The Hawthorne family took the train on Thursday, May 23, 1850, from the Castle station in Salem to Lenox in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. The writer called this retreat "Moving their household gods from Salem," an allusion to Virgil's Aeneid, in which the Roman hero Aeneas follows an ancient custom, moving his household gods from the sacked and burning Troy, bearing his father, Anchises, on his back. Themes from the Aeneid abound in The House of the Seven Gables.

Salem, Massachusetts was Nathaniel Hawthorne's legendary burning Troy. Salem means "peace," but after his sacking at the Custom House, and the furious response of the local newspapers, politicians and clergy to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne thought otherwise. After the Salem people "at two several attacks" had permitted him "to be deliberately lied down," he wished to "bid farewell forever to this abominable city":

I detest this town so much that I hate to go into the streets, or to have the people see me. . . . I feel an infinite contempt for them, and probably have expressed more of it than I intended; for my preliminary chapter has caused the greatest uproar that ever happened here since witch-times.

He half-expected the crowds to tar and feather him: "from such judges as my fellow-citizens, I should look upon it as a higher honor than a laurel-crown."

In The House of the Seven Gables, the legend of the Golden Bough from the Aeneid appears with the morning sun: " ... a reflected gleam, struggling through the boughs of the elm-tree." There is another allusion to the epic poem in the first impression given by Jaffrey Pyncheon: " ... you could feel just as certain that he was opulent ... as if you had seen him touching the twigs of the Pyncheon-elm, and, Midas-like, transmuting them to gold." This ancestral elm survives the five-day northeaster intact,

... except a single branch, that, by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the autumn, had been transmuted to bright gold. It was like the golden branch that gained Aeneas and the Sibyl admittance into Hades.

This one mystic branch hung down before the main-entrance of the seven gables, so nigh the ground, that any passer-by might have stood on tiptoe and plucked it off. Presented at the door, it would have been a symbol of his right to enter and be made acquainted with all the secrets of the house.

In Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas descends into the Lower World and sees that "an elm-tree loomed there, shadowy and huge,/The aged boughs outspread, beneath whose leaves,/Men say, the false dreams cling, thousands on thousands."

Hawthorne not only links his Pyncheon elm to the Virgil elm; he also recollects that in "The Sleeping Beauty," the curse settles on the whole world: "And the wind fell, and on the trees before the castle, not a leaf moved again." But the Pyncheon elm will survive the terrible storm, and beauty will return: "The Pyncheon-elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the morning sun and a sweetly tempered little breeze, which lingered within this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leafy tongues a-whispering all at once." The elm "whispered unintelligible prophecies."

Clifford becomes a second Aeneas: "this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay more than half-lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rosebud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty, amid which he should have had his home."

Translating the Aeneid for entrance to Bowdoin College in 1820, at the age of sixteen, was a deep revelation and consolation for Nathaniel, the forlorn son of lost seafarers. He was ever haunted by the feeling that his father had never been properly buried at home, in Salem. The elder Nathaniel Hathorne, a ship captain, had died of yellow fever in Surinam just before sailing for home in 1808, when his son was four years old.

The first six books of Virgil's epic poem speak of Aeneas' moral quest, the almost fatal sea journey, and his death-celebrating funeral rites. The famous image of Aeneas bearing his father on his shoulders from the burning Troy and the poem's overwhelming stress on funeral rites are echoed in Holgrave's talk of the past:

It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body! In fact, the case is just as if a young giant were compelled to waste all his strength in carrying about the corpse of the old giant, his grandfather, who died a long while ago, and only needs to be decently buried. Just think, a moment; and it will startle you to see what slaves we are to bygone times--to Death, if we give the matter the right word!"

The elder Nathaniel Hathorne's death marked his son for life: "The world is cold," said the writer, "and I am an almshouse child."

