s."

My present object is to invite the notice of readers of the "New England
Magazine" of our day to the last completed work from the hand of that
man of marvellous genius,

"Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen,
And left the tale half told."

I remember with what concern I once heard a resident of Concord, a man
not unknown in the world of letters, speak of certain evils likely to
result from "Hawthorne's fall."

This, to me, conveyed only the idea of physical disaster, and it was
with a sentiment of relief, commensurate with the contempt inspired by
such an explanation, that I was given to understand that it was the
great author's unselfish effort in behalf of his old college comrade and
life-long friend, that was supposed to imply a state of moral declension
fitly indicated by the sinister word.

It was thus that men and women, full of the cheap patriotism of the
time, and puffed up with a sort of loyal egotism that blinded them to
the possibilities of honest purpose in any whose views on politics and
public affairs varied never so slightly from their accepted standard of
right, ventured to condemn what they were constitutionally incapable of
judging with either coolness or fair appreciation.

The "Life of Franklin Pierce" is by no means a great book, and neither
the subject nor its treatment entitles it to a place among the immortal
works that preceded and followed it; but to those of us who knew and
loved the writer, and to those who through his books got some glimpses
of the singular purity of his moral nature, a quality of friendship that
excludes the idea of selfish interest seems its author's only and
sufficient motive.

When the storm of civil war broke upon us, these worthy critics flung
themselves with tongue, or pen, or sword--chiefly with tongue--into the
good cause, and were scandalized at the vision of one who would fain
have dreamed while they, after their various methods, were fighting; of
a poet so far aloft in the regions of ideal fancy that the confused
voices of battle well-nigh failed to reach him. And yet, in the words of
one of their own writers,

"There was but one man living whom the country could so ill
afford to lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable
poet and dreamer, who sneered at the war, and at the great
nation that waged it, with the pettishness of a spoiled child."

But the charge that Hawthorne sneered at the righteous war,