The House of the Seven Gables | Page 6

perhaps choose to assign an actual locality to the
imaginary events of this narrative. If permitted by the historical
connection,--which, though slight, was essential to his plan,--the author
would very willingly have avoided anything of this nature. Not to speak
of other objections, it exposes the romance to an inflexible and
exceedingly dangerous species of criticism, by bringing his
fancy-pictures almost into positive contact with the realities of the
moment. It has been no part of his object, however, to describe local
manners, nor in any way to meddle with the characteristics of a
community for whom he cherishes a proper respect and a natural regard.
He trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending by laying out
a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights, and appropriating a
lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of
materials long in use for constructing castles in the air. The personages
of the tale--though they give themselves out to be of ancient stability
and considerable prominence--are really of the author's own making, or
at all events, of his own mixing; their virtues can shed no lustre, nor
their defects redound, in the remotest degree, to the discredit of the
venerable town of which they profess to be inhabitants. He would be
glad, therefore, if-especially in the quarter to which he alludes-the book
may be read strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with
the clouds overhead than with any portion of the actual soil of the
County of Essex.
LENOX, January 27, 1851.

THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES by Nathaniel Hawthorne
I. The Old Pyncheon Family
HALFWAY down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands
a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing
towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney
in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old
Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted
before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the

Pyncheon Elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom
failed to turn down Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the
shadow of these two antiquities, --the great elm-tree and the
weather-beaten edifice.
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a
human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm
and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and
accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be
worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest
and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity,
which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the
story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of
two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a
bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could
prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a
similar period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work
with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House,
otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme.
With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the
foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint
exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind,--pointing, too, here
and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and
walls,--we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not
very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection with
the long past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to
manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete --which, if
adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much
of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life.
Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded
truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and
must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with
the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency,
they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may
darkly overshadow their posterity.
The House of the Seven Gables, antique as it now looks, was not the

first habitation erected by civilized man on precisely the same spot of
ground. Pyncheon Street formerly bore the humbler appellation of
Maule's Lane, from the name of the original occupant of the soil, before
whose cottage-door it was a cow-path. A natural spring of soft and
pleasant water--a rare treasure on the sea-girt peninsula where the
Puritan settlement was made--had early induced Matthew Maule to