The House of the Seven Gables quotes

On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities—the great elm-tree and the weather-beaten edifice.

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within.

Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement.

The chimney of the new house, in short, belching forth its kitchen smoke, impregnated the whole air with the scent of meats, fowls, and fishes, spicily concocted with odoriferous herbs, and onions in abundance.

The mere smell of such festivity, making its way to everybody’s nostrils, was at once an invitation and an appetite.

Maule’s Lane, or Pyncheon Street, as it were now more decorous to call it, was thronged, at the appointed hour, as with a congregation on its way to church.

All, as they approached, looked upward at the imposing edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind.

There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in pride, not modesty.

Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread.

So much of mankind’s varied experience had passed there—so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed—that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart.

It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences.

The deep projection of the second story gave the house such a meditative look, that you could not pass it without the idea that it had secrets to keep, and an eventful history to moralize upon.

But as for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality.

So much of mankind’s varied experience had passed there⁠—so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed⁠—that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart.

It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and sombre reminiscences.

… a certain Alice Pyncheon had flung up the seeds, in sport, and that the dust of the street and the decay of the roof gradually formed a kind of soil for them, out of which they grew, when Alice had long been in her grave.

However the flowers might have come there, it was both sad and sweet to observe how Nature adopted to herself this desolate, decaying, gusty, rusty old house of the Pyncheon family; and how the ever-returning Summer did her best to gladden it with tender beauty, and grew melancholy in the effort.

There is one other feature, very essential to be noticed, but which, we greatly fear, may damage any picturesque and romantic impression which we have been willing to throw over our sketch of this respectable edifice.

… wig, a faded velvet coat, an apron at his waist, and his ruffles carefully turned back from his wrists, might be seen through the chinks of the shutters, any night of the year, ransacking his till, or poring over the dingy pages of his daybook.

From the look of unutterable woe upon his face, it appeared to be his doom to spend eternity in a vain effort to make his accounts balance.

And now—in a very humble way, as will be seen—we proceed to open our narrative.

“How miserably cross I look!” she must often have whispered to herself; and ultimately have fancied herself so, by a sense of inevitable doom.

But her heart never frowned.

It was naturally tender, sensitive, and full of little tremors and palpitations; all of which weaknesses it retained, while her visage was growing so perversely stern, and even fierce.

… from childhood with the shadowy food of aristocratic reminiscences, and whose religion it was that a lady’s hand soils itself irremediably by doing aught for bread—this born lady, after sixty years of narrowing means, is fain to step down from her pedestal of imaginary rank.

Poverty, treading closely at her heels for a lifetime, has come up with her at last.

She must earn her own food, or starve! And we have stolen upon Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, too irreverently, at the instant of time when the patrician lady is to be transformed into the plebeian woman.

Nevertheless, if we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate.

Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron countenance of fate.

What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.

I merely look in to offer my best wishes, and to ask if I can assist you any further in your preparations.”

People in difficulty and distress, or in any manner at odds with the world, can endure a vast amount of harsh treatment, and perhaps be only the stronger for it; whereas they give way at once before the simplest expression of what they perceive to be genuine sympathy.

So it proved with poor Hepzibah; for, when she saw the young man’s smile—looking so much the brighter on a thoughtful face—and heard his kindly tone, she broke first into a hysteric giggle and then began to sob.

They are unavoidable at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a child’s storybook.

I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

So it will be with what you think so terrible.”

Now and then, there came a thrill of almost youthful enjoyment. It was the invigorating breath of a fresh outward atmosphere, after the long torpor and monotonous seclusion of her life.

So wholesome is effort! So miraculous the strength that we do not know of!

The healthiest glow that Hepzibah had known for years had come now in the dreaded crisis, when, for the first time, she had put forth her hand to help herself.

In the case of our old gentlewoman, after the excitement of new effort had subsided, the despondency of her whole life threatened, ever and anon, to return.

It was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall, it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine.

But, always, the envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial azure.

It was like the heavy mass of clouds which we may often see obscuring the sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall, it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine.

But, always, the envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial azure.

Customers came in, as the forenoon advanced, but rather slowly; in some cases, too, it must be owned, with little satisfaction either to themselves or Miss Hepzibah; nor, on the whole, with an aggregate of very rich emolument to the till.

