Part 24 (2/2)

Browning. He was very agreeable, and seemed delighted to see me again.

At lunch, we had Lord Dufferin, the Honorable Mrs. Norton, and Mr.

Sterling (author of the ”Cloister Life of Charles V.”), with whom we are to dine on Sunday.

You would be stricken dumb, to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur.

A German artist has come to me with a letter of introduction, and a request that I will sit to him for a portrait in bas-relief. To this, likewise, I have a.s.sented! subject to the condition that I shall have my leisure.

The stir of this London life, somehow or other, 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.

I have had time to see Bennoch only once.

[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, Sat.u.r.day, 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 soldiers.h.i.+p were to be seen,-- bright b.u.t.tons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and sometimes a round-shouldered b.u.mpkin 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.

END OF VOL. II.

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