Poverty put an untimely end to life at the Old Manse. The years from 1846 to 1852 were spent in Boston and Salem. In 1852 Hawthorne was able to buy a dilapidated old house at Concord, which he called The Wayside. Here he remained until his appointment in 1853 as American Consul at Liverpool, and to it he returned after long wandering.
The Wayside had been the home of Bronson Alcott. Here Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne made their second real home. They rejoiced as, a little at a time, they were able to improve the property, and they showed always that they knew the secret of finding happiness in the midst of privations.
Hawthorne described his new abode for his friend, George William Curtis:
"As for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestion about it and no venerableness, although from the style of its architecture it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with the situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few minutes after passing it....
"The house stands within ten or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence, and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. Wherefore I have called it 'The Wayside,' which I think a better name and more morally suggestive than that which, as Mr. Alcott has since told me, he bestowed on it, 'The Hillside.' In front of the house, on the opposite side of the road, I have eight acres of land,—the only valuable portion of the place in a farmer's eye, and which are capable of being made very fertile. On the hither side, my territory extends some little distance over the brow of the hill, and is absolutely good for nothing, in a productive point of view, though very good for many other purposes.
"I know nothing of the history of the house, except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die. I believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably appear and dispute my title to his residence."
In furnishing the house Mrs. Hawthorne took keen pleasure in putting the best of everything in her husband's study. She called it "the best room, the temple of the Muses and the Delphic shrine."
In these surroundings, supported by a wife who worshipped him, Hawthorne wrote until the call came to go to England. It was 1860 before he returned to The Wayside. There he hoped to end his life, but death overtook him at Plymouth, New Hampshire, while he was making a tour of New England with Franklin Pierce. Mrs. Hawthorne survived him seven years.