“For what end,” thought she, giving vent to that feeling of hostility which is the only real abasement of the poor in presence of the rich—“for what good end, in the wisdom of Providence, does that woman live?

Must the whole world toil, that the palms of her hands may be kept white and delicate?

”

Such an effect may occasionally be observed in pictures of antique date.

They acquire a look which an artist (if he have anything like the complacency of artists nowadays) would never dream of presenting to a patron as his own characteristic expression, but which, nevertheless, we at once recognize as reflecting the unlovely truth of a human soul.

In such cases, the painter’s deep conception of his subject’s inward traits has wrought itself into the essence of the picture, and is seen after the superficial coloring has been rubbed off by time.

Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old time. She had dwelt too much alone—too long in the Pyncheon House—until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its timbers.

She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.

By the spell of contrast, another portrait rose up before her, painted with more daring flattery than any artist would have ventured upon, but yet so delicately touched that the likeness remained perfect.

… in his extreme old age—whether it were that his long and hard experience had actually brightened him, or that his decaying judgment rendered him less capable of fairly measuring himself—the venerable man made pretensions to no little wisdom, and really enjoyed the credit of it.

There was likewise, at times, a vein of something like poetry in him; it was the moss or wallflower of his mind in its small dilapidation, and gave a charm to what might have been vulgar and commonplace in his earlier and middle life.

Hepzibah had a regard for him, because his name was ancient in the town and had formerly been respectable.

His hat had relation to no other part of his dress, and but very little to the head that wore it.

Thus Uncle Venner was a miscellaneous old gentleman, partly himself, but, in good measure, somebody else; patched together, too, of different epochs; an epitome of times and fashions.

“So, you have really begun trade,” said he—“really begun trade! Well, I’m glad to see it. Young people should never live idle in the world, nor old ones neither, unless when the rheumatize gets hold of them. It has given me warning already;

Hepzibah fancied that there was something peculiar in her venerable friend’s look and tone; insomuch, that she gazed into his face with considerable earnestness, endeavoring to discover what secret meaning, if any, might be lurking there.

Individuals whose affairs have reached an utterly desperate crisis almost invariably keep themselves alive with hopes, so much the more airily magnificent as they have the less of solid matter within their grasp whereof to mould any judicious and moderate expectation of good.

Thus, all the while Hepzibah was perfecting the scheme of her little shop, she had cherished an unacknowledged idea that some harlequin trick of fortune would intervene in her favor.

She still responded, mechanically, to the frequent summons of the shop-bell, and, at the demand of her customers, went prying with vague eyes about the shop, proffering them one article after another, and thrusting aside—perversely, as most of them supposed—the identical thing they asked for.

There is sad confusion, indeed, when the spirit thus flits away into the past, or into the more awful future, or, in any manner, steps across the spaceless boundary betwixt its own region and the actual world; where the body remains to guide itself as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life.

It is like death, without death’s quiet privilege—its freedom from mortal care. Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman.

where the body remains to guide itself as best it may, with little more than the mechanism of animal life.

It is like death, without death’s quiet privilege⁠—its freedom from mortal care.

Worst of all, when the actual duties are comprised in such petty details as now vexed the brooding soul of the old gentlewoman. As the animosity of fate would have it, there was a great influx of custom in the course of the afternoon.

“The girl must have mistaken the house.” She stole softly into the hall, and, herself invisible, gazed through the dusty sidelights of the portal at the young, blooming, and very cheerful face which presented itself for admittance into the gloomy old mansion.

It was a face to which almost any door would have opened of its own accord.

The young girl, so fresh, so unconventional, and yet so orderly and obedient to common rules, as you at once recognized her to be, was widely in contrast, at that moment, with everything about her.

Little Phoebe was one of those persons who possess, as their exclusive patrimony, the gift of practical arrangement.

It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home.

A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night’s lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade.

… it were the white roses, or whatever the subtle influence might be—a person of delicate instinct would have known at once that it was now a maiden’s bedchamber, and had been purified of all former evil and sorrow by her sweet breath and happy thoughts.

Her dreams of the past night, being such cheerful ones, had exorcised the gloom, and now haunted the chamber in its stead.

After arranging matters to her satisfaction, Phoebe emerged from her chamber, with a purpose to descend again into the garden.

“She was a Davenport, of a good family. They were almost the first teacups ever seen in the colony; and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it.

But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle teacup, when I remember what my heart has gone through without breaking.

