But the public phase of that epoch could not
assume an important place: it was sunk into the background, forming
merely a lurid field on which the figures of this most solemn and
terrific of all Hawthorne's works stand out in portentous relief. One
singular result of the historic location, however, is the use that was
now made of that tradition which Lowell had told him at the Old Manse,
concerning a boy who was chopping wood on the April morning of the
famous fight, and found a wounded British soldier on the field, whom he
killed with his axe. "Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral exercise,
I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent career,
and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain.... This one
circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells us
of the fight." Thus had he written, fourteen years before; and now that
sombre study furnished him with the psychology of the death-scene in the
beginning of "Septimius."
But the romance, even in this form, was again abandoned, as we learn
from the prefatory note to Pierce in "Our Old Home," written in July,
1863. He there speaks of it as an "abortive project, utterly thrown
aside," which "will never now be accomplished." In November of that
year, "The Dolliver Romance" was announced for serial publication; and
in the first page of the isolated opening scene, published in July,
1864, occurs the mention of a certain potent cordial, from which the
good doctor had received great invigoration, and which we may well
suppose was destined to tincture the whole story.
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