If you know anything of me, you know how I sprang out of mystery, akin to none, a thing concocted out of the elements, without visible agency--how, all through my boyhood, I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet continually longing for one--longing to be connected with somebody--and never feeling myself so. . . . I have tried to keep down this yearning, to stifle it, annihilate it, with making a position for myself, with being my own past; but I cannot overcome this natural horror of being a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing; ever this feeling that there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, of being so unconnected. There is not even a grave, not a heap of dry bones, not a pinch of dust, with which I can claim connection.

Hawthorne feared that he should "leave no son to inherit my share in life, with a better sense of its privileges and duties, when his father should vanish like a bubble."

Hawthorne inherited his father's sea journals--a source of inspiration and a spur to the writer's literary impulse. The elder Nathaniel addressed couplets and quatrains to his young wife back in Salem in these journals. With the ship Perseverence docked in Manilla, he wrote: "Lowering Clouds appear/And angry Jove deforms the inclement Year."

While translating the Aeneid, the son thought of going to sea himself and practiced writing a ship's log. He copied his father's ornate script in one journal, practicing. In the hand-printed Spectator--a newsletter of his own devising--in 1820, in answer to the question "What then is Benevolence?" he gives "It is to protect the fatherless, and to make the Widow's heart to sing for joy." In an essay entitled, "Autumnal," he asks, "Must we slumber to awake no more?"

Many of Hawthorne's tales deal with the sudden departure, by a character, from the ordinary way. The question is often whether or not there will be a successful return to the true inner self. In these inventions, we see the child who, in the years following his father's death, made up stories for his sisters and ended them with "And then I'll go away and never come back."

These stories were Hawthorne's first literary obsequies, along with the quatrain he composed for the burial of the family's cat. There is an early concern for proper burial in his ritualistic repetition of a favorite line from Richard III: "Stand back, my lord, and let the coffin pass!" The spiritual quests in his childhood favorites, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, became associated with his father's last journey.

This child again dominates the author of The House of the Seven Gables passage in which Hepzibah, in flight from her house, has "the wretched consciousness of being adrift," while "wandering all abroad, on precisely such a pilgrimage as a child often meditates, to the world's end." Surinam may well have been the world's end.

The circumstances of Captain Hathorne's death are reflected here: "Hardly a week after his decease, one of the Cunard steamers brought intelligence of the death, by cholera, of Judge Pyncheon's son, just at the point of embarkation for his native land." Hepzibah also has "an uncle--who had sailed for India, fifty years before, and never been heard of since. . . . "

Both Hawthorne's uncles--John Manning and Daniel Hathorne, maternal and paternal--had been lost at sea. Finally, only one month had elapsed from Margaret Fuller's drowning on July 19, 1850, to Hawthorne's measured sentence "In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point."

The central image in the Aeneid is the serpent. Hawthorne's serpent references strike a Virgilian aspect. Holgrave mentions "the drama which, for almost two hundred years, has been dragging its slow length over the ground, where you and I now tread"--the drama of the Pyncheon-Maule vengeance.

Jaffrey Pyncheon's "sultry, dog-day heat" of benevolence radiates from his heart, making him "very much like a serpent, which, as a preliminary to fascination, is said to fill the air with his peculiar odor." The scissor-grinder's wheel "issued an intense and spiteful prolongation of a hiss, as fierce as those emitted by Satan and his compeers in Pandemonium. . . . It was an ugly, little, venemous serpent of a noise. . . . "

In the chapter "The Arched Window," the political procession that "trailed its length of trampling footsteps" past the Seven Gables is a kind of serpent. It "might so fascinate" Clifford as to induce him to hurl himself to his death from the arched window in a misguided effort to join the throng below. Hawthorne's memories of politics in Salem were still painful, so he describes the procession as "trampling."

Hawthorne once told Horace Conolly, whom he regarded as his most subtle betrayer in Salem, "I don't reckon you among my enemies, nor ever have. You are a kind of pet serpent, and must be allowed to bite now and then, that being the nature of the critter." Pondering the themes of the Aeneid in the Berkshire Hills, Hawthorne, still resenting being cast out of Salem, looked about for a Trojan horse. He was not long in finding one.

