character as Hawthorne's. These things are always relative, and in
appreciating them everything depends upon the point of view. Mr.
Lathrop writes for American readers, who in such a matter as this are
very easy to please. Americans have as a general thing a hungry
passion for the picturesque, and they are so fond of local colour that
they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of
other countries would detect only the most neutral tints. History, as
yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a
deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and
nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming
rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light
of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet 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