Hawthorne has rested so long in the twilight of impersonality, that I hesitate sometimes to reveal the man even to his warmest admirers.  This very day Sainte-Beuve has made me feel a fresh reluctance in unveiling my friend, and there seems almost a reproof in these words, from the eloquent French author:—­

“We know nothing or nearly nothing of the life of La Bruyere, and this obscurity adds, it has been remarked, to the effect of his work, and, it may be said, to the piquant happiness of his destiny.  If there was not a single line of his unique book, which from the first instant of its publication did not appear and remain in the clear light, so, on the other hand, there was not one individual detail regarding the author which was well known.  Every ray of the century fell upon each page of the book and the face of the man who held it open in his hand was veiled from our sight.”

Beautifully said, as usual with Sainte-Beuve, but I venture, notwithstanding such eloquent warning, to proceed.

After his return home from Washington Hawthorne sent to me, during the month of May, an article for the Atlantic Monthly, which he entitled “Chiefly about War-Matters.”  The paper, excellently well done throughout, of course, contained a personal description of President Lincoln, which I thought, considered as a portrait of a living man, and drawn by Hawthorne, it would not be wise or tasteful to print.  The office of an editor is a disagreeable one sometimes, and the case of Hawthorne on Lincoln disturbed me not a little.  After reading the manuscript, I wrote to the author, and asked his permission to omit his description of the President’s personal appearance.  As usual,—­for he was the kindest and sweetest of contributors, the most good-natured and the most amenable man to advise I ever knew,—­he consented to my proposal, and allowed me to print the article with the alterations.  If any one will turn to the paper in the Atlantic Monthly (it is in the number for July, 1862), it will be observed there are several notes; all of these were written by Hawthorne himself.  He complied with my request without a murmur, but he always thought I was wrong in my decision.  He said the whole description of the interview and the President’s personal appearance were, to his mind, the only parts of the article worth publishing.  “What a terrible thing,” he complained, “it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!” President Lincoln is dead, and as Hawthorne once wrote to me, “Upon my honor, it seems to me the passage omitted has an historical value,” I will copy here verbatim what I advised my friend, both on his own account and the President’s, not to print nine years ago.  Hawthorne and his party had gone into the President’s room, annexed, as he says, as supernumeraries to a deputation from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with a present of a splendid whip to the Chief Magistrate:—­