ll sympathy with the writer's political
heresies. The heresies strike the reader of to-day as extremely mild,
and what excites his emotion, rather, is the questionable taste of the
editorial commentary, with which it is strange that Hawthorne should
have allowed his article to be encumbered. He had not been an
Abolitionist before the War, and that he should not pretend to be one
at the eleventh hour, was, for instance, surely a piece of consistency
that might have been allowed to pass. "I shall not pretend to be an
admirer of old John Brown," he says, in a page worth quoting, "any
further than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may
go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any
apophthegm of a sage whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden
sentences"--the allusion here, I suppose, is to Mr. Emerson--"as from
that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honoured a name), that
the death of this blood-stained fanatic has 'made the Gallows as
venerable as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won
his martyrdom fairly, and took it fairly. He himself, I am persuaded
(such was his natural integrity), would have acknowledged that
Virginia had a right to take the life which he had staked and lost;
although it would have been better for her, in the hour that is fast
coming, if she could generously have forgotten the criminality of his
attempt in its enormous folly. On the other hand, any common-sensible
man, looking at the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain
intellectual satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in
requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities." Now
that the heat of that great conflict has passed away, this is a
capital expression of the saner estimate, in the United States, of the
dauntless and deluded old man who proposed to solve a complex
political problem by stirring up a servile insurrection. There is much
of the same sound sense, interfused with light, just appreciable
irony, in such a passage as the following:--

"I tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of a
Southern army would be in a sober town of Massachusetts; and
the thought considerably lessened my wonder at the cold and
shy regards that are cast upon our troops, the gloom, the
sullen demeanour, the declared, or scarcely hidden, sympathy
with rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange
thing in human life