instinct. He would listen with rapture to the unaccompanied voice; and I
have been always much touched by a little incident recorded in the
"English Note-Books": "There is a woman who has several times passed
through this Hanover Street in which we live, stopping occasionally to
sing songs under the windows; and last evening ... she came and sang
'Kathleen O'Moore' richly and sweetly. Her voice rose up out of the dim,
chill street, and made our hearts throb in unison with it as we sat in
our comfortable drawing-room. I never heard a voice that touched me more
deeply. Somebody told her to go away, and she stopped like a nightingale
suddenly shot." Hawthorne goes on to speak with wonder of the waste of
such a voice, "making even an unsusceptible heart vibrate like a
harp-string"; and it is pleasant to know that Mrs. Hawthorne had the
woman called within, from the street. So that his soul was open to
sound. But the unmusicalness of New England, less marked now than
formerly, is only a symbol, perhaps,--grievous that it should be so!--of
the superior temperance of our race. For, by one of those strange
oversights that human nature is guilty of, Scotland, in opening the door
for song and dance and all the merry crew of mirth, seems to admit quite
freely two vagabonds that have no business there, Squalor and
Drunkenness. Yet notwithstanding this grave unlikeness between the two
peoples, Hawthorne seems to have found a connecting clew, albeit
unwittingly, when he remarked, as he did, on his first visit to Glasgow,
that in spite of the poorer classes there excelling even those of
Liverpool in filth and drunkenness, "they are a better looking people
than the English (and this is true of all classes), more intelligent of
aspect, with more regular, features." There is certainly one quality
linking the two nations together which has not yet been commented on, in
relation to Hawthorne; and this is the natural growth of the weird in
the popular mind, both here and in Scotland. It is not needful to enter
into this at all at length. In the chapter on Salem I have suggested