The Pilgrims had their seasons of storm and stress, but there came to them too halcyon days like this when the mayflower bloomed in all the woodland about them, the mourning cloak butterflies danced with joy down the sunny glades, and the bay spread its wonderful blue beneath their feet in the delicious promise of June. Nor is it any wonder that in spite of hardships and disasters manifold they yet found heart to write home that it was a “fayere lande and bountiful.”
But for all the lure of Plymouth woods with their fragrance of trailing arbutus, from all the grandeur of the wide outlook from Manomet Heights, the hearts of all who come to Plymouth must lead them back to the resting place of the fathers on the brow of the little hill in the midst of the town. There where the grass was not yet green and the buttercups that will later shine in gold have put forth but the tiniest beginnings of their fuzzy, three-parted leaves, I watched the sun sink, big and red in a golden mist, over a land of whose coming material greatness Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims could have had no inkling. Seaward the tropic bloom of the water was all gone, and there as the sun passed I saw the cool steel of the bay catch the last rays in little dimples of silver light. Manomet withdrew, blue and mysterious in the haze of nightfall. Out over the Gurnet, and beyond, the sky caught purples from the colors in the west, and there, dropping below the horizon line, east northeast toward England, I saw a sail vanish in the soft haze as if it might be the first Mayflower, sailing away from the heavy-hearted Pilgrims, toward England and home. The sun’s last ray touched it with a fleck of rose as it passed, a rose like that which tipped the petals of the mayflowers that I held in my hand, mayflowers that sent up to me in the coolness of the gathering April night a fragrance as aromatic and beloved as is the memory of the lives of the Pilgrims that slept all about me on the brow of Burial Hill. Bradford wrote gravely and simply the chronicles of these, and no more, yet the fervent faith and sturdy love for fair play, unquenchable in the hearts of these men, breathes from every page, a fragrance that shall go forth on the winds of the world for all time.
XI
OLD SALEM TOWN
A Scarlet Letter Day in the Witch City
Over all the hum of business activity that rises from Salem town sleeps the glamour of old-time memories. Factories drone, traffic roars or clatters, and the multiple message of modern civilization goes forth to eye and ear, but among all these sits the ancient city dreaming long dreams and careless of the children of to-day.
Along Charter Street and down Derby the once stately mansions of the great merchants of another century droop in senile decay, knee deep in the dust and debris that immigrant, alien races scatter, and note it and them no more than they do the rats in the wainscoting. The thoughts of the old houses are busy still with ships in the China Sea, battling round the Cape of Good Hope with the Flying Dutchman, or running down the trades from Senegambia, Surinam or Ceylon, and their upper window eyes stare unwinkingly across rotten wharves and out to the island gaps in the horizon of the bay, watching for the sails that come no more. So the world thinks of Salem to-day as the city of romantic memories. It may weave cotton cloth and tan hides and make shoes and carry on a thousand other inventions of modern business, yet we who dwell away from it, far or near, will always know it best for its romance of elder days, the dread delusion of its witch finding, the astounding deeds of its merchant sailors, and in the end most of all perhaps, for its man of dreams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who dreamed there the grim story of “The Scarlet Letter” and made it live for all men for all time.
More and more, as the years slip by, Hawthorne comes to be the presiding genius of Salem, and reverent pilgrims in increasing numbers come to seek the few abiding traces of his life there; and though they go to Gallows Hill and also view the relics of the old merchants and their portraits and the pictures of their ships, they go first to the house where Hawthorne was born, to the other houses where he lived and worked, and to the sleepy, dignified old Custom House from whose drab duties grew the strange flower of weird romance. It may be that out of the Ghettos and Warsaws which now surround the old Custom House will come again as great merchants as once dwelt there, or as great a writer of romance as he who worked on its scarred old wooden desk now preserved with such care in the Essex Institute, but one may be pardoned for having his doubts. The world matures rapidly, and the heritage of primitive environment and primitive opportunity is smoothed out by the steel roller of modern invention. New ports no longer wait the seaman adventurer. Steam makes all ports common, and the knowledge of them common, to all the world. We shall look long for the successors to Derby and Peabody and their ilk, and we may well doubt if ships like The Grand Turk, Rajah and Astræa will sail again from any future Salem.
One angle of “The House of the Seven Gables.”
