Sketches from Memory (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") — Inside the Classic

The Inland Port as Anti-Sea

Hawthorne's eye for detail turns Burlington into a catalogue of deficiencies when measured against the ocean. The painted lighthouse on a green island, the wharves and sloops, all 'reminded me of some fishing-town on the sea-coast'—but only as a reminder of what they are not. The lake's water lacks salt, its smell is 'unpleasant and sickly,' and the vessels show 'a great lack of tar about the seams and rigging.' The men who work the boats wear coats 'preponderously long-tailed,' a sartorial absurdity at the masthead. Hawthorne's comparisons are not mere description; they are a quiet indictment of a place that mimics the sea without understanding it. The reader is invited to see the inland port as a stage where the props of maritime life are assembled but the drama never truly begins.

The Irish Swarm and the Miracle of the Perch

A striking shift occurs when Hawthorne turns from the lake to its human population. He notes 'the great number of Irish emigrants' who 'swarm in huts and mean dwellings near the lake' and 'elbow the native citizens entirely out of competition in their own line.' Every species of bodily labor is their prerogative. Yet their multitude exceeds any possible demand for their services, and Hawthorne wonders how a third of them can earn even 'a daily glass of whiskey.' Some fish for perch, but the catch is too small to feed so many. He dryly remarks that 'a miracle there certainly must have been, and a daily one.' The observation is precise and unsentimental: the Irish are both a labor force and a puzzle, their survival a statistical impossibility that Hawthorne leaves unresolved.

The Narrator's Detached Gaze

Throughout the sketch, Hawthorne maintains a cool, analytical distance. He is a traveler who observes but does not participate. The boatmen who brought him from Peru are dismissed in a single clause; the Irish are described as a 'tribe' overflowing into the States. His comparisons are often deflating: the lake's smell is 'sickly,' the sailors are 'queer figures,' the perch are 'little fishes.' This detachment is not coldness but a method. By refusing to romanticize the inland port, Hawthorne forces the reader to see it as it is—a place of borrowed forms and insufficient realities. The sketch becomes a study in perception, where the narrator's own position as an outsider is the only fixed point. The reader is left to wonder what Hawthorne would make of a true seaport, or whether his eye would find deficiency there as well.

Hawthorne's sketch rewards attention to its small, precise judgments. The reader should note how each observation—the lack of tar, the long-tailed coats, the insufficient perch—builds a cumulative portrait of a place defined by what it lacks. The narrator's voice is the real subject: a consciousness that measures the world against an absent standard and finds it wanting. This is not a guide to Burlington but a demonstration of how a skeptical mind processes the unfamiliar.

Hawthorne’s eye for the restless, half-finished quality of Burlington stayed with me — how the river-boat men lacked the sea’s true cadence. That same quiet noticing, the way a place holds its contradictions, I found again in Prose Idylls, New and Old — Key Ideas to Explore. It felt less like traveling elsewhere, more like sitting beside someone who sees the tilt in everything.