”

“Ah! ’tis all very well!” observed the maiden lady, drawing herself up. “But these things must have come to you with your mother’s blood. I never knew a Pyncheon that had any turn for them.”

It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts; as was Hepzibah of this native inapplicability, so to speak, of the Pyncheons to any useful purpose.

She regarded it as an hereditary trait; and so, perhaps, it was, but unfortunately a morbid one, such as is often generated in families that remain long above the surface of society.

Before they left the breakfast-table, the shop-bell rang sharply, and Hepzibah set down the remnant of her final cup of tea, with a look of sallow despair that was truly piteous to behold.

In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first.

We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs. At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly obstreperous little bell.

In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first.

We return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs.

At all events, Hepzibah had fully satisfied herself of the impossibility of ever becoming wonted to this peevishly obstreperous little bell. Ring as often as it might, the sound always smote upon her nervous system rudely and suddenly.

But there was both lustre and depth in her eyes.

She was very pretty; as graceful as a bird, and graceful much in the same way; as pleasant about the house as a gleam of sunshine falling on the floor through a shadow of twinkling leaves, or as a ray of firelight that dances on the wall while evening is drawing nigh.

Instead of discussing her claim to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist.

so that labor, while she dealt with it, had the easy and flexible charm of play.

Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them; and so did Phoebe.

The two relatives—the young maid and the old one—found time before nightfall, in the intervals of trade, to make rapid advances towards affection and confidence.

It being her first day of complete estrangement from rural objects, Phoebe found an unexpected charm in this little nook of grass, and foliage, and aristocratic flowers, and plebeian vegetables.

The eye of Heaven seemed to look down into it pleasantly, and with a peculiar smile, as if glad to perceive that nature, elsewhere overwhelmed, and driven out of the dusty town, had here been able to retain a breathing-place.

The spot acquired a somewhat wilder grace, and yet a very gentle one, from the fact that a pair of robins had built their nest in the pear-tree, and were making themselves exceedingly busy and happy in the dark intricacy of its boughs.

I turn up the earth by way of pastime. My sober occupation, so far as I have any, is with a lighter material.

In short, I make pictures out of sunshine; and, not to be too much dazzled with my own trade, I have prevailed with Miss Hepzibah to let me lodge in one of these dusky gables.

It is like a bandage over one’s eyes, to come into it. But would you like to see a specimen of my productions?”

But there certainly is truth in what you have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so.

There is a wonderful insight in Heaven’s broad and simple sunshine.

While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it. There is, at least, no flattery in my humble line of art.

But there certainly is truth in what you have said. Most of my likenesses do look unamiable; but the very sufficient reason, I fancy, is, because the originals are so. There is a wonderful insight in Heaven’s broad and simple sunshine.

While we give it credit only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he detect it.

There is, at least, no flattery in my humble line of art. Now, here is a likeness which I have taken over and over again, and still with no better result. Yet the original wears, to common eyes, a very different expression.

“Do, if you please, my dear child,” answered Hepzibah. “But put it on the table in the corner of the passage. My eyes are weak; and I can seldom bear the lamplight on them.”

What an instrument is the human voice! How wonderfully responsive to every emotion of the human soul!

In Hepzibah’s tone, at that moment, there was a certain rich depth and moisture, as if the words, commonplace as they were, had been steeped in the warmth of her heart.

… china cups and saucers, and the crested spoons, and a silver cream-jug (Hepzibah’s only other article of plate, and shaped like the rudest porringer), set out a board at which the stateliest of old Colonel Pyncheon’s guests need not have scorned to take his place.

But the Puritan’s face scowled down out of the picture, as if nothing on the table pleased his appetite.

By way of contributing what grace she could, Phoebe gathered some roses and a few other flowers, possessing either scent or beauty, and arranged them in a glass pitcher, which, having long ago lost its handle, was so much the fitter for a flower-vase.

Yet there were no tokens that his physical strength might not have sufficed for a free and determined gait.

It was the spirit of the man that could not walk.

The expression of his countenance—while, notwithstanding it had the light of reason in it—seemed to waver, and glimmer, and nearly to die away, and feebly to recover itself again. It was like a flame which we see twinkling among half-extinguished embers;

… the pen that writes, for the public eye and for distant time—and which inevitably lose much of their truth and freedom by the fatal consciousness of so doing—there were traditions about the ancestor, and private diurnal gossip about the Judge, remarkably accordant in their testimony.

