About the ruins is a quiet, modest,
New England neighborhood. There is not much to see at the site of the
Hawthorne Cottage, yet every day fashionable folk from New York and
Boston and a score of western cities drive thither with fine equipages
and jingling harness, halt, and look curiously for a minute or two at
the green turf of the dooryard and the crumbling brick walls of the
cottage site."
To go from Salem to Lenox was to contrast very forcibly the somewhat
oppressed spirits of historical association with the healthy grandeur
of nature. The books my father wrote here embrace this joy of
untheoried, peaceful, or gloriously perturbed life of sky and land.
Theory of plot or principle was as much beneath him as the
cobble-stones; from self-righteous harangues he turned as one who had
heard a divine voice that alone deserved to declare. He taught as
Nature does, always leading to thoughts of something higher than the
dictum of men, and nobler than their greatest beauty of action. He
said it was difficult for him to write in the presence of such a view
as the "little red house" commanded. It certainly must have been a
scene that expressed otherwise unutterable sublimity. But if my father
struggled to bring his human power forward in the presence of an
outlook that so reminded him of God, he did bring it forward there,
and we perceive the aroma and the color which his work could not have
gained so well in a town or a village covert.
Mrs. Hawthorne's letters, written for the pleasure of her family, in
spite of her growing cares, continue to be a source of intelligence to
us:--
MY DEAR LIZZIE,--I have just received your letter, for which I am very
glad.
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