A few visitors came to the little red house—Kemble, James, Lowell, Holmes, E. P. Whipple, and the others already mentioned—in whose presence the "statue of night and silence" was wont to relax, but for the most part his life was that of a recluse. Here, as elsewhere, his thoughts dwelt apart in "a twilight region" where the company of his kind was usually a perturbing intrusion. For companionship, his family, the lake, the woods, his own thoughts, sufficed; he seldom sought any other, and therefore was unpopular in the neighborhood. It is hardly to be supposed that the creator of Zenobia, Hester Prynne, and the Pyncheons would greatly enjoy the society of his rural neighbors, but they were not therefore the less displeased by his habitually going out of his way—sometimes across the fields—to avoid meeting them. Some of them had a notion that he was the author of "a poem, or an arithmetic, or some other kind of a book,"—as he makes "Primrose Pringle" to say of him in the tale,—but to most he was incomprehensible, perhaps a little uncanny, and the great genius of romance is yet mentioned here as "a queer sort o' man that lived in Tappan's red house."
Reasons for leaving Berkshire
His son records that after Hawthorne had freed himself from Salem "he soon wearied of any particular locality;" after a time he tired even of beautiful Berkshire. Its obtrusive scenery "with the same strong impressions repeated day after day" became irksome; then he grew tired of the mountains and "would joyfully see them laid flat." He writes to Fields, "I am sick of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here." Doubtless the region which we behold in the glamour of the early autumn seemed very different to Hawthorne in the season when he had daily "to trudge two miles to the post-office through snow or slush knee-deep." Ellery Channing—who had knowledge of the winter here—in his letters to Hawthorne calls Berkshire "that satanic institution of Spitzbergen," "that ice-plant of the Sedgwicks."
A more cogent reason for Hawthorne's discontent here is found in his failing health. He writes to Pike, "I am not vigorous as I used to be on the coast;" to Fields, "For the first time since boyhood I feel languid and dispirited. Oh, that Providence would build me the merest shanty and mark me out a rood or two of garden near the coast."
For these and other reasons Hawthorne finally left Berkshire at the end of 1851, going first to West Newton and a few months later to "the Wayside," while his friend Tappan occupied the thenceforth famous little red house.
The world of readers owes much to Hawthorne's residence among the mountains. Besides the material here gathered and the exquisite settings for his tales these landscapes afforded, we are indebted to his environment in Berkshire for the quality of the work here accomplished and for its quantity as well; for he responded so readily to the inspiriting influence of his surroundings that he produced more during his stay here than at any similar period of his life. The soulful beauty and the seclusion of the haunts to which we here trace him, suiting well his solitary mood, may measurably account to us for his habit of thought and for the manner of expression by which nature was here portrayed and life expounded by the great master of American romance.
A DAY WITH THE GOOD GRAY POET