It is often instructive to take the woman’s, the private and domestic, view of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving and the pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand behind the original’s back.

For example: tradition affirmed that the Puritan had been greedy of wealth; the Judge, too, with all the show of liberal expenditure, was said to be as closefisted as if his grip were of iron.

In both sexes, occasionally, this lifelong croak, accompanying each word of joy or sorrow, is one of the symptoms of a settled melancholy; and wherever it occurs, the whole history of misfortune is conveyed in its slightest accent.

The effect is as if the voice had been dyed black; or⁠—if we must use a more moderate simile⁠—this miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are strung, and whence they take their hue.

Such voices have put on mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with them!

or—if we must use a more moderate simile—this miserable croak, running through all the variations of the voice, is like a black silken thread, on which the crystal beads of speech are strung, and whence they take their hue.

Such voices have put on mourning for dead hopes; and they ought to die and be buried along with them!

Discerning that Clifford was not gladdened by her efforts, Hepzibah searched about the house for the means of more exhilarating pastime. At one time, her eyes chanced to rest on Alice Pyncheon’s harpsichord. It was a moment of great peril;

Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the character over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it necessary.

The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semicircle of faces round about it, but need not know the individuality of one among them all.

Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in Clifford’s traits to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay so much in the Actual as Phoebe’s did.

Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to be led back.

They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountaintop or in a dungeon.

Now, Phoebe’s presence made a home about her—that very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate—the wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above it—instinctively pines after—a home! She was real! Holding her hand, you felt something; a tender something;

By looking a little further in this direction, we might suggest an explanation of an often-suggested mystery.

Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.

There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between this pair, so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birthday to hers.

… brought strongly into play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much, even, by the finer graces of his character, as by the simple appeal of a heart so forlorn as his to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers.

She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love, and seemed to have received so little.

With a ready tact, the result of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience she ignored;

If a tear—a maiden’s sunshiny tear over imaginary woe—dropped upon some melancholy page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume. And wisely too!

Is not the world sad enough, in genuine earnest, without making a pastime of mock sorrows?

With poetry it was rather better. He delighted in the swell and subsidence of the rhythm, and the happily recurring rhyme.

After all, there need be no question why the bees came to that one green nook in the dusty town.

God sent them thither to gladden our poor Clifford. They brought the rich summer with them, in requital of a little honey.

When the bean-vines began to flower on the poles, there was one particular variety which bore a vivid scarlet blossom.

breaking what seems its own promise in their nature; withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a banquet; and thus—when it might so easily, as one would think, have been adjusted otherwise—making their existence a strangeness, a solitude, and torment.

All his life long, he had been learning how to be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little airy happiness.

Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his eyes. “Take my hand, Phoebe,” he would say, “and pinch it hard with your little fingers!

The daguerreotypist once whispered her that these marks betokened the oddities of the Pyncheon family, and that the chicken itself was a symbol of the life of the old house, embodying its interpretation, likewise, although an unintelligible one, as such clues generally are.

It was a feathered riddle; a mystery hatched out of an egg, and just as mysterious as if the egg had been addle!

The second of Chanticleer’s two wives, ever since Phoebe’s arrival, had been in a state of heavy despondency, caused, as it afterwards appeared, by her inability to lay an egg.

If I had done so, I should feel as if Providence was not bound to take care of me; and, at all events, the city wouldn’t be!

I’m one of those people who think that infinity is big enough for us all⁠—and eternity long enough.

”

The idea of terrible energy thus forced upon him was new at every recurrence, and seemed to affect him as disagreeably, and with almost as much surprise, the hundredth time as the first.

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment.

It can merely be a suspended animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be little use of immortality. We are less than ghosts, for the time being, whenever this calamity befalls us.

It can merely be a suspended animation; for, were the power actually to perish, there would be little use of immortality.

We are less than ghosts, for the time being, whenever this calamity befalls us.

Clifford was indeed the most inveterate of conservatives. All the antique fashions of the street were dear to him; even such as were characterized by a rudeness that would naturally have annoyed his fastidious senses.

In her aspect there was a familiar gladness, and a holiness that you could play with, and yet reverence it as much as ever.

She was like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one’s mother-tongue.

Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing that she wore—neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings—had ever been put on before;

They could not flee; their jailer had but left the door ajar in mockery, and stood behind it to watch them stealing out. At the threshold, they felt his pitiless grip upon them.

For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

But it would be no fair picture of Clifford’s state of mind were we to represent him as continually or prevailingly wretched.

Behold him, scattering airy spheres abroad from the window into the street!

Little impalpable worlds were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface.

It was curious to see how the passersby regarded these brilliant fantasies, as they came floating down, and made the dull atmosphere imaginative about them. Some stopped to gaze, and perhaps, carried a pleasant recollection of the bubbles onward as far as the street-corner;

Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.

There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of his own connections.

The artist, in a desultory manner, had imparted to Phoebe something of his history. Young as he was, and had his career terminated at the point already attained, there had been enough of incident to fill, very creditably, an autobiographic volume.

A romance on the plan of Gil Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a romance.

The experience of many individuals among us, who think it hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the Spaniard’s earlier life;

But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps, showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that, amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.

Homeless as he had been⁠—continually changing his whereabout, and, therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to individuals⁠—putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be soon shifted for a third⁠—he had never violated the innermost man, but had carried his conscience along with him.

It was impossible to know Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence which such a certainty inspires.

“Oh, nothing—of course, nothing!” answered Holgrave with a smile. “Only this is such an odd and incomprehensible world!

The more I look at it, the more it puzzles me, and I begin to suspect that a man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.

Men and women, and children, too, are such strange creatures, that one never can be certain that he really knows them; nor ever guess what they have been from what he sees them to be now. Judge Pyncheon! Clifford!

nor had Holgrave, in his premature experience of life, wasted entirely that beautiful spirit of youth, which, gushing forth from one small heart and fancy, may diffuse itself over the universe, making it all as bright as on the first day of creation.

Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.

So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he said;

The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people.

Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely in their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing-day.

But our business is with Holgrave as we find him on this particular afternoon, and in the arbor of the Pyncheon garden.

With the insight on which he prided himself, he fancied that he could look through Phoebe, and all around her, and could read her off like a page of a child’s storybook.

But these transparent natures are often deceptive in their depth; those pebbles at the bottom of the fountain are farther from us than we think.

Thus the artist, whatever he might judge of Phoebe’s capacity, was beguiled, by some silent charm of hers, to talk freely of what he dreamed of doing in the world. He poured himself out as to another self.

Without directly answering her, he turned from the Future, which had heretofore been the theme of his discourse, and began to speak of the influences of the Past.

One subject, indeed, is but the reverberation of the other.

“Shall we never, never get rid of this Past?” cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. “It lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body!

or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions.

We read in dead men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes, and cry at dead men’s pathos!

We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds.

We read in dead men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes, and cry at dead men’s pathos! We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients!

We worship the living Deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds.

Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart!

I doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols, statehouses, courthouses, city-hall, and churches—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick.

It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform the institutions which they symbolize.

”

This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half-century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.

Human blood, in order to keep its freshness, should run in hidden streams, as the water of an aqueduct is conveyed in subterranean pipes.

In the family existence of these Pyncheons, for instance—forgive me Phoebe, but I cannot think of you as one of them—in their brief New England pedigree, there has been time enough to infect them all with one kind of lunacy or another.”

and my name has figured, I can assure you, on the covers of Graham and Godey, making as respectable an appearance, for aught I could see, as any of the canonized bead-roll with which it was associated.

In the humorous line, I am thought to have a very pretty way with me; and as for pathos, I am as provocative of tears as an onion.

But shall I read you my story?”

“Three o’clock!” said he to himself. “My father told me that dial was put up only an hour before the old Colonel’s death. How truly it has kept time these seven-and-thirty years past!

The shadow creeps and creeps, and is always looking over the shoulder of the sunshine!

”

“I certainly shall entertain no manner of apprehension, with my father at hand,” said Alice with maidenly dignity. “

Neither do I conceive that a lady, while true to herself, can have aught to fear from whomsoever, or in any circumstances!

”

the fruit-trees, shrubbery, and flower-bushes had a dark obscurity among them. The commonplace characteristics—which, at noontide, it seemed to have taken a century of sordid life to accumulate—were now transfigured by a charm of romance.

A hundred mysterious years were whispering among the leaves, whenever the slight sea-breeze found its way thither and stirred them.

