Horatio Bridge, my father's college friend, was a purser in the navy and
lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at Portsmouth. He
had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends
had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a
believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter
shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant
"I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard. And when my
father cast about for a more congenial place than Salem to live in, it
was to Bridge that he applied for suggestions. He stipulated that the
place should be somewhere along the New England sea-coast.

Had this wish of his been fulfilled it might have made great
differences. Hawthorne had always dwelt within sight and sound of the
Atlantic, on which his forefathers had sailed so often between the
Indies and Salem port, and Atlantic breezes were necessary to his
complete well-being. At this juncture physical health had for the first
time become an object to him; he was run down by a year of suffering and
hard work, and needed nature's kindest offices. A suitable house of
his own by the sea-side would probably have brought him up to his best
physical condition to begin with, and kept him so; and it would so have
endeared itself to him that when, two or three years later, Pierce had
offered him a foreign appointment he might have been moved to decline
it, and have gone on writing American romances to the end--to the
advantage of American letters. Concord had its own attractions; but it
never held him as the sea would have done, nor nourished his health, nor
stimulated his genius. A house of his own beside the Atlantic might well
have added twenty years to his life.

But it was not upon the knees of the gods.

Bridge's zealous efforts failed to find a place available, and after an
uneasy interval, during which his friend wandered uncomfortably about
Boston and the neighborhood (incidentally noting down some side-scenes
afterwards to be incorporated in The Blithedale Romance), a cottage
in the Berkshire Hills was spoken of, and upon examination seemed
practicable. Lenox, at that time, was as little known as Mount Desert;
it was not until long afterwards that fashion found them out and made
them uninhabitable to any but fashionable folks. Moreover, my father had
seen something of Lenox a dozen years before.

A dozen years before he was not ye