It was no time for quiet observation or creative revery. A new era had
broken upon us, ushered by the wild din of trumpet and cannon, and
battle-cry; an era which was to form new men, and shape a new generation.
He must pause and listen to the agonies of this birth, striving vainly to
absorb the commotion into himself and to let it subside into clear visions
of the future. No hope! He could not pierce the war-smoke to any horizon
of better things. He who had schooled himself so unceasingly to feel with
utmost intensity the responsibility of each soul for any violence or crime
of others, could not cancel the fact of multitudinous murder by any
hypothesis of prospective benefit. Thus, in the midst of that magnificent
turbulence, he was like the central quiet of a whirlpool: all the fierce
currents met there, and seemed to pause,--but only seemed. Full of
sympathy as he was for his fellows, and agitated at times by the same
warlike impulses, he could not give himself rein as they did, nor dared
to raise any encouraging strain in his writing, as others felt that they
might freely do. His Puritan sense of justice, refined by descent and
wedded to mercy, compelled him to weigh all carefully, to debate long and
compassionately. But meantime the popular sense of justice--that same
New England sentiment, of which his own was a development--cared nothing
for these fine considerations, and Hawthorne was generally condemned by
it as being warped by his old Democratic alliances into what was called
treason.
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