous sensitiveness were equal to those of the most finely organized woman. "He was tall and strongly built," wrote his friend Hillard, "with broad shoulders, deep chest, a massive head.... He looked like a man who might have held the stroke oar in a University boat.... But, on the other hand, no man had more of the feminine element than he. He was feminine in his quick perceptions, his fine insight, his sensibility to beauty.... No man comprehended woman better than he. And his face was as mobile and rapid in its changes of expression as that of a young girl....