In
this, then, we perceive one of the formative effects on Hawthorne's mind
of his stay at Brunswick. Those four years of student life gave him a
thousand eyes for observing and analyzing character. He learned then,
also, to choose men on principles of his own. Always afterward he was
singularly independent in selecting friends; often finding them even in
unpopular and out-of-the-way persons. The affinity between himself and
Bridge was ratified by forty years of close confidence; and Hawthorne
never swerved from his early loyalty to Pierce, though his faithfulness
gave him severe trials, both public and private, afterward. I am not of
those who explain this steadfastness by a theory of early prepossession
on Hawthorne's part, blinding him to Pierce's errors or defects. There
is ample proof in the correspondence between Bridge and himself, which I
have seen, that he constantly and closely scanned his distinguished
friend the President's character with his impartial and searching eye
for human character, whatsoever its relations to himself. I believe if
he had ever found that the original nucleus of honor and of a certain
candor which had charmed him in Pierce was gone, he would, provided it
seemed his duty, have rejected the friendship. As it was, he saw his old
friend and comrade undergoing changes which he himself thought
hazardous, saw him criticised in a post where no one ever escaped the
severest criticism, and beheld him return to private life amid
unpopularity, founded, as he thought, upon misinterpretation of what was
perhaps error, but not dishonesty.
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