The Hawthorne pilgrimage has drawn us to many shrines: the sunny scenes of "The Marble Faun," the peaceful landscapes of "Our Old Home," the now busy city of "The Scarlet Letter," the elm-shaded Salem of "Dr. Grimshaw" and "The House of the Seven Gables," the Manse of the "Mosses," the Wayside of "Septimius Felton" and "The Dolliver Romance,"--these and many another resort of the subtile romancer, in the Old World and the New, have held our lingering feet.
Amid the splendors of a New England September we follow him into the "headlong Berkshire" of "Ethan Brand" and "Tanglewood Tales."
Hawthorne was more than most writers influenced by environment; the situations and circumstances under which his work was produced often determined its tone and color, while the persons, localities, and occurrences observed by his alert senses in the real world about him were skilfully wrought into his romance. His residence in Berkshire affected not only the books written there, but some subsequently produced, and the scenery of this loveliest corner of New England supplied the setting for many of his tales. Some of the best passages of his "American Note-Books" are records of his observations in this region,--sundry scenes, characters, and incidents being afterward literally transcribed therefrom into his fiction,--while a few of his shorter stories seem to have been suggested by legends once current in Berkshire. It passes, therefore, that for us the greatest charm of this realm of delights is that all its beauties--the grandeur of its mountains, the enchantment of its valleys, the glamour of its autumn woods, the sheen of its lakelets, the sapphire of its skies--serve to bring us into closer sympathy with Hawthorne, to whom these beauties were once a familiar vision.
He first came to Berkshire in the summer of 1838. For thirteen years he had bravely "waited for the world to know" him. His "Twice-Told Tales" had brought him little fame or money, but they had procured him the friendship of the Peabodys, and it would appear that he and the lovely Sophia already loved each other. In a letter to her sister Elizabeth, written early in the summer, Sophia says, "Hawthorne came one morning for a take-leave call, looking radiant. He said he was not going to tell any one, not even his mother, where he should be for the next months; he thought he should change his name, so that if he died no one would be able to find his gravestone. We asked him to keep a journal while he was gone. He at first said he would not write anything, but finally concluded it would suit very well for hints for future stories." It was from his journal of these months of mysterious retirement that, forty years later, the gentle Sophia--then his widow--transcribed those pages of the "Note-Books" which contain the account of his sojourn in upper Berkshire and of his observations and meditations there. How far the journal furnished "hints for future stories" the literary world well knows.