frequently determined by political events, which, more than all others,
are the most entirely foreign to his tastes and habits. He retired to
the hills of Berkshire, the eye of the world now regarding his movements.
There he lived a year or two in a little red cottage upon the
"Stockbridge Bowl", as a small lake near that town is called. In this
retreat he wrote _The House of the Seven Gables_, which more deeply
confirmed the literary position already acquired for him by the first
romance. The scene is laid in Salem, as if he could not escape a strange
fascination in the witch-haunted town of our early history. It is the
same black canvas upon which plays the rainbow-flash of his fancy, never,
in its brightest moment, more than illuminating the gloom. This marks
all his writings. They have a terrible beauty, like the siren, and their
fascination is as sure.

After six years of absence Hawthorne returned to Concord, where he
purchased a small house formerly occupied by Orphic Alcott. When that
philosopher came into possession it was a miserable little house of
two peaked gables. But the genius which recreated itself in devising
graceful summer-houses, like that for Mr. Emerson, already noticed,
soon smoothed the new residence into some kind of comeliness. It was
an old house when Mr. Alcott entered it, but his tasteful finger
touched it with picturesque grace.

Not like a tired old drudge of a house, rusting into unlionored decay,
but with a modest freshness that does not belie the innate sobriety of
a venerable New England farm-house, the present residence of our
author stands, withdrawn a few yards from the high-road to Boston,
along which marched the British soldiers to Concord bridge. It lies at
the foot of a wooded hill, a neat house of a "rusty olive hue", with a
porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end. The