but few of
the secrets of the world and none of the weariness of shining; the
vegetation has the appearance of not having reached its majority. A
large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things, and in the
vividness of the present, the past, which died so young and had time
to produce so little, attracts but scanty attention. I doubt whether
English observers would discover any very striking trace of it in the
ancient town of Salem. Still, with all respect to a York and a
Shrewsbury, to a Toledo and a Verona, Salem has a physiognomy in which
the past plays a more important part than the present. It is of course
a very recent past; but one must remember that the dead of yesterday
are not more alive than those of a century ago. I know not of what
picturesqueness Hawthorne was conscious in his respectable birthplace;
I suspect his perception of it was less keen than his biographer
assumes it to have been; but he must have felt at least that of
whatever complexity of earlier life there had been in the country, the
elm-shadowed streets of Salem were a recognisable memento. He has made
considerable mention of the place, here and there, in his tales; but
he has nowhere dilated upon it very lovingly, and it is noteworthy
that in _The House of the Seven Gables_, the only one of his novels of
which the scene is laid in it, he has by no means availed himself of
the opportunity to give a description of it. He had of course a filial
fondness for it--a deep-seated sense of connection with it; but he
must have spent some very dreary years there, and the two feelings,
the mingled tenderness and rancour, are visible in the Introduction to
_The Scarlet Letter_.

"The old town of Salem," he writes,--"my native place,
though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and
in maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my
affections, the force of which I have never realized during
my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as the
physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried
surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of
which pretend to architectural beauty; its irregularity,
which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame; its
long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole
extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at
one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other--such
being the features