Chapter: IT must not be supposed that the life of a personage naturally so
active as Phoebe could be wholly confined within the precincts of the
old Pyncheon House.  Clifford's demands upon her time were usually
satisfied, in those long days, considerably earlier than sunset.  Quiet
as his daily existence seemed, it nevertheless drained all the
resources by which he lived.  It was not physical exercise that
overwearied him,--for except that he sometimes wrought a little with a
hoe, or paced the garden-walk, or, in rainy weather, traversed a large
unoccupied room,--it was his tendency to remain only too quiescent, as
regarded any toil of the limbs and muscles.  But, either there was a
smouldering fire within him that consumed his vital energy, or the
monotony that would have dragged itself with benumbing effect over a
mind differently situated was no monotony to Clifford.  Possibly, he
was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly
assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights,
             sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more
             practised with the world.  As all is activity and vicissitude to the
             new mind of a child, so might it be, likewise, to a mind that had
             undergone a kind of new creation, after its long-suspended life.

             Be the cause what it might, Clifford commonly retired to rest,
             thoroughly exhausted, while the sunbeams were still melting through his
             window-curtains, or were thrown with late lustre on the chamber wall.
             And while he thus slept early, as other children do, and dreamed of
             childhood, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder
             of the day and evening.

             This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so
             little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe.  The old
             house, as we have already said, had both the dry-rot and the damp-rot
             in its walls; it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere than that.
             Hepzibah, though she had her valuable and redeeming traits, had grown
             to be a kind of lunatic by imprisoning herself so long in one place,
             with no other company than a single series of ideas, and but one
             affection, and one bitter sense of wrong.  Clifford, the reader may
             perhaps imagine, was too inert to operate morally on his
             fellow-creatures, however intimate and exclusive their relations with
             him.  But the sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtile
             and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes
             of organized life, and vibrates from one to another.  A flower, for
             instance, as Phoebe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in
             Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law,
             converting her whole daily life into a flower fragrance for these two
             sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much
             sooner than if worn on a younger and happier breast.  Unless she had
             now and then indulged her brisk impulses, and breathed rural air in a
             suburban walk, or ocean breezes along the shore,--had occasionally
             obeyed the impulse of Nature, in New England girls, by attending a
             metaphysical or philosophical lecture, or viewing a seven-mile
             panorama, or listening to a concert,--had gone shopping about the city,
             ransacking entire depots of splendid merchandise, and bringing home a
             ribbon,--had employed, likewise, a little time to read the Bible in her
             chamber, and had stolen a little more to think of her mother and her
             native place--unless for such moral medicines as the above, we should
             soon have beheld our poor Phoebe grow thin and put on a bleached,
             unwholesome aspect, and assume strange, shy ways, prophetic of
             old-maidenhood and a cheerless future.

             Even as it was, a change grew visible; a change partly to be regretted,
             although whatever charm it infringed upon was repaired by another,
             perhaps more precious.  She was not so constantly gay, but had her
             moods of thought, which Clifford, on the whole, liked better than her
             former phase of unmingled cheerfulness; because now she understood him
             better and more delicately, and sometimes even interpreted him to
             himself.  Her eyes looked larger, and darker, and deeper; so deep, at
             some silent moments, that they seemed like Artesian wells, down, down,
             into the infinite.  She was less girlish than when we first beheld her
             alighting from the omnibus; less girlish, but more a woman.

             The only youthful mind with which Phoebe had an opportunity of frequent
             intercourse was that of the daguerreotypist.  Inevitably, by the
             pressure of the seclusion about them, they had been brought into habits
             of some familiarity.  Had they met under different circumstances,
             neither of these young persons would have been likely to bestow much
             thought upon the other, unless, indeed, their extreme dissimilarity
             should have proved a principle of mutual attraction.  Both, it is true,
             were characters proper to New England life, and possessing a common
             ground, therefore, in their more external developments; but as unlike,
             in their respective interiors, as if their native climes had been at
             world-wide distance.  During the early part of their acquaintance,
             Phoebe had held back rather more than was customary with her frank and
             simple manners from Holgrave's not very marked advances.  Nor was she
             yet satisfied that she knew him well, although they almost daily met
             and talked together, in a kind, friendly, and what seemed to be a
             familiar way.

