completely from their mutual world, while she groped darkly,
and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not!"

_The House of the Seven Gables_ was written at Lenox, among the
mountains of Massachusetts, a village nestling, rather loosely, in one
of the loveliest corners of New England, to which Hawthorne had
betaken himself after the success of _The Scarlet Letter_ became
conspicuous, in the summer of 1850, and where he occupied for two
years an uncomfortable little red house which is now pointed out to
the inquiring stranger. The inquiring stranger is now a frequent
figure at Lenox, for the place has suffered the process of
lionisation. It has become a prosperous watering-place, or at least
(as there are no waters), as they say in America, a summer-resort. It
is a brilliant and generous landscape, and thirty years ago a man of
fancy, desiring to apply himself, might have found both inspiration
and tranquillity there. Hawthorne found so much of both that he wrote
more during his two years of residence at Lenox than at any period of
his career. He began with _The House of the Seven Gables_, which was
finished in the early part of 1851. This is the longest of his three
American novels, it is the most elaborate, and in the judgment of some
persons it is the finest. It is a rich, delightful, imaginative work,
larger and more various than its companions, and full of all sorts of
deep intentions, of interwoven threads of suggestion But it is not so
rounded and complete as _The Scarlet Letter_; it has always seemed to
me more like a prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself. I
think this is partly owing to the fact that the subject, the _donnee_,
as the French say, of the story, does not quite fill it out, and that
we get at the same time an impression of certain complicated purposes
on the author's part, which seem to reach beyond it. I call it larger
and more various than its companions, and it has indeed a greater
richness of tone and density of detail. The colour, so to speak, of
_The House of the Seven Gables_ is admirable. But the story has a sort
of expansive quality which never wholly fructifies, and as I lately
laid it down, after reading it for the third time, I had a sense of
having interested myself in a magnificent fragment. Yet the book has a
great fascination, and of all of those of its author's productions
which I have read over while writing this sketch, it is perhaps the
one that ha