of 190 tons burden, was launched in the harbor, and George Crowninshield went yachting in the Mediterranean in this luxurious vessel,—perhaps the first American pleasure yacht, as much admired in Europe as in New England. Many are the traditions of this romantic and prosperous era. Many are the famous names of merchants and sailors—men of great wealth and public spirit, mighty in time of war and influential in affairs of state, as Colonel Timothy Pickering, and Benjamin W. Crowninshield, esteemed at home and abroad for their enlightened, progressive, humane, public-spirited services to town and State.
Many of their stately mansions still remain to attest the wealth and fashion and gracious hospitality of that period. The spacious rooms, rich in mahogany furniture, carved wainscoting, French mirrors, and Canton china, were the scenes of elegant and memorable entertainments when Washington, Lafayette, and many other celebrated men of Europe and America visited the old town. As regards the beautiful objects of interior decoration,—now so eagerly sought, and often purchased at high prices,—Salem is one vast museum, almost every home boasting its inherited treasures, while a few houses are so richly dowered that the envy of less fortunate housekeepers can be easily pardoned.
The commerce in time went to Boston, and many of the sons of Salem followed it to help build up the wealth and character of the larger city. In fact where have not the sons, like the vessels, of Salem gone? Their memory is green in the old town and the citizen points with pride to the former residence-site of many a distinguished man she calls her son; of Bowditch, mathematician and author of the famous Navigator, of Judge Story and his no less eminent son, the poet and sculptor, of W. H. Prescott, the heroic historian of Spain, of Jones Very, poet and mystic, and of many another man of mark in law and literature.
But of all the distinguished sons of Salem no one makes so eloquent an appeal to the popular heart as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Visitors are particularly interested in the places associated with his life and romances. Of these
there are many, for the novelist lived at one time or another in half a dozen Salem houses, while several are identified with his stories. To appreciate Hawthorne one should read him here, in the old Puritan town with its ancient houses, several of which date from the seventeenth century, its commemorative tablets, ancient tombstones, family names, and the collections of the Essex Institute. With magic pen he traced the greatness and the littleness of the Puritan age, its austere piety, its intolerance, its stern repression of the lighter side of human nature, its moral grandeur and its gloomy splendor. He did for our past what Walter Scott did for the past of the mother-country. Another “Wizard of the North,” he breathed the breath of life into the dry and dusty materials of history; he summoned the great dead again to live and move among us.
The visitor will be interested in all the houses associated with his name,—the modest birthplace on Union Street, the old residence on Turner Street popularly but erroneously called the House of the Seven Gables, the Peabody homestead, beside the Old Burying Point, where he found his wife and also Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret. The visitor will be most interested, however, in the three-story, wooden building with the front door opening into the little garden at the side, after the fashion of many Salem houses, where he lived when Surveyor of the Port and wrote the immortal romance of Puritan New England. Here his wife wept over the woe of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, and hither came James T. Fields to hear the story which he so eagerly accepted. After one has read the facts of history in Felt and Upham and the diaries and chronicles of the seventeenth century, it is well to turn to Hawthorne for the realistic touch that makes the Puritan characters live once more for us. His sombre genius was at home in the Puritan atmosphere. How clearly its influence over him is acknowledged in the Introduction to The Scarlet Letter! He had the literary taste and the literary ambition, and he found his material in the musty records of the Custom-house, in the town pump so long a feature of Salem streets, in the church steeple, the ancient burying-ground, the old gabled houses, even the Main Street that had witnessed the varied pageants of more than two centuries. He was always leaving Salem and always returning, drawn by the “sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.” Here his ancestors lay buried, and here, although he has said he was happiest elsewhere, lay his inspiration. The strange group of Pyncheons, Clifford, Hepzibah and the Judge, the Gentle Child, the Minister with the Black Veil, Lady Eleanore in her rich mantle, and the tragic group of The Scarlet Letter—these are not simply the creations
of a delicate and somewhat morbid imagination, even more are they the marvellous resurrection of a life long dead.