One would have to go to Dante’s “Inferno” to realize a situation more thoroughly disagreeable; yet the very pathos of Hawthorne’s employment served to inspire him with elevated thoughts and beautiful reflections. His letters are full of aërial fancies. He notices what a beautiful day it was on April 18, 1840, and regrets that he cannot “fling himself on a gentle breeze and be blown away into the country.” April 30 is another beautiful day,--“a real happiness to live; if he had been a mere vegetable, a hawthorn bush, he would have felt its influence.” He goes to a picture gallery in the Athenaeum, but only mentions seeing two paintings by Sarah Clarke. He returns to Salem in October, and writes in his own chamber the passage already quoted, in which he mourns the lonely years of his youth, and the long, long waiting for appreciation, “while he felt the life chilling in his veins and sometimes it seemed as if he were already in the grave;” but an early return to his post gives him brighter thoughts. He takes notice of the magnificent black and yellow butterflies that have strangely come to Long Wharf, as if seeking to sail to other climes since the last flower had faded. Mr. Bancroft has appointed him to suppress an insurrection among the government laborers, and he writes to Miss Sophia Peabody: “I was not at the end of Long Wharf to-day, but in a distant region,--my authority having been put in requisition to quell a rebellion of the captain and ‘gang’ of shovellers aboard a coal-vessel. I would you could have beheld the awful sternness of my visage and demeanor in the execution of this momentous duty. Well,--I have conquered the rebels, and proclaimed an amnesty; so to-morrow I shall return to that paradise of measurers, the end of Long Wharf,--not to my former salt-ship, she being now discharged, but to another, which will probably employ me well-nigh a fortnight longer.” A month later we meet with this ominous remark in his diary: “I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft’s yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had given me some business to do, for which I was very thankful.” Had Hawthorne already encountered this remarkable woman with the feminine heart and masculine mind, and had he already conceived that aversion for her which is almost painfully apparent in his Italian diary? Certainly in many respects they were antipodes.