depressed by it; it cut from beneath his
feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a
heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest. Such was
the bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation of which
I have spoken; their illusions were rudely dispelled, and they saw the
best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage. This
affair had no place in their scheme, and nothing was left for them but
to hang their heads and close their eyes. The subsidence of that great
convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found, and one may
say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind.
It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of
proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place
than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more
difficult. At the rate at which things are going, it is obvious that
good Americana will be more numerous than ever; but the good American,
in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and
confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will
not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he
will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an
observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable,
and that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities,
as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him
intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so
admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this
reason that Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very proper President.

The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for so liberal a
confidence was to offer his old friend one of the numerous places in
his gift. Hawthorne had a great desire to go abroad and see something
of the world, so that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never
stirred in the matter himself, but his friends strongly urged that
something should be done; and when he accepted the post of consul at
Liverpool there was not a word of reasonable criticism to be offered
on the matter. If General Pierce, who was before all things
good-natured and obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion
than to confer this modest distinction upon the most honourable and
discreet of men of letters, he would have made a more brillia