A Study of Hawthorne | Page 6

years since as to take us out
of our bearings, in considering its present aspect. Pace its quiet,

thoroughfares awhile, and you will find them leading softly and easily
into the past.
You arrive in the ordinary way, by railroad, and at first the place wears
a disappointingly commonplace aspect. It does not seem impressively
venerable; hacks and horse-cars rattle and tinkle along the streets,
people go about their affairs in the usual way, without any due
understanding that they ought to be picturesque and should devote
themselves to falling into effective groups posed in vistas of historic
events. Is antiquity, then, afraid to assert itself, even here in this
stronghold, so far as to appear upon the street? No. But one must
approach these old towns with reverence, to get at their secrets. They
will not yield inspiration or meaning save to an imaginative effort.
Under the influence of that, the faded past, traced in sympathetic ink, as
it were, revives and starts into distinctness. Passing down Essex Street,
or striking off from its modest bustle a little way, we come upon shy,
ungainly relics of other times. Gray gambrel-roofed houses stand out
here and there, with thick-throated chimneys that seem to hold the
whole together. Again you pass buildings of a statelier cast, with
carved pilasters on the front and arched doorways bordered with some
simple, dainty line of carving; old plaster-covered urns, perhaps, stand
on the brick garden-wall, and the plaster is peeling off in flakes that
hang long and reluctant before falling to the ground. There are quaint
gardens everywhere, with sometimes an entrance arched with iron
gracefully wrought by some forgotten colonial Quentin Matsys, and
always with their paths bordered by prim and fragrant box, and grass
that keeps rich and green in an Old World way, by virtue of some secret
of growth caught from fresher centuries than ours. If your steps have
the right magic in them, you will encounter presently one of the ancient
pumps like to the Town Pump from which Hawthorne drew that clear
and sparkling little stream of revery and picture which has flowed into
so many and such distant nooks, though the pump itself has now
disappeared, having been directly in the line of the railroad. But, best of
all, by ascending Witch Hill you may get a good historic outlook over
the past and the present of the place. Looking down from here you
behold the ancient city spread before you, rich in chimneys and
overshadowed by soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts

itself like a huge gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating
in a square top or a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its
look, rising slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating
pauses, to reach a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is
lighted at intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, and wears
a probable aspect of being the one which the young dreamer would
have chosen for the standpoint of his "Sights from a Steeple"; and the
two kinds of spire seem to typify well the Puritan gloom and the
Puritan aspiration that alike found expression on this soil. Off beyond
the gray and sober-tinted town is the sea, which in this perspective
seems to rise above it and to dominate the place with its dim,
half-threatening blue; as indeed it has always ruled its destinies in great
measure, bringing first the persecuted hither and then inviting so many
successive generations forth to warlike expedition, or Revolutionary
privateering or distant commercial enterprise. With the sea, too,
Hawthorne's name again is connected, as we shall presently notice.
Then, quitting the brimming blue, our eyes return over the "flat,
unvaried surface covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of
which pretend to architectural beauty," with its "irregularity which is
neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame"; and retracing the line
upon which Hawthorne has crowded the whole history of Salem, in
"Main Street," [Footnote: See The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told
Tales.] we fall to pondering upon the deeds that gave this hill its name.
At its foot a number of tanneries and mills are grouped, from which
there are exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that
once overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind
it the land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the
earliest period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as
complete as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging
cabalistic webs from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine
trees that grow upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars
for a world full of witches. But here on the