MY DEAR MOTLEY,--You are certainly that Gentle Reader for whom all
my books were exclusively written. Nobody else (my wife excepted,
who speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own) has
ever said exactly what I love to hear. It is most satisfactory to
be hit upon the raw, to be shot straight through the heart. It is
not the quantity of your praise that I care so much about (though I
gather it all up carefully, lavish as you are of it), but the kind,
for you take the book precisely as I meant it; and if your note had
come a few days sooner, I believe I would have printed it in a
postscript which I have added to the second edition, because it
explains better than I found possible to do the way in which my
romance ought to be taken.... Now don't suppose that I fancy the
book to be a tenth part as good as you say it is. You work out my
imperfect efforts, and half make the book with your warm
imagination, and see what I myself saw but could only hint at.
Well, the romance is a success, even if it never finds another
reader.
We spent the winter in Leamington, whither we had come from the
sea-coast in October. I am sorry to say that it was another winter
of sorrow and anxiety.... I have engaged our passages for June
16th.... Mrs. Hawthorne and the children will probably remain in
Bath till the eve of our departure; but I intend to pay one more
visit of a week or two to London, and shall certainly come and see
you. I wonder at your lack of recognition of my social
propensities. I take so much delight in my friends, that a little
intercourse goes a great way, and illuminates my life before and
after....
Your friend,
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
One may well linger here, for an instant, over the calm, confident, but
deeply vibrating happiness from which those words sprang, concerning his
wife, "who speaks so near me that I cannot tell her voice from my own;"
and one may profitably lay away, for instruction, the closing lines,--"I
take so much delight in my friends, that a little intercourse goes a
great way." The allusion to "another winter of sorrow and anxiety"
carries us back to the previous winter, passed in Rome, during which
Hawthorne's elder daughter underwent a prolonged attack of Roman fever.
Illness again developed itself in his family while they were staying at
Leamington.