The shock of such an accident was by no means the right sort of tonic for a man of Hawthorne's sensitive disposition when he was already feeble and almost ill. In April, 1862, he had been to Washington, and the things that impressed him there were noted down in an "Atlantic Monthly" paper, entitled "Chiefly About War Matters." At Washington, also, Leutze painted a portrait of him for General Pierce. In July, he took a brief trip with his son to the Maine coast, and began a new journal. There were no other changes of scene for him; the monotony of his life at The Wayside was seldom broken. That this period was for him one of unmitigated gloom cannot truthfully be predicated; he enjoyed his home, he had the society of his wife and children; he had many small and quiet pleasures. But there was likewise much to make him sorrowful, and the tide of vitality was steadily ebbing away. In May, 1863, James Russell Lowell invited him to Elmwood, and Hawthorne agreed to go, but he was finally prevented from doing so by a troublesome cold. The slow and mysterious disease, which was to prove fatal within a year, continued to make inroads upon his constitution. After the publication of "Our Old Home," in the autumn of 1863, there is no certain record of his condition or his proceedings, beyond this, that he went on declining, and that--having abandoned the two preceding phases of his new fiction--he attempted to write the resultant form of it, which was to have been brought out as "The Dolliver Romance." Although the title had not yet been determined upon, he consented to begin a serial publication of the work in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864. But he wrote to Mr. Fields: "I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through.... I can think of no title for the unborn Romance. Always heretofore I have waited till it was quite complete, before attempting to name it, and I fear I shall have to do so now." On the 1st of December, he dispatched the manuscript of the first chapter, with the title of the whole. But he could not follow it up with more, and wrote, about the middle of January, 1864: "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success." At the end of February: "I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it..., I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death." From this time on he accomplished no work which he was willing to send to the press, although he had among his papers the two fragmentary scenes from "The Dolliver Romance" that were posthumously printed.