SALEM.
Let us now look more closely at the local setting. To understand
Hawthorne's youth and his following development, we must at once
transport ourselves into another period, and imagine a very different
kind of life from the one we know best. It hardly occurs to readers,
that an effort should be made to imagine the influences surrounding a
man who has so recently passed away as Hawthorne. It was in 1864 that he
died,--little more than a decade since. But he was born sixty years
before, which places his boyhood and early youth in the first quarter of
the century. The lapse since then has been a long one in its effects;
almost portentously so. The alterations in manners, relations,
opportunities, have been great. Restless and rapid in their action,
these changes have multiplied the mystery of distance a hundred-fold
between us and that earlier time; so that there is really a considerable
space to be traversed before we can stand in thought where Hawthorne
then stood in fact. Goldsmith says, in that passage of the Life of
Parnell which Irving so aptly quotes in his biography of the writer: "A
poet while living is seldom an object sufficiently great to attract much
attention.... When his fame is increased by time, it is then too late to
investigate the peculiarities of his disposition; the dews of morning
are past, and we vainly try to continue the chase by the meridian
splendor." The bustle of American life certainly does away with "the
dews of morning" very promptly; and it is not quite a simple matter to
reproduce the first growth of a life which began almost with the
century.
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