84 Singing Valleys 



and who did no more than her duty. From her unresponsive 

 bosom men turned for love to that other mother, the sea. 



The salt tang seasoned New England speech, as the salt 

 herring seasoned New England farmlands. The sea's loneliness 

 turned sea captain's sons to transcendentalism. Experiences of 

 coral islands and fantastic ports made comprehensible to the 

 New England mind the visionary flights of Ezekiel and the 

 Apostle John. Goethe says somewhere that no man walks with 

 impunity under palms. The men of Marblehead and Hingham 

 who had watched "the sun come up like thunder, out o' 

 China cross the bay," brought home to the big, square, quiet 

 houses with their many-paned, shining windows, and handed 

 on to their sons and daughters, something more than teak- 

 wood chests, carved ivory chessmen and rolls of pale-colored 

 Chinese silks. Who can say what heritage was bequeathed to 

 Hawthorne by his father's dying of yellow fever in Surinam 

 and not of God-fearing old age in the four-poster in the north 

 bedroom of the house on Salem's Herbert Street? 



In Virginia, tobacco decreed a society of plantations and few 

 towns. As wealth and luxury increased, these remained on the 

 land. The country snubbed the streets. Too, the tobacco's 

 rapid exhaustion of the soil advanced the planters further and 

 further up the rivers away from the coasts. But in New Eng- 

 land, where prosperity could not be harvested from the soil, 

 men's thoughts turned to the sea. The building of ships and 

 the sailing of them created a society of small, coast villages; 

 of houses ranged along an elm-shaded street or fronting on a 

 common which provided pasturage for the cows. Behind each 

 house stretched straight backward a deep, narrow "farm-lot," 

 in which the family worked to raise their own food, and no 

 more. 



The village street ran down to quiet water. There catboats 

 and dories bobbed on the tide. On tall ways, proud ships took 

 form that would soon sail to Madagascar and Pernambuco. 

 All day the ship-carpenters' hammers rang in the village. All 

 day, and through months and even years there was talk of the 



