Ch. 7 - Last Years

Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is not much to tell
that I have not already told. He returned to America in the summer of
1860, and took up his abode in the house he had bought at Concord
before going to Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been
brief. He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted upon the
fact of his being an intense American, and of his looking at all
things, during his residence in Europe, from the standpoint of that
little clod of western earth which he carried about with him as the
good Mohammedan carries the strip of carpet on which he kneels down to
face towards Mecca. But it does not appear, nevertheless, that he
found himself treading with any great exhilaration the larger section
of his native soil upon which, on his return, he disembarked. Indeed,
the closing part of his life was a period of dejection, the more acute
that it followed directly upon seven years of the happiest
opportunities he was to have known. And his European residence had
been brightest at the last; he had broken almost completely with those
habits of extreme seclusion into which he was to relapse on his return
to Concord. "You would be stricken dumb," he wrote from London,
shortly before leaving it for the last time, "to see how quietly I
accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my
engagements without a murmur.... The stir of this London life, somehow
or other," he adds in the same letter, "has done me a wonderful deal
of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for
if I had my choice I should leave undone almost all the things I do."
"When he found himself once more on the old ground," writes Mr.
Lathrop, "with the old struggle for subsistence staring him in the
face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of
depression would follow." There is indeed not a little sadness in the
thought of Hawthorne's literary gift, light, delicate, exquisite,
capricious, never too abundant, being charged with the heavy burden of
the maintenance of a family. We feel that it was not intended for such
grossness, and that in a world ideally constituted he would have
enjoyed a liberal pension, an assured subsistence, and have been able
to produce his charming prose only when the fancy took him.

The brightness of the outlook at home was not made greater by the
explosion of the Civil War in the spring of 1861. These months, and
the three years that followed them, were not a cheerful time for any
persons but army-contractors; but over Hawthorne the war-cloud appears
to have dropped a permanent shadow. The whole affair was a bitter
disappointment to him, and a fatal blow to that happy faith