summoning him to potent incantation over the abyss of time; but from
this it was easy to conceive it deepened and intensified in him a
hundred-fold. Moreover, in his youth and growing-time, the influence
itself was stronger, the suggestive aspect of the town more salient. If
you read even now, on the ground itself, the story of the settlement and
the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate
suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts
of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly
from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the
founders themselves.

John White, the English Puritan divine, who, with the "Dorchester
Adventurers," established the first colony at Cape Ann, was moved to
this by the wish to establish in Massachusetts Bay a resting-place for
the fishermen who came over from Dorchester in England, so that they
might be kept under religious influences. This was the origin of Salem;
for the emigrants moved, three years later, to this spot, then called
Naumkeag. In the Indian name they afterward found a proof, as they
supposed, that the Indians were an offshoot of the Jews, because it
"proves to be perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by
interpretation, the bosom of consolation." Later, they named it Salem,
"for the peace," as Cotton Mather says, "which they had and hoped in
it"; and when Hugh Peters on one occasion preached at Great Pond, now
Wenham, he took as his text, "At Enon, near to Salim, because there was
much water there." This playing with names is a mere surface indication
of the ever-present scriptural analogy which these men were constantly
tracing in all their acts. Cut off by their intellectual asceticism from
any exertion of the imagination in literature, and denying themselves
all that side of life which at once develops and rhythmically restrains
the sense of earthly beauty, they compensated themselves by running