Writing a romance based on "The Sleeping Beauty" called for a happy ending. Two or three weeks after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne wrote: " ... in writing it, I suppose I was illuminated by my purpose to bring it to a prosperous close, while the gloom of the past threw its shadow along the reader's pathway." This is consistent with Hawthorne's faith--despite Salem--in "man's brightening destiny."

But clearly, a happy ending could never be written by the man who had said: "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" In order to resolve this, Hawthorne resorted to multiple narratives and levels of meaning.

Before writing The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne wrote a fairly long, detailed story about a witchcraft execution of a woman. Hawthorne later added this execution as a secret inner story about Hepzibah Pyncheon. In order to accomplish this without being detected--except by the very alert--Hawthorne broke this execution tale into pieces and scattered them throughout his romance. Many passages in The House of the Seven Gables, then, have a double meaning--what the admiring Melville referred to with Ahab's admonition to "Hark ye, yet again--the little lower layer."

The surface of The House of the Seven Gables is sunny. But if the fragments of the execution story are detected, then taken from the misleading contexts into which they are placed and reassembled in proper order, a vastly different picture emerges in horrifying detail. The romance is precisely what Sophia called it in her journal: "the inevitable Fate--'the innocent suffering for the guilty' seemingly so dark yet so clear a law." Clifford and Hepzibah Pyncheon are the suffering innocents.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was ready to write about Salem, but the good citizens of Essex County and the politicos of that "unblessed" Custom House were not ready to appreciate Hawthorne's modern witch-hunt for Clifford and Hepzibah. The author concealed his true narrative, "to render it the more difficult of attainment" by the intolerant.

Hawthorne refers directly to the possibility of a reader discovering his deeper meaning--and his literary duplicity--in The House of the Seven Gables itself: "Had any observer of these proceedings been aware of the fearful secret, hidden within the house, it would have affected him with a singular shape and modification of horror. . . "

The romance "was not to be taken literally and simply, but had a hidden process involved in it that made the whole thing infinitely deeper than he had hitherto deemed it to be. Indeed, it appeared to him, on close observation, that it had not been the intention of the writer really to conceal what he had written from any earnest student, but rather to lock it up for safety in a sort of coffer, of which diligence and insight should be the key, and the keen intelligence with which the meaning was sought should be the test of the seeker's being entitled to possess the secret treasure." With these two sentences, Hawthorne ostensibly describes his protagonist, Septimius Felton, at the moment he discovers that the mysterious manuscript before him "was part of that secret writing for which the Age of Elizabeth was so famous and so dexterous."

On February 10, 1850 Hawthorne wrote that, in a particular type of story, it might be "allowable, and highly advisable ... to have as much mist and glorified fog as possible, diffused on all sides, but still there should be a distinct pathway to tread upon--a clue that the reader shall confide in, as being firmly fastened somewhere." But the readers will not proceed far unless they "know--or, at least, begin to know, or fancy they are about knowing--something of the matter at hand."

It is likely that Hawthorne feared that his loss of his secure position at the Custom House, after years of struggle for financial stability for his growing family, would irreparably ruin him. This fear would account for his severe resentment of Salem policitians. But after writing The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne realized that "The better remedy is for the sufferer to pass on, and leave what he once thought his irreparable ruin far behind him."

The House of the Seven Gables illustrates Hawthorne's thesis that " . . . the wrongdoing of one generation lives into successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief. . . . " Hawthorne later said, "I would come, as if to gather up the white ashes of those who had perished at the stake, and to tell the world--the wrong being now atoned for--how much had perished there which it had never yet known how to praise."

