Literary Friends and Acquaintance | Page 8

I saw them;
and I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the
objects of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of
getting them together.

VI.
I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or
after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from
Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the
quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the
memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the
Salem I cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables,
and suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great
many more of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of

Bridget Bishop, with the sheriff's return of execution upon it, which I
found at the Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one
of the cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs;
I could have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were
sworn to have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill,
where the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that
death-warrant remained the most vivid color of my experience of the
tragedy; I had no need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like
a stain of red in my memory.
The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and who was
transfigured to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to
the African coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town,
and showed me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it
was in the preface to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not
share my enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more
sensible that in Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about
him. No doubt the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his
romance had given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted
quiet of its own flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to
hearing a young lady say she knew a girl who said she would like to
poison Hawthorne, it seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the
West that something more of love for the great romancer would not
have been too much for him. Hawthorne had already had his say,
however, and he had not used his native town with any great tenderness.
Indeed, the advantages to any place of having a great genius born and
reared in its midst are so doubtful that it might be well for localities
designing to become the birthplaces of distinguished authors to think
twice about it. Perhaps only the largest capitals, like London and Paris,
and New York and Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an
unaccountable perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the
large cities, which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the
personal susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art.
I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest
name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem
in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there
to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first

time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most
characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact
of a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life
had been passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors,
and the conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course,
was full of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be
theoretically ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly
supposed that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America
except in Virginia, where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation.
But now I found myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and
heard its names pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare
say was as much their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names
were all strange, and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden
mansions, of a tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing
themselves in quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an
impression of family as an actuality and a force which I had never had
before, but which no Westerner