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selves. In Mr. Peabody's house in Danvers, we cannot 

 believe we are in this century. It is a bit of colonial 

 England, and still transports us to the mother country. 

 Later, style was lost utterly for fifty years. 



There is good iron work down Central street, and in 

 front of Dr. Gate's house. One fine fence remains by 

 the Osgood house in South Salem. Posts remain else- 

 where of beautiful design as at the Baldwin house. How 

 important these things are, and what effect they have 

 upon the imagination, especially upon childhood, let us 

 measure by picture books. They are a living picture 

 book. Micklefield's Indian, and the image over the Pick- 

 man house door, the wooden images on the Crowuinshield 

 farm in Danvers, and the grotesque carving over the 

 engine house there, the carving on the upper common 

 gate, the pine apple with its bright imitative color, the 

 figures in the Derby-houses' grounds, and the carvings 

 on Macintire's works, slender in amount as they all 

 were, were to a Salem boy forty years ago what St. 

 Mary's Redcliffe was to Chatterton, they created him and 

 enriched his imagination. Hawthorne need not have 

 complained of Salem, nor James for him. Had he been 

 born in Lynn, Lowell, or some other fiercely new Ameri- 

 can town, he never would have been Hawthorne. Essex 

 county, out of the vortex, and from its old stock, history 

 and wealth, has had more genius than any other county ; 

 and Salem at this hour with this Institute, and in some 

 measure through it, has more the ripeness and tone of 

 the old world, maturity, ease, taste and comfort, and 

 leisure and repose, and what they bring, than any other 

 town. 



Boston now is getting filled with open air statues and 

 monumental work, which, to the boj^, will inspire him with 

 historic suggestion and imaginative delight. Our hitherto 

 bare life of the last half century is getting artistical. 