On August 5, 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne met Herman Melville: the impact shook every timber in The House of the Seven Gables. The presence of this brooding mariner, poetic soul such as Hawthorne's father had been, stirred the deepest memories--and doubts--of the older writer. Melville's talk of the sea, of time, eternity, death, myth, and literature, his metaphysical leaping, struck Hawthorne's own particular woe. Hawthorne eventually recoiled from Melville's truth--but not before giving to Moby Dick; or the Whale the bitter duplicity of his literary technique in The House of the Seven Gables.

Herman Melville held the literary key to unlock the secret treasure in The House of the Seven Gables. On April 16, 1851 Melville wrote the Pittsfield "secret review" of Hawthorne's romance, "published by H. Melville". Inside the mansion he had found "a dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps, entitled 'Hawthorne: A Problem.'" Melville could not have given a more finely pointed hint that he knew the secret--a book within the book. Melville had felt the nerve-trembling "shock of recognition" when first discovering Hawthorne's deeper meanings.

He wrote in his personal copy of Hawthorne's Mosses From an Old Manse, "For there is a sure, though a secret sign in some works which prove the culmination of the powers (only the developable ones, however) that produced them. . . . I somehow cling to the strange fancy, that, in all men, hiddenly reside certain wondrous, occult properties ... which may chance to be called forth. . . .

Melville so admired Hawthorne's skill in deliberately concealing these fragments--and his true meaning--that he modelled the sinking of the Pequod on the sinking of Clifford. Melville's Ishmael is slowly drawn to the vortex of the whirlpool caused by the plunging ship: "Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the buttonlike black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst. . . . "

Hawthorne describes the process of Clifford's drowning in detail, a matter of "whirling sticks, straws, and all such trifles, round and round, right over the black depth where a dead corpse lay unseen. . . . At his decease, there is only vacancy, and a momentary eddy--very small, as compared with the apparent magnitude of the ingurgitated object--and a bubble or two, ascending out of the black depth, and bursting at the surface."

Since Ixion is mentioned by Hawthorne and Melville alike, they may have discussed this Greek legend. Ixion is punished for murderous cruelty to his father-in-law and for his blind adulterous lust, qualities which Hawthorne saw in Judge Pyncheon standing in for Judge Royall Tyler: "It was a modern parallel to the case of Ixion embracing a cloud, and was so much the more ridiculous, as the Judge prided himself on eschewing all airy matter, and never mistaking a shadow for a substance." In the Aeneid, Ixion is tortured in the lower world, and a hundred iron throats cannot tell his crimes. Ixion is tantalized in Hades with the riches of the world, so Hawthorne taunts "Governor Pyncheon" with sarcastic irony for a full chapter in The House of the Seven Gables.

But Melville never revealed Hawthorne's secret--even until his death forty years later in 1891. This seems extraordinary. The explanation may lie in the circumstances of their meeting. On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne and Melville went on an outing of literary people--a picnic on Monument Mountain in the Berkshire Hills. After ascending the heights, the party enjoyed a feast early in the afternoon, "well-moistened" with wine, at the home of David Dudley Field, an attorney in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

This dinner was the occasion of a notable literary debate. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes began by praising English authors, apparently with little reservation, and by taunting Cornelius Mathews--the chief editorial writer for Edward Duyckinck's Literary World--for his literary chauvinism in promoting the movement known as Young America.

The fiery Melville joined in the dispute, defending American writers. Even if Duyckinck did report to his wife that Hawthorne looked on placidly--which he may well have, at first--the publisher James T. Fields recalled that Hawthorne "rayed out in a sparkling and unwonted manner" and "stoutly" opposed Holmes's comparison of English and American authors.

Cornelius Mathews wrote about this encounter for the Literary World: "You would give the world to have an accurate account of so careful a pen as ours of what that picked company of wits and belles had to say to each other over the wine." But "We have sealed a seal, never, never to divulge, no never" what had been discussed.

The secret collaboration between Hawthorne and Melville began in this atmosphere of mystery, and continued with Melville's literary disguise in signing his "Hawthorne and His Mosses" review for the Literary World as "A Virginian Spending His Summer in Vermont." Friendships in the nineteenth century often involved such blood-brotherhood pacts. The stage was set for literary duplicity.

