Collected Prose

saluted me in Spanish; to which I replied by touching my hat, and went on with the newspaper. But the cavalier renewing his salutation, I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville!” The two men walked the mile to the red house together (with Julian, “highly pleased,” sitting atop Melville’s horse), and then, in what are probably the most frequently quoted sentences from the American Notebooks , Hawthorne continues: “After supper, I put Julian to bed; and Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night; and if truth must be told, we smoked cigars even within the sacred precincts of the sitting-room. At last, he arose, and saddled his horse (whom we had put into the barn) and rode off for his own domicile; and I hastened to make the most of what little sleeping-time remained for me.”
    That was the one galvanizing moment in an otherwise torpid stretch of days. When he wasn’t taking care of Julian, Hawthorne wrote letters, read Fourier as he prepared to begin The Blithedale Romance , and took a half-hearted stab at Thackeray’s Pendennis . The diary includes many keenly written passages about the shifting light of the landscape (few novelists looked at nature as attentively as Hawthorne did) and a handful of droll and increasingly sympathetic descriptions of Hindlegs, the pet rabbit, who unfortunately expired as the chronicle was coming to an end. More and more, however, as his solitude dragged on, Hawthorne yearned for his wife to come home. By the beginning of the final week, that feeling had been turned into a constant ache. After putting Julian to bed on the evening of August tenth, he suddenly let himself go, breaking down in a rhapsodic gush of longing and allegiance. “Let me say outright, for once, that he is a sweet and lovely little boy, and worthy of all the love that I am capable of giving him. Thank God! God bless him! God bless Phoebe for giving him to me! God bless her as the best wife and mother in the world! God bless Una, whom I long to see again! God bless Little Rosebud! God bless me, for Phoebe’s and all their sakes! No other man has so good a wife; nobody has better children. Would I were worthier of her and them!” The entry then concludes: “My evenings are all dreary, alone, and without books that I am in the mood to read; and this evening was like the rest. So I went to bed at about nine, and longed for Phoebe.”
    He was expecting her to return on the thirteenth, then on the fourteenth, then on the fifteenth, but various delays and missed communications put off Sophia’s departure from West Newton until the sixteenth. Increasingly anxious and frustrated, Hawthorne nevertheless pushed on dutifully with the diary. On the very last day, during yet another visit to the lake with Julian, he sat down at the edge of the water with a magazine, and as he read, he was moved to make the following observation, which in some sense stands as a brief and inadvertent ars poetica , a precise description of the spirit and methodology of all his writing: “… the best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape, is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then, when your eyes happen to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch Nature at unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, and passes away almost as soon as you are conscious of it; but it is real, for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another; as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every wilful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as much a mystery as before.”
    As with landscapes, so with people, especially little people in the flush of childhood. All is change with them, all is movement, and you can grasp their essence only “at unawares,” at moments when you are not consciously looking for it. That is the beauty of Hawthorne’s little piece of notebook-writing. Throughout all the drudgery and tedium of his constant companionship with the five-year-old boy, Hawthorne was able to glance at him often enough to capture something of his essence, to bring him to life in words. A century and a half later, we are still