or, far
worse, at his country, is full of an injustice which seems more bitter
because it comes from one whose hearty admiration of the AUTHOR should
have lifted him to a clearer appreciation of the MAN in his purity and
lofty patriotism.

The writer concludes the article from which I have quoted, and which, in
keen analysis and generous, literary judgment, is rarely equalled by any
of Hawthorne's reviewers, with these and like ill-considered words:--

"Wherever he turned his weary steps, there stood in his path
the genius of the time, not beautiful, not romantic, to his
eyes; not even grand--but stern enough and in grim earnest,
demanding of him what he could not give,--the heart and voice
of an American citizen in the hour of America's danger."

The writer forgot, or, blinded by strong feeling, failed to perceive,
that the silence which, with him as with hundreds of good and earnest
men, would indeed have indicated a fatal lack of patriotic emotion, was
in the case of Hawthorne only the inevitable shrinking of a rare and
sensitive spirit from contact with the awful realities of conflict.

When the "Artist of the Beautiful" descended from the serene atmosphere,
where his lofty spiritual nature had its true home and highest sphere of
action, and devoted his delicate gifts to the useful mysteries of
watch-making, the result, while eminently satisfactory to his old
employer and well-wisher, the jeweller, and doubtless of blessed effect
on the poor artist's purse, was disastrous in loss to the world of
thought, and in its influence on his better and real self.

A writer of tenderer sympathies and nicer discrimination, takes a more
kindly and a wiser view:--

"About the whole question of the war, Hawthorne's mind was, I
think, always hovering between two views. He sympathized with
it in principle; but its inevitable accessories--the bloodshed,
the bustle, and above all, perhaps, the bunkum which
accompanied it--were to him absolutely hateful.... To any one
who knew the man, the mere fact that Hawthorne should have been
able to make up his mind to the righteousness and expediency of
the war at all, is evidence of the strength of that popular
passion which drove the North and South into conflict."

But it was not Hawthorne's silence that provoked to fiercest expression
the safe zeal of certain literary loyalists. This last sketch from that
pen, the