So quaintly characteristic is its commencement that I am tempted to give its opening paragraphs in full:-- "There is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically scaled seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate. Of course, the general heart-quake of the country long ago knocked at my cottage-door, and compelled me, reluctantly, to suspend the contemplation of certain fantasies to which, according to my harmless custom, I was endeavoring to give a sufficiently lifelike aspect to admit of their figuring in a romance. As I make no pretensions to statecraft or soldiership, and could promote the common weal neither by valor nor counsel, it seemed at first a pity that I should be debarred from such unsubstantial business as I had contrived for myself, since nothing more genuine was to be substituted for it. "But I magnanimously considered that there is a kind of treason in inoculating one's self from the universal fear and sorrow, and thinking one's idle thoughts in the dread time of civil war; and could a man be so cold and hard-hearted, he would better deserve to be sent to Fort Warren than many who have found their way thither on the score of violent but misdirected sympathies. "I remember the touching rebuke administered by King Charles to that rural squire, the echo of whose hunting-horn came to the poor monarch's ear on the morning before a battle, where the sovereignty and constitution of England were at stake. So I gave myself up to reading newspapers, and listening to the click of the telegraph, like other people, until after a great many months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that I determined to look a little more closely at matters with my own eyes." It was in the early days of March that Hawthorne, in company with his friend and publisher, Wm. D. Ticknor, left Boston on a visit to Washington and the seat of war, then in its immediate vicinity. The sketches of natural scenery are touched with the same pencil that gave us the charming picture of daily life at the Old Manse. It was in New York that the travellers had the first clear intimation of the unnatural order of things consequent on a state of civil war. Here they found a rather prominent display of military goods at the shop windows--such as swords, with gilded scabbards and trappings, epaulettes, carbines, revolvers, and sometimes a great iron cannon at the edge of the pavement, as if Mars had dropped one of his pocket-pistols there while hurrying to the field.