that the greatest errors both of men
and women often spring from their sweetest and most generous
qualities; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of warmhearted,
generous, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not
from any real zeal for the cause, but because, between two
conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay
nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government
against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself
by such plausible arguments, as against that of the United
States. The anomaly of two allegiances, (of which that of
the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and
includes the altar and the hearth, while the General
Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law,
and has no symbol but a flag,) is exceedingly mischievous in
this point of view; for it has converted crowds of honest
people into traitors, who seem to themselves not merely
innocent but patriotic, and who die for a bad cause with a
quiet conscience as if it were the best. In the vast extent
of our country--too vast by far to be taken into one small
human heart--we inevitably limit to our own State, or at
farthest, to our own little section, that sentiment of
physical love for the soil which renders an Englishman, for
example, so intensely sensitive to the dignity and
well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot,
treading anywhere upon it, would make a bruise on each
individual breast. If a man loves his own State, therefore,
and is content to be ruined with her, let us shoot him, if
we can, but allow him an honourable burial in the soil he
fights for."

To this paragraph a line of deprecation from the editor is attached;
and indeed from the point of view of a vigorous prosecution of the war
it was doubtless not particularly pertinent. But it is interesting as
an example of the way an imaginative man judges current events--trying
to see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his adversary
feels, and present his view of the case.

But he had other occupations for his imagination than putting himself
into the shoes of unappreciative Southerners. He began at this time
two novels, neither of which he lived to finish, but both of which
were published, as fragments, after his death. The shorter of these
fragments, to which he had given the