But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born.  I believe, now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet.  I got my friend to show me

       “——­the breezy dome of groves,
        The shadows of Deering’s woods,”

because they were in one of Longfellow’s loveliest and tenderest poems; and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the

“—–­black wharves and the slips, And the sea-tides tossing free, And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, And the beauty and mystery of the ships, And the magic of the sea,”

mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond vision of the poet’s past.  I am in doubt whether it was at this time or a later time that I went to revere

       “—­the dead captains as they lay
        In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
        where they in battle died,”

but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under

       “—­the trees which shadow each well-known street,
        As they balance up and down,”

for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I well remember.

The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as material that might be turned into literature, or that might be associated with it somehow.  I do not know how I managed to keep these preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them, which I had early learnt, helped me to do it.  I was at that particular moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them together.

VI.

I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or after I had passed a day or two in Salem.  As Salem is on the way from Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem I cared for.  I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop, with the sheriff’s return of execution upon it, which I found at the Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could have got on with less.  I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged.  But that death-warrant remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of red in my memory.