Sympathy is the most delicate tendril of the mind, and the most fascinating gift which nature can give us.  The most precious associations of the human heart cluster around the word, and we love to remember those who have sorrowed with us in sorrow, and rejoiced with us when we were glad.  But for the awkward and the shy the sympathetic are the very worst company.  They do not wish to be sympathized with—­they wish to be with people who are cold and indifferent; they like shy people like themselves.  Put two shy people in a room together, and they begin to talk with unaccustomed glibness.  A shy woman always attracts a shy man.  But women who are gifted with that rapid, gay impressionability which puts them en rapport with their surroundings, who have fancy and an excitable disposition, a quick susceptibility to the influences around them, are very charming in general society, but they are terrible to the awkward and the shy.  They sympathize too much, they are too aware of that burning shame which the sufferer desires to conceal.

The moment a shy person sees before him a perfectly unsympathetic person, one who is neither thinking nor caring for him, his shyness begins to flee; the moment that he recognizes a fellow-sufferer he begins to feel a re-enforcement of energy.  If he be a lover, especially, the almost certain embarrassment of the lady inspires him with hope and renewed courage.  A woman who has a bashful lover, even if she is afflicted with shyness, has been known to find a way to help the poor fellow out of his dilemma more than once.

HAWTHORNE.

Who has left us the most complete and most tragic history of shyness which belongs to “that long rosary on which the blushes of a life are strung,” found a woman (the most perfect character, apparently, who ever married and made happy a great genius) who, fortunately for him, was shy naturally, although without that morbid shyness which accompanied him through life.  Those who knew Mrs. Hawthorne found her possessed of great fascination of manner, even in general society, where Hawthorne was quite impenetrable.  The story of his running down to the Concord River and taking boat to escape his visitors has been long familiar to us all.  Mrs. Hawthorne, no doubt, with a woman’s tact and a woman’s generosity, overcame her own shyness in order to receive those guests whom Hawthorne ran away from, and through his life remained his better angel.  It was through this absence of expressed sympathy that English people became very agreeable to Hawthorne.  He describes, in his “Note-Book,” a speech made by him at a dinner in England:  “When I was called upon,” he says, “I rapped my head, and it returned a hollow sound.”  He had, however, been sitting next to a shy English lawyer, a man who won upon him by his quiet, unobtrusive simplicity, and who, in some well-chosen words, rather made light of dinner-speaking and its terrors.  When Hawthorne