This ballad is as long as the cruise, and the rhythm of it seems to show
that the writer had not quite got his sea-legs on, in boarding the
poetic craft. Especially is he to be commiserated on that unhappy
necessity to which the length of the verse compels him, of keeping "the
Eastern shore on board for forty leagues," in the first stanza; but it
was due to its historic and associative value to give it entire.

Perhaps, after all, it was a shrewd insight that caused the Hathornes to
take to the sea. Salem's greatest glory was destined for a term to lie
in that direction. Many of these old New England seaports have
magnificent recollections of a commercial grandeur hardly to be guessed
from their aspect to-day. Castine, Portsmouth, Wiscasset, Newburyport,
and the rest,--they controlled the carrying of vast regions, and
fortune's wheel whirled amid their wharves and warehouses with a merry
and reassuring sound. Each town had its special trade, and kept the
monopoly. Portsmouth and Newburyport ruled the trade with Martinique,
Guadaloupe, and Porto Rico, sending out fish and bringing back sugar;
Gloucester bargained with the West Indies for rum, and brought coffee
and dye-stuffs from Surinam; Marblehead had the Bilboa business; and
Salem, most opulent of all, usurped the Sumatra, African, East Indian,
Brazilian, and Cayenne commerce. By these new avenues over the ocean
many men brought home wealth that literally made princes of them, and
has left permanent traces in the solid and stately homes they built,
still crowded with precious heirlooms, as well as in the refinement
nurtured therein, and the thrifty yet generous character they gave to
the town. Among these successful merchants was Simon Forrester, who
married Nathaniel Hawthorne's great-aunt Rachel, and died in 1817,
leaving an immense property. Him Hawthorne speaks of in "The Custom
House"; alluding to "old King Derby, old Billy Gray, old Simon
Forrester, and many another magnate of his day; whose powdered head,