“‘The Old Pyncheon House:  A Romance’; ’The Old Pyncheon Family; or the House of the Seven Gables:  A Romance’;—­choose between them.  I have rather a distaste to a double title? otherwise, I think I should prefer the second.  Is it any matter under which title it is announced?  If a better should occur hereafter, we can substitute.  Of these two, on the whole, I judge the first to be the better.

“I write diligently, but not so rapidly as I had hoped.  I find the book requires more care and thought than ‘The Scarlet Letter’; also I have to wait oftener for a mood.  ‘The Scarlet Letter’ being all in one tone, I had only to get my pitch, and could then go on interminably.  Many passages of this book ought to be finished with the minuteness of a Dutch picture, in order to give them their proper effect.  Sometimes, when tired of it, it strikes me that the whole is an absurdity, from beginning to end; but the fact is, in writing a romance, a man is always, or always ought to be, careering on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies in coming as close as possible, without actually tumbling over.  My prevailing idea is, that the book ought to succeed better than ’The Scarlet Letter,’ though I have no idea that it will.”

On the 9th of December he was still at work on the new romance, and writes:—­

“My desire and prayer is to get through with the business in hand.  I have been in a Slough of Despond for some days past, having written so fiercely that I came to a stand-still.  There are points where a writer gets bewildered and cannot form any judgment of what he has done, or tell what to do next.  In these cases it is best to keep quiet.”

On the 12th of January, 1851, he is still busy over his new book, and writes:  “My ‘House of the Seven Gables’ is, so to speak, finished; only I am hammering away a little on the roof, and doing up a few odd jobs, that were left incomplete.”  At the end of the month the manuscript of his second great romance was put into the hands of the expressman at Lenox, by Hawthorne himself, to be delivered to me.  On the 27th he writes:—­

“If you do not soon receive it, you may conclude that it has miscarried; in which case, I shall not consent to the universe existing a moment longer.  I have no copy of it, except the wildest scribble of a first draught, so that it could never be restored.

“It has met with extraordinary success from that portion of the public to whose judgment it has been submitted, viz. from my wife.  I likewise prefer it to ‘The Scarlet Letter’; but an author’s opinion of his book just after completing it is worth little or nothing, he being then in the hot or cold fit of a fever, and certain to rate it too high or too low.

    “It has undoubtedly one disadvantage in being brought so close to
    the present time; whereby its romantic improbabilities become more
    glaring.