Excerpt from The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance
"'The House of the Seven Gables' was finished yesterday," wrote Mrs. Hawthorne from Lenox on January 27, 1851. She had heard the last pages read aloud by Hawthorne on the previous evening, and the impression they made upon her was summed up in a word: "There is unspeakable grace and beauty in the conclusion, throwing back upon the sterner tragedy of the commencement an ethereal light, and a dear home-loveliness and satisfaction." The story had taken him five months to write, in the autumn and winter of 1850-1851. It had to stand the hard test of comparison with its great and immediate predecessor, "The Scarlet Letter"; and it did not disappoint those who appreciated him at his true measure. James Russell Lowell said in a letter to him: "It is with the highest art that you have typified, in the revived likeness of Judge Pyncheon to his ancestor the Colonel, that intimate relationship between the Present and the Past in the way of ancestry and descent, which historians so carefully overlook." And his friend and fellow-romancer, Herman Melville, author of "Typee," wrote: "This book is like a fine old chamber. ... It has delighted us; it has piqued a re-perusal; it has robbed us of a day, and made us a present of a whole year - of thoughtfulness. ... There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean the tragedies of human thought in its own unbiased, native and profounder workings. ..."
Nathaniel Hawthorne had left Salem, the real scene of "The House of the Seven Gables," for Lenox, early in the year in which it was chiefly written.
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