of my native town it would be quite as
reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
chequer-board."

But he goes on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense
of intensely belonging to it--that the spell of the continuity of his
life with that of his predecessors has never been broken. "It is no
matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of the old
wooden houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of site and
sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chilliest of social
atmospheres;--all these and whatever faults besides he may see or
imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as
powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise." There is a
very American quality in this perpetual consciousness of a spell on
Hawthorne's part; it is only in a country where newness and change and
brevity of tenure are the common substance of life, that the fact of
one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a
single spot would become an element of one's morality. It is only an
imaginative American that would feel urged to keep reverting to this
circumstance, to keep analysing and cunningly considering it.

The Salem of to-day has, as New England towns go, a physiognomy of its
own, and in spite of Hawthorne's analogy of the disarranged
draught-board, it is a decidedly agreeable one. The spreading elms in
its streets, the proportion of large, square, honourable-looking
houses, suggesting an easy, copious material life, the little gardens,
the grassy waysides, the open windows, the air of space and salubrity
and decency, and above all the intimation of larger antecedents--these
things compose a picture which has little of the element that painters
call depth of tone, but which is not without something that they would
admit to be style. To English eyes the oldest and most honourable of
the smaller American towns must seem in a manner primitive and rustic;
the shabby, straggling, village-quality appears marked in them, and
their social tone is not unnaturally inferred to bear the village
stamp. Village-like they are, and it would be no gross incivility to
describe them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic villages.
But even a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are
no overshadowing squires, where the "county" has no social existence,
where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of
gentility, p