Thoreau prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near the heart of a man.  This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him.  That surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention, that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is still strange to his countrymen.

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top, and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to pines too.  He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his words.  When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid.  But there was a great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy kindness, I felt my spirits sink.  After tea, he showed me a book case, where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves, and said, coldly, “This is my library.”  I knew that men were his books, and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that he should care so little, or seem to care so little.  Some of his own romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my finger on the ‘Blithedale Romance’ and said that I preferred that to the others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans liked that best too.

Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I liked.  I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things; and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got away, to be, “I find this young man worthy.”  The quaintness, the little stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat with joy.  In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne.  He had been as cordial as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.