chancellor-like stateliness of his wit, in prose, to Hawthorne's
resonant periods, and dignity that is never weakened though admirably
modified by humor. Altogether, if one could compound Bunyan and Milton,
combine the realistic imagination of the one with the other's passion
for ideas, pour the ebullient undulating prose style of the poet into
the veins of the allegorist's firm, leather-jerkined English, and make a
modern man and author of the whole, the result would not be alien to
Hawthorne.

Yet that native love of historic murkiness and mossy tradition which we
have been learning to associate with Salem would have to be present in
this compound being, to make the likeness complete. And this, with the
trains of revery and the cast of imagination which it must naturally
breed, would be the one thing not easily supplied, for it is the
predisposition which gives to all encircling qualities in Hawthorne
their peculiar coloring and charm. That predisposition did not find its
sustenance only in the atmosphere of sadness and mystery that hangs over
the story of Salem; bygone generations have left in the town a whole
legacy of legend and shudder-rousing passages of family tradition, with
many well-supported tales of supernatural hauntings; and it is worth
while to notice how frequent and forcible a use Hawthorne makes of this
enginery of local gossip and traditional horror, in preparing the way
for some catastrophe that is to come, or in overshooting the mark with
some exaggerated rumor which, by pretending to disbelieve it, he causes
to have just the right effect upon the reader's mind. Some of the old
houses that stand endwise to the street, looking askant at the
passer,--especially if he is a stranger in town,--might be veritable
treasuries of this sort of material. Gray, close-shuttered, and
retiring, they have not so much the look of death; it is more that they
are poor, widowed homes that have mournfully long outlived their lords.