"--the trees which shadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,"

for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues
bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I
well remember.

The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic
expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as
material that might be turned into literature, or that might be
associated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these
preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them,
which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular
moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw
them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how 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