The hard necessity to hide the truth, in order to protect it from a destructive society, was ever borne in upon Hawthorne. In later years he wrote, "What a terrible thing it is, to try to get off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!"

Melville never betrayed Hawthorne's confidence. When Julian Hawthorne visited Melville in 1883 in New York City on East Twenty-sixth, "a quiet side street ... where he was living almost alone," he asked the aged writer if he had any letters that Hawthorne had written. Melville replied with a melancholy gesture that they "had all been destroyed long since ... that he had kept nothing."

Asked to recall the red cottage days, Melville only shook his head. Twenty years after Nathaniel Hawthorne's death, his son describes Melville:

He seemed nervous, and every few minutes would rise to open and then to shut again the window opening on the court yard. . . . He was convinced Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career ... some secret in my father's life which had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books. It was characteristic in him to imagine so; there were many secrets untold in his own career.

There is cruelty in Melville's refusal to tell Julian directly about the subtle Nathaniel. But Melville was under no obligation to tell even Julian. This would not only have betrayed Hawthorne's desire to keep his secret only for those who had earned a right to it; but it also would have deprived Julian of the freedom to discover the secret of The House of the Seven Gables for himself.

It is sufficient that Melville recognized Hawthorne:

There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the visible truth ever entered more deeply than into this man's. By visible truth we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him...

It is a fair conjecture what Hawthorne intended for the elusive Holgrave. This Maule, concealing his identity, comes to the Seven Gables two months before Clifford arrives from the prison. Hepzibah, who "had gnashed her teeth against human law," senses that Holgrave is a kindred lawless spirit and tells Phoebe, "I suppose he has a law of his own!"

Quite possibly Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon has sought Holgrave out to be his spy on Clifford and a betraying informer--the judge believing that only the Maule could be so revengeful, and therefore predictable and trustworthy. But Holgrave then falls in love with Phoebe and abandons his dark purpose. In a rare moment of honesty, he tells her that he lives at the Seven Gables so "that I may know the better how to hate it."

Quite aside from being an informer, Holgrave is surrounded by allusions to Shakespeare's King Lear. Hawthorne had seen Edmund Kean's performance of King Lear in Boston on March 5, 1821, and had written: "It was enough to have drawn tears from millstones. I could have cried myself if I had been in a convenient place for such an exploit." This tale of an ancient British royalty hopelessly divided by property and power offers a parallel to the American story.

Holgrave says, "I cannot help fancying that Destiny is arranging its fifth act for a catastrophe." He relates how his ancestor, Matthew Maule, was said to be able to regulate other peoples' dreams, "pretty much like the stage-manager of a theatre."

Phoebe accuses Holgrave: "You talk as if this old house were a theatre; and you seem to look at Hepzibah's and Clifford's misfortunes, and those of generations before them, as a tragedy, such as I have seen acted in the hall of a country-hotel. . . . " And in commenting on the fall of the aristocratic Hepzibah to becoming the huckstress of a cent-shop, Hawthorne says: "The tragedy is enacted with as continual a repetition as that of a populur drama on a holiday, and, nevertheless, is felt as deeply, as when an hereditary noble sinks below his order."

Melville's review, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," must have reminded Hawthorne of seeing King Lear in Boston thirty years before. Melville had been especially moved by Hawthorne's description of the orchard at the Old Manse and saw it, in an allegorical fashion, as "the visible type of the fine mind that had described it." In the stillness of summer afternoons, he, too, had heard the apples falling "out of the mere necessity of perfect ripeness." Thinking of his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville remembered King Lear's poignant brooding:

Men must endure

Their going hence, even as their coming hither;

Ripeness is all.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's engraved portrait is by Thomas Phillibrown, after an 1850 painting by Cephas Giovanni Thompson (1809-1888).