[This closes the European Journal. After Mr. Hawthorne's return to
America, he published "Our Old Home," and began a new romance, of which
two chapters appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. But the breaking out of
the war stopped all imaginative work with him, and all journalizing,
until 1862, when he went to Maine for a little excursion, and began
another journal, from which I take one paragraph, giving a slight note
of his state of mind at an interesting period of his country's history.
--ED.]
West Gouldsborough, August 15th, 1862.--It is a week ago, Saturday, since
J----- and I reached this place, . . . . Mr. Barney S. Hill's.
At Hallowell, and subsequently all along the route, the country was
astir with volunteers, and the war is all that seems to be alive, and
even that doubtfully so. Nevertheless, the country certainly shows a
good spirit, the towns offering everywhere most liberal bounties, and
every able-bodied man feels an immense pull and pressure upon him to go
to the war. I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more
genuine and disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not
unalloyed with baser motives and tendencies. We met a train of cars with
a regiment or two just starting for the South, and apparently in high
spirits. Everywhere some insignia of soldiership were to be seen,--
bright buttons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and
sometimes a round-shouldered bumpkin in the entire uniform. They require
a great deal to give them the aspect of soldiers; indeed, it seems as if
they needed to have a good deal taken away and added, like the rough clay
of a sculptor as it grows to be a model. The whole talk of the bar-rooms
and every other place of intercourse was about enlisting and the war,
this being the very crisis of trial, when the voluntary system is drawing
to an end, and the draft almost immediately to commence.