"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 passages near the close. They are descriptive of certain guests at Willard's Hotel, in Washington, where the travellers lived during their stay at the Capital.
This portion of Hawthorne's last magazine article recalls forcibly passages in the first of his published stories, "The Gray Champion."
"It is curious to observe what antiquated figures and costumes sometimes make their appearance at Willard's. You meet elderly men with frilled shirt-fronts, for example, the fashion of which adornment passed away from among the people of this world half a century ago.
"It is as if one of Stuart's portraits were walking abroad.
"I see no way of accounting for this, except that the troubles of the times, the impiety of traitors, and the peril of our sacred Union and Constitution have disturbed in their honored graves, some of the venerable fathers of the country, and summoned them forth to protest against the meditated and half-accomplished sacrilege.