“Whoever built the house, he builded better than he knew; or else Orion in the zenith flashed down his Damocles’ sword to him some starry night, and said: ‘Build there.’ For how, otherwise, could it have entered the builder’s mind that, upon the clearing being made, such a purple prospect would be his? Nothing less than Greylock, with all his hills about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.
“A piazza must be had.
“The house was wide—my fortune narrow ... upon but one of the four sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now which side? Charlemagne, he carried it.
“No sooner was ground broken than all the neighbourhood, neighbour Dives in particular, broke too—into a laugh. Piazza to the north! Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch the Aurora Borealis, I suppose; hope he’s laid in a good store of polar muffs and mittens.
“That was in the lion month of March. Not forgotten are some of the blue noses of the carpenters and how they scouted at the greenness of the cit, who would build his sole piazza to the north. But March don’t last forever; patience, and August comes. And then, in the cool elysium of my northern bower, I, Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom, cast down the hill a pitying glance on poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his piazza to the south.
“But, even in December, this northern piazza does not repel—nipping cold and gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller, bolting by the snow in finest flour—for then, once more, with frosted beard, I pace the sleety deck, weathering Cape Horn.
“In summer, too, Canute-like, sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods over the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.”
In I and My Chimney Melville makes the old chimney at Arrowhead the chief character in a sketch of his domestic life at Pittsfield: himself and his wife, both freely idealised, are the other actors. This chimney, twelve feet square at the base, was built by Capt. David Bush who erected the house in 1780. It has three fireplaces on the first floor and the one formerly used for the kitchen fireplace is large enough for a log four feet long. This fireplace is panelled in pine, and above it hangs an Indian tomahawk, found and hung there by Melville. Around it are many nooks and cupboards. In I and My Chimney Melville wrote: “And here I keep mysterious cordials of a choice, mysterious flavour, made so by the constant naturing and subtle ripening of the chimney’s gentle heat, distilled through that warm mass of masonry. Better for wines it is than voyages to the Indies; my chimney itself is a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a November day is as good for an invalid as a long season spent in Cuba. Often I think how grapes might ripen against my chimney. How my wife’s geraniums bud there! But in December. Her eggs too—can’t keep them near the chimney on account of hatching. Ah, a warm heart has my chimney.”
Col. Richard Lathers, in his reminiscences of his Pittsfield residence, writes: “One of my nearest neighbours at Pittsfield was Herman Melville, author of the interesting and very original sea tales, Typee and Omoo (which were among the first books to be published simultaneously in London and New York), and of various other volumes of prose and verse. I visited him often in his well-stocked library, where I listened with intense pleasure to his highly individual views of society and politics. He always provided a bountiful supply of good cider—the product of his own orchard—and of tobacco, in the virtues of which he was a firm believer. Indeed, he prided himself on the inscription painted over his capacious fireplace: ‘I and my chimney smoke together,’ an inscription I have seen strikingly verified more than once when the atmosphere was heavy and the wind was east.”
When Melville set up his family at Arrowhead, Hawthorne had already been settled at Lenox, some miles away, for a number of months. “I have taken a house in Lenox”—so he announced his removal—“I long to get into the country, for my health is not what it has been. An hour or two in a garden and a daily ramble in country air would keep me all right.”