Ellery Channing came with a man named Buttrick to borrow Hawthorne’s boat for the search, and Hawthorne went with them. As it happened, they were the ones who found the corpse, and Hawthorne’s account in his diary of its recovery is a terribly accurate description,--softened down and poetized in the rewritten statement of “The Blithedale Romance.” There is in fact no description of a death in Homer or Shakespeare so appalling as this literal transcript of the veritable fact. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 300.] What concerns us here, however, are the comments he set down on the dolorous event. Concerning her appearance, he says: “If she could have foreseen while she stood, at five o’clock that morning on the bank of the river, how her maiden corpse would have looked eighteen hours afterwards, and how coarse men would strive with hand and foot to reduce it to a decent aspect, and all in vain,--it would surely have saved her from the deed.” And again: “I suppose one friend would have saved her; but she died for want of sympathy--a severe penalty for having cultivated and refined herself out of the sphere of her natural connections.” The first remark has often been misunderstood. It is not the vanity of women, which is after all only a reflection (or the reflective consequence) of the admiration of man, which Hawthorne intends, but that delicacy of feeling which Nature requires of woman for her own protection; and he may not have been far wrong in supposing that if Miss Hunt had foreseen the exact consequences of her fatal act she would not have committed it. Hawthorne’s remark that her death was a consequence of having refined and cultivated herself beyond the reach of her relatives, seems a rather hard judgment. The latter often happens in American life, and although it commonly results in more or less family discord, are we to condemn it for that reason? If she died as Hawthorne imagines, from the lack of intellectual sympathy, we may well inquire if there was no one in Concord who might have given aid and encouragement to this young aspiring soul. “Take her up tenderly; Lift her with care, Fashioned so slenderly, Young and so fair.” And one is also tempted to add: “Alas! for the rarity Of Christian charity.” Hawthorne’s earthly paradise only endured until the autumn of 1843. When cool weather arrived, want and care came also. On November 26 he wrote to George S. Hillard: