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 hill there is no special suggestion of
the dark memory that broods upon it when seen in history. An obliging