In this way his silence was most social. Everything
seemed to have been said."
I am told that in his own home, though he was often silent, it was never
with sadness except in seasons of great illness in the house, the
prevailing effect of his manner being usually that of a cheerful and
almost humorous calm. Mr. Curtis gives perhaps one of the best
descriptions of his aspect, when he speaks of his "glimmering smile";
and of his atmosphere, when he says that at Emerson's house it seemed
always morning, but at Hawthorne's you passed into
"A land in which it seemed always afternoon."
Hawthorne's personal appearance is said by those who knew him to have
been always very impressive. He was tall and strongly built, with
beautiful and lustrous gray-blue eyes, and luxuriant dark brown hair of
great softness, which grew far back from his forehead, as in the early
engraved portrait of him. His skin had a peculiar fineness and delicacy,
giving unusual softness to his complexion. After his Italian sojourn he
altered much, his hair having begun to whiten, and a thick dark mustache
being permitted to grow, so that a wit described him as looking like a
"boned pirate." When it became imperative to shake off his reticence, he
seems to have had the power of impressing as much by speech as he had
before done by silence. It was the same abundant, ardent, but
self-contained and perfectly balanced nature that informed either phase.
How commanding was this nature may be judged from the fact related of
him by an acquaintance, that rude people jostling him in a crowd would
give way at once "at the sound of his low and almost irresolute voice.
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