exercised his descriptive powers so
far as was possible in describing the advance of the United States
troops from Vera Cruz to the city of the Montezumas. The mouthpieces
of the Whig party spared him, I believe, no reprobation for
"prostituting" his exquisite genius; but I fail to see anything
reprehensible in Hawthorne's lending his old friend the assistance of
his graceful quill. He wished him to be President--he held afterwards
that he filled the office with admirable dignity and wisdom--and as
the only thing he could do was to write, he fell to work and wrote for
him. Hawthorne was a good lover and a very sufficient partisan, and I
suspect that if Franklin Pierce had been made even less of the stuff
of a statesman, he would still have found in the force of old
associations an injunction to hail him as a ruler. Our hero was an
American of the earlier and simpler type--the type of which it is
doubtless premature to say that it has wholly passed away, but of
which it may at least be said that the circumstances that produced it
have been greatly modified. The generation to which he belonged, that
generation which grew up with the century, witnessed during a period
of fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development of the
young Republic; and when one thinks of the scale on which it took
place, of the prosperity that walked in its train and waited on its
course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it conferred, of
the broad morning sunshine, in a word, in which it all went forward,
there seems to be little room for surprise that it should have
implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the grandeur of the
country, its duration, its immunity from the usual troubles of earthly
empires. This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with an
element of genial optimism, in the light of which it appeared that the
great American state was not as other human institutions are, that a
special Providence watched over it, that it would go on joyously for
ever, and that a country whose vast and blooming bosom offered a
refuge to the strugglers and seekers of all the rest of the world,
must come off easily, in the battle of the ages. From this conception
of the American future the sense of its having problems to solve was
blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the programme, no
looming complications, no rocks ahead. The indefinite multiplication
of the population, and its enjoyment of the benefits of