Through the foliage that roofed the little summerhouse the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted …

… the little summerhouse the moonlight flickered to and fro, and fell silvery white on the dark floor, the table, and the circular bench, with a continual shift and play, according as the chinks and wayward crevices among the twigs admitted or shut out the glimmer.

So sweetly cool was the atmosphere, after all the feverish day, that the summer eve might be fancied as sprinkling dews and liquid moonlight, with a dash of icy temper in them, out of a silver vase.

Here and there, a few drops of this freshness were scattered on a human heart, and gave it youth again, and sympathy with the eternal youth of nature. The artist chanced to be one on whom the reviving influence fell.

and the house!—it would be like a bower in Eden, blossoming with the earliest roses that God ever made.

Moonlight, and the sentiment in man’s heart responsive to it, are the greatest of renovators and reformers.

And all other reform and renovation, I suppose, will prove to be no better than moonshine!”

“I have been happier than I am now; at least, much gayer,” said Phoebe thoughtfully. “

Yet I am sensible of a great charm in this brightening moonlight; and I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon.

I never cared much about moonlight before. What is there, I wonder, so beautiful in it, tonight?”

“You have lost nothing, Phoebe, worth keeping, nor which it was possible to keep,” said Holgrave after a pause. “

Our first youth is of no value; for we are never conscious of it until after it is gone.

But sometimes—always, I suspect, unless one is exceedingly unfortunate—there comes a sense of second youth, gushing out of the heart’s joy at being in love; or, possibly, it may come to crown some other grand festival in life, if any other such there be.

I do not like this.

The play costs the performers too much, and the audience is too cold-hearted.

”

“We shall miss you, next Sabbath afternoon,” observed the street philosopher. “

It is unaccountable how little while it takes some folks to grow just as natural to a man as his own breath; and, begging your pardon, Miss Phoebe (though there can be no offence in an old man’s saying it), that’s just what you’ve grown to me!

My years have been a great many, and your life is but just beginning;

“I am no angel, Uncle Venner,” said Phoebe, smiling, as she offered him her hand at the street-corner. “

But, I suppose, people never feel so much like angels as when they are doing what little good they may.

So I shall certainly come back!”

… the inevitable force of circumstances should occasionally make him do one questionable deed among a thousand praiseworthy, or, at least, blameless ones—would you characterize the Judge by that one necessary deed, and that half-forgotten act, and let it overshadow the fair aspect of a lifetime?

What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb’s bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil which were heaped into the other scale!

This scale and balance system is a favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon’s brotherhood.

and this with so natural and imperceptible a change, that it seemed as if the iron man had stood there from the first, and the meek man not at all.

The effect was as when the light, vapory clouds, with their soft coloring, suddenly vanish from the stony brow of a precipitous mountain, and leave there the frown which you at once feel to be eternal.

Hepzibah almost adopted the insane belief that it was her old Puritan ancestor, and not the modern Judge, on whom she had just been wreaking the bitterness of her heart.

… Hepzibah now felt as if the Judge, and Clifford, and herself—they three together—were on the point of adding another incident to the annals of the house, with a bolder relief of wrong and sorrow, which would cause it to stand out from all the rest.

Thus it is that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the grave or glad events of many years ago.

It is but for a moment, comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling—a truth that has the bitter and the sweet in it.

… that the grief of the passing moment takes upon itself an individuality, and a character of climax, which it is destined to lose after a while, and to fade into the dark gray tissue common to the grave or glad events of many years ago.

It is but for a moment, comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling⁠—a truth that has the bitter and the sweet in it.

But Hepzibah could not rid herself of the sense of something unprecedented at that instant passing and soon to be accomplished. Her nerves were in a shake.

Anything that would take her out of the grievous present, and interpose human beings betwixt herself and what was nearest to her—whatever would defer for an instant the inevitable errand on which she was bound—all such impediments were welcome.

Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful.

Hepzibah had little hardihood for her own proper pain, and far less for what she must inflict on Clifford.

Even had there been no bitter recollections, nor any hostile interest now at stake between them, the mere natural repugnance of the more sensitive system to the massive, weighty, and unimpressible one, must, in itself, have been disastrous to the former.

It would be like flinging a porcelain vase, with already a crack in it, against a granite column.

