the best, to alter slightly the famous Horatian line, but he never
could quite make up his mind whether he altogether approved of its
wisdom, and therefore followed it but falteringly.

"'Better to bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of,'

"expressed the philosophy to which Hawthorne was thus borne
imperceptibly. Unjustly, but yet not unreasonably, he was looked upon
as a pro-slavery man, and suspected of Southern sympathies. In
politics he was always halting between two opinions; or, rather,
holding one opinion, he could never summon up his courage to adhere
to it and it only."

The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs
were just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his
mind held the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts
of principle and passion around him, as among those of which he read
and mused. If you ask why this was so--how it was that the tragedy of
an old Italian garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the
crime of a provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with
romantic appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see
a Carolina slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity--you must
take your answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any
of his stories the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition. His
genius obeyed its law. When he wrote like a disembodied intelligence
of events with which his neighbors' hearts were quivering--when the
same half-smile flutters upon his lips in the essay _About War
Matters_, sketched as it were upon the battle-field, as in that upon
_Fire Worship_, written in the rural seclusion of the mossy Manse--ah