eat author:--

"Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet
the difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed
constantly upon his mind. He told me once that while he had
been consul at Liverpool a vessel arrived there with a number
of negro sailors, who had been brought from slave States, and
would, of course, be enslaved on their return. He fancied that
he ought to inform the men of the fact, but then he was stopped
by the reflection--who was to provide for them if they became
free? and, as he said with a sigh, 'While I was thinking, the
vessel sailed.' So I recollect, on the old battlefield of
Manassas, on which I strolled in company with Hawthorne,
meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, footsore, wretched,
and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine,
some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train
going northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me
with the remark, 'I am not sure that we were doing right, after
all. How can those poor beings find food and shelter away from
home?'

"Thus this ingrained and inherent doubt incapacitated him from
following any course vigorously.

"He thought on the whole that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd
Garrison and the abolitionists were in the right, but then he
was never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after
all; so that his advocacy of their cause was of a very
uncertain character."

There is a constant temptation to transcend proper limits in quoting
from this most characteristic production of our great author.

It was my purpose simply to recall to the minds of readers an article
whose authorship was scarcely known at the time of its appearance (in
the July of 1862), and which has never been included in its writer's
collected works.

Nothing in Hawthorne's books--not even excepting "Twice-Told Tales"--is
more suggestive and eloquent of the man and the author.

The same matchless purity of style, with never a sophomoric flight nor a
tinge of dulness; replete with subtle humor, and an irony whose
tempered edge scarcely wounds by reason of the attendant richness of
good nature that "steals away its sharpness"; as in the same soil that
nourishes the keen, aggressive nettle, is always found a certain herb of
healing potency. I cannot refrain from giving our readers some pass