In his “Society and Solitude” Emerson has drawn a picture of Hawthorne as the lover of a hermitical life; a picture only representing that side of his character, and developed after Emerson’s fashion to an artistic extreme. “Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not,” and “He had a remorse running to despair, of his social _gaucheries_, and walked miles and miles to get the twitching out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his shoulders.” [Footnote: “Society and Solitude,” 4, 5.] There is a touch of arrogance in this, and it merely marks the difference between the modest author of the “Essays,” and the proud, censorious Emerson of 1870; but his love of absolute statements ofttimes led him into strange contradictions, and the injustice which results from judging our fellow-mortals by an inflexible standard was the final outcome of his optimism. Hawthorne was more charitable when he remarked that without Byron’s faults we should not have had his virtues; but the truth lies between the two. There have been many instances of genius as sensitive as Hawthorne’s in various branches of art: Shelley and Southey, Schubert and Chopin, Correggio and Corot. Southey not only blushed red but blushed blue--as if the life were going out of him; and in Chopin and Correggio at least we feel that they could not have been what they were without it. Napoleon, whose nerves were like steel wires, suffered nevertheless from a peculiar kind of physical sensitiveness. He could not take medicines like other men,--a small dose had a terrible effect on him,--and it was much the same with respect to changes of food, climate, and the like. What Hawthorne required was sympathetic company. Do not we all require it? The hypercritical morality of the Emersonians, especially in Concord, could not have been favorable to his mental ease and comfort. How could a man in a happily married condition feel anything but repugnance to Thoreau’s idea of marriage as a necessary evil; or Alcott’s theory that eating animal food tended directly to the commission of crime? On the first anniversary of Hawthorne’s wedding, a tragical drama was enacted in Concord, in which he was called upon to perform a subordinate part. One Miss Hunt, a school-teacher and the daughter of a Concord farmer, drowned herself in the river nearly opposite the place where Hawthorne was accustomed to bathe. The cause of her suicide has never been adequately explained, but as she was a transcendentalist, or considered herself so, there were those who believed that in some occult way that was the occasion of it. However, as one of her sisters afterward followed her example, it would seem more likely to have come from the development of some family trait. She was seen walking upon the bank for a long time, before she took the final plunge; but the catastrophe was not discovered until near evening.