On a near knoll, commanding a view of the circle of mountains and the winding river, stands the sometime summer residence of Holmes among his ancestral acres, where Hawthorne and Fields came to visit him. His "den," in which he did much literary work, overlooks the beautiful meadows, and is now expanded into a large library, while the trees he planted are grown to be the crowning beauty of the place, which the owner calls Holmesdale. It was the hereditary home of the Wendells.
Beyond, at the edge of the town of Pittsfield, is the mansion where Longfellow found his wife and his famous "Old Clock on the Stairs." At the Athenæum in the town some thousands of Holmes's books will soon be placed, and here is preserved the secretary from Hawthorne's study in the little red house,--a time-worn mahogany combination of desk, drawers, and shelves, at which he wrote "The House of the Seven Gables," "The Wonder-Book," "The Snow Image," and part of "The Blithedale Romance." Pittsfield was long the home of "Godfrey Graylock;" here the gifted Rose Terry Cooke passed her closing years of life with her husband, and not far away Josh Billings, "the Yankee Solomon," was born and reared as Henry Savage Shaw. One day we trace from Pittsfield the footsteps of Hawthorne and Melville across the Taconics to the whilom home of "Mother Ann" and to the higher Hancock peaks.
Hawthorne's daily walk to the post-office was past the later residence of Charlotte Cushman, and by the church where the older Channing delivered his last discourse and where twenty years ago Parkhurst was preacher. In the church-tower Fanny Kemble's clock still tells the hours above the lovely spot where she desired to be buried.
[Sidenote: Hawthorne's Habit of Meditation]
These various excursions compass the range of Hawthorne's rambles in this region: he was never ten miles away from the little red house during his residence here. Obviously he preferred short and solitary strolls which allowed undisturbed meditation upon the work in hand. The quantity and finish of the writing done here indicate that much thought was expended upon it outside his study. We may be sure that upon "The House of the Seven Gables" were bestowed, besides the five months of daily sessions at his desk, other months of study and thought as he strolled the country roads and loitered by the lake-side or in the dell of "Blossom-Brook." He avowed himself a shameless idler in warm weather, declaring he was "good for nothing in a literary way until after the autumnal frosts" brightened his imagination as they did the foliage about him here; yet the meditations of one summer in Berkshire produced his masterpiece, and the next summer accomplished "The Wonder-Book," quickly followed by "The Snow Image" and "Blithedale." During this summer also he had a voluminous correspondence with the many "Pyncheon jackasses" who thought themselves aggrieved by his use of their name in "The House of the Seven Gables."