t betrothed to Sophia Peabody; he
already loved her and she him; but her health seemed an insuperable
barrier between them. This and certain other matters were weighing
heavily upon his soul, and his future seemed dark and uncertain. He
thought of taking a voyage round the world; he thought of getting into
politics; he even thought--as young men full of life sometimes will--of
death. What he finally did, with native good sense, was to make a
two-months' trip in the mountainous region to the westward, to change
the scene and his state of mind, and to get what artists call a fresh
eye. He chose North Adams as his headquarters, and forayed thence in
various directions over a radius of twenty miles. He was then beginning
to revolve one of the two great romance themes that preoccupied his
whole after-life, neither of which was he destined to write. This was
the idea of the Unpardonable Sin; the other was the conception of the
Deathless Man. The only essay we have towards the embodiment of the
first vision is the short fragment published in Mosses from an Old
Manse, called "Ethan Brand." The other was attempted in various forms,
of which Septimius, Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and The Dolliver Romance,
all posthumously published, are the most important.

But Stockbridge, Pittsfield, and Lenox had been included among his
haunts during the break-away above mentioned, and he remembered that the
scenery was beautiful, the situation remote, and the air noble. Next to
the sea it seemed an ideal place to recuperate and write in. Thither,
at all events, he resolved to go, and early in the summer of 1850 we
arrived at the little red house above the shores of Stockbridge Bowl,
with bag and baggage. Little though the house was, the bag and baggage
were none too much to find easy accommodation in it.

A fair-sized city drawing-room of these sumptuous contemporary days
could stow away in a corner the entire structure which then became our
habitation, and retain space enough outside it for the exploitation of
social functions. Nevertheless, by the simple expedient of making the
interior divisions small enough, this liliputian edifice managed to
contain eight rooms on its two floors (including the kitchen). One of
the rooms was, in fact, the entrance-hall; you stepped into it across
the threshold of the outer door, and the staircase ascended from it. It
was used as an extension of the drawing-room, which opened out of it.
The drawing-room adjoi