And when he found himself once more on the old
ground, with the old struggle for subsistence staring him steadily in
the face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of
depression would follow. Just as this reaction had set in, the breaking
out of civil war threw upon Hawthorne, before he had time to brace
himself for the shock, an immense burden of sorrowing sympathy. The
conflict of feelings which it excited on the public side has been
sketched; and that alone should have been enough to make the years of
strife a time of continuous gloom and anxiety to him; but it would be
losing sight of a very large element in his distress, not to add that he
mourned over the multitude of private griefs which were the harvest of
battle as acutely as if they had all been his own losses. His intense
imagination burned them too deeply into his heart. How can we call this
weakness, which involved such strength of manly tenderness and sympathy?
"Hawthorne's life was shortened by the war," Mr. Lowell says. Expressing
this view once, to a friend, who had served long in the Union army, I
was met with entire understanding. He told me that his own father, a
stanch Unionist, though not in military service, was as certainly
brought to his death by the war as any of the thousands who fell in
battle. In how wide and touchingly humane a sense may one apply to
Hawthorne Marvell's line on Cromwell's death,--
"To Love and Grief the fatal writ was signed!"
His decline was gradual, and semi-conscious, as if from the first he
foresaw that he could not outlive these trials.
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