author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a
romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no
mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a
commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily
the case with my dear native land." Is crime never romantic, then,
until distance ennobles it? Or were the tragedies of Puritan life so
terrible that the imagination could not help kindling, while the pangs
of the plantation are superficial and commonplace? Charlotte Bronte,
Dickens, and Thackeray were able to find a shadow even in "merrie
England". But our great romancer looked at the American life of his
time with these marvellous eyes, and could see only monotonous
sunshine. That the devil, in the form of an elderly man clad in grave
and decent attire, should lead astray the saints of Salem village, two
centuries ago, and confuse right and wrong in the mind of Goodman
Brown, was something that excited his imagination, and produced one of
his weirdest stories. But that the same devil, clad in a sombre
sophism, was confusing the sentiment of right and wrong in the mind of
his own countrymen he did not even guess. The monotonous sunshine
disappeared in the blackest storm. The commonplace prosperity ended in
tremendous war. What other man of equal power, who was not
intellectually constituted precisely as Hawthorne was, could have
stood merely perplexed and bewildered, harassed by the inability of
positive sympathy, in the vast conflict which tosses us all in its
terrible vortex?

In political theories and in an abstract view of war men may differ.
But this war is not to be dismissed as a political difference. Here is
an attempt to destroy the government of a country, not because it
oppressed any man, but because its evident tendency was to secure
universal justice under law. It is, therefore, a conspiracy against