Never before had Hepzibah so adequately estimated the powerful character of her cousin Jaffrey—powerful by intellect, energy of will, the long habit of acting among men, and, as she believed, by his unscrupulous pursuit of selfish ends through evil means.

But how wild, how almost laughable, the fatality—and yet how continually it comes to pass, thought Hepzibah, in this dull delirium of a world—that whosoever, and with however kindly a purpose, should come to help, they would be sure to help the strongest side!

Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction.

There would be Judge Pyncheon—a person eminent in the public view, of high station and great wealth, a philanthropist, a member of Congress and of the church, and intimately associated with whatever else bestows good name—so imposing, in these advantageous lights, that Hepzibah herself could …

With an impulse of idle curiosity, that flickered among her heavy thoughts, she looked at one of the daguerreotypes, and beheld Judge Pyncheon frowning at her. Fate stared her in the face. She turned back from her fruitless quest, with a heartsinking sense of disappointment.

In all her years of seclusion, she had never felt, as now, what it was to be alone.

It seemed as if the house stood in a desert, or, by some spell, was made invisible to those who dwelt around, or passed beside it; so that any mode of misfortune, miserable accident, or crime might happen in it without the possibility of aid.

Those mists had gathered, as if to symbolize a great, brooding mass of human trouble, doubt, confusion, and chill indifference, between earth and the better regions.

Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart.

It smote her with the wretched conviction that Providence intermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul;

She had struck with the entire force of her heart’s vibration, communicating, by some subtle magnetism, her own terror to the summons. Clifford would turn his face to the pillow, and cover his head beneath the bedclothes, like a startled child at midnight.

She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel upon the senseless wood.

“Clifford! Dear brother!” said Hepzibah. “Shall I come in?”

… moments, in the lives of persons who lack real force of character—moments of test, in which courage would most assert itself—but where these individuals, if left to themselves, stagger aimlessly along, or follow implicitly whatever guidance may befall them, even if it be a child’s.

No matter how preposterous or insane, a purpose is a Godsend to them.

Hepzibah had reached this point.

But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this. These railroads—could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid of—are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us.

They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel!

Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him?

they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him?

Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere⁠—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?

”

“They may be said, in few and pithy words, to have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us around again to the nomadic state.

You are aware, my dear sir⁠—you must have observed it in your own experience⁠—that all human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve.

While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal.

While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal.

The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

To apply this truth to the topic now under discussion.

… the sky—that the greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement are these heaps of bricks and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home!

The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it.

Morbid influences, in a thousandfold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of households. There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers and relatives. I speak of what I know.

The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it. Morbid influences, in a thousandfold variety, gather about hearths, and pollute the life of households.

There is no such unwholesome atmosphere as that of an old home, rendered poisonous by one’s defunct forefathers and relatives.

I speak of what I know.

It was too soon! I could not bear it!

Age had no right to come! I had not lived!

But now do I look old? If so, my aspect belies me strangely; for—a great weight being off my mind—I feel in the very heyday of my youth, with the world and my best days before me!”

“Be quiet yourself, Hepzibah!” returned her brother. “No matter what they think! I am not mad.

For the first time in thirty years my thoughts gush up and find words ready for them.

I must talk, and I will!”

Just imagine, for a moment, how much of human evil will crumble away, with this one change!

What we call real estate⁠—the solid ground to build a house on⁠—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

A man will commit almost any wrong—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for himself to die in, and for …

“Then there is electricity—the demon, the angel, the mighty physical power, the all-pervading intelligence!” exclaimed Clifford. “Is that a humbug, too?

Is it a fact⁠—or have I dreamt it⁠—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Or, shall we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!”

Nature made sweet amends that morning for the five unkindly days which had preceded it.

It would have been enough to live for, merely to look up at the wide benediction of the sky, or as much of it as was visible between the houses, genial once more with sunshine.

Every object was agreeable, whether to be gazed at in the breadth, or examined more minutely. Such, for example, were the well-washed pebbles and gravel of the sidewalk; even the sky-reflecting pools in the centre of the street;

Was ever before such a grinding out of jigs and waltzes, where nobody was in the cue to dance? Yes, very often.

This contrast, or intermingling of tragedy with mirth, happens daily, hourly, momently.

The gloomy and desolate old house, deserted of life, and with awful Death sitting sternly in its solitude, was the emblem of many a human heart, which, nevertheless, is compelled to hear the thrill and echo of the world’s gayety around it.