             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; while their ultimate success, or the point
             whither they tend, may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist
             would imagine for his hero.  Holgrave, as he told Phoebe somewhat
             proudly, could not boast of his origin, unless as being exceedingly
             humble, nor of his education, except that it had been the scantiest
             possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
             school.  Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
             self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
             his natural force of will.  Though now but twenty-two years old
             (lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
             been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
             store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
             of a country newspaper.  He had subsequently travelled New England and
             the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
             manufactory of cologne-water and other essences.  In an episodical way
             he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
             success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
             streams.  As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
             packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
             to see Italy, and part of France and Germany.  At a later period he had
             spent some months in a community of Fourierists.  Still more recently
             he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
                     assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
                     Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
             very remarkable endowments.

             His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
             his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
             preceding ones.  It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
             adventurer, who had his bread to earn.  It would be thrown aside as
             carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
             equally digressive means.  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.  She was startled, however, and
             sometimes repelled,--not by any doubt of his integrity to whatever law
             he acknowledged, but by a sense that his law differed from her own.  He
             made her uneasy, and seemed to unsettle everything around her, by his
             lack of reverence for what was fixed, unless, at a moment's warning, it
             could establish its right to hold its ground.

             Then, moreover, she scarcely thought him affectionate in his nature.
             He was too calm and cool an observer.  Phoebe felt his eye, often; his
             heart, seldom or never.  He took a certain kind of interest in Hepzibah
             and her brother, and Phoebe herself.  He studied them attentively, and
             allowed no slightest circumstance of their individualities to escape
             him.  He was ready to do them whatever good he might; but, after all,
             he never exactly made common cause with them, nor gave any reliable
             evidence that he loved them better in proportion as he knew them more.
             In his relations with them, he seemed to be in quest of mental food,
             not heart-sustenance.  Phoebe could not conceive what interested him so
             much in her friends and herself, intellectually, since he cared nothing
             for them, or, comparatively, so little, as objects of human affection.

             Always, in his interviews with Phoebe, the artist made especial inquiry
             as to the welfare of Clifford, whom, except at the Sunday festival, he
             seldom saw.

             "Does he still seem happy?" he asked one day.

             "As happy as a child," answered Phoebe; "but--like a child, too--very
             easily disturbed."

             "How disturbed?" inquired Holgrave.  "By things without, or by thoughts
             within?"

             "I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?" replied Phoebe with simple
             piquancy.  "Very often his humor changes without any reason that can be
             guessed at, just as a cloud comes over the sun.  Latterly, since I have
             begun to know him better, I feel it to be not quite right to look
             closely into his moods.  He has had such a great sorrow, that his heart
             is made all solemn and sacred by it.  When he is cheerful,--when the
             sun shines into his mind,--then I venture to peep in, just as far as
             the light reaches, but no further.  It is holy ground where the shadow
             falls!"

             "How prettily you express this sentiment!" said the artist.  "I can
             understand the feeling, without possessing it.  Had I your
             opportunities, no scruples would prevent me from fathoming Clifford to
             the full depth of my plummet-line!"

             "How strange that you should wish it!" remarked Phoebe involuntarily.
             "What is Cousin Clifford to you?"

             "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! What a
             complex riddle--a complexity of complexities--do they present! It
             requires intuitive sympathy, like a young girl's, to solve it.  A mere
             observer, like myself (who never have any intuitions, and am, at best,
                     only subtile and acute), is pretty certain to go astray."

             The artist now turned the conversation to themes less dark than that
             which they had touched upon.  Phoebe and he were young together; 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; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the
             world--that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without
             being venerable--as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into
             all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest
             promise of becoming.  He had that sense, or inward prophecy,--which a
             young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a
             mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,--that we
             are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this
             very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be
             accomplished in his own lifetime.  It seemed to Holgrave,--as doubtless
             it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam's
             grandchildren,--that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown
             and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be
             thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to
             begin anew.

             As to the main point,--may we never live to doubt it!--as to the better
             centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right.  His error lay
             in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is
             destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new
             suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in
             applying his own little life-span as the measure of an interminable
             achievement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything
             to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or
             against it.  Yet it was well for him to think so.  This enthusiasm,
             infusing itself through the calmness of his character, and thus taking
             an aspect of settled thought and wisdom, would serve to keep his youth
             pure, and make his aspirations high.  And when, with the years settling
             down more weightily upon him, his early faith should be modified by
             inevitable experience, it would be with no harsh and sudden revolution
             of his sentiments.  He would still have faith in man's brightening
             destiny, and perhaps love him all the better, as he should recognize
             his helplessness in his own behalf; and the haughty faith, with which
             he began life, would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its
             close, in discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a
             kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.

             Holgrave had read very little, and that little in passing through the
             thoroughfare of life, where the mystic language of his books was
             necessarily mixed up with the babble of the multitude, so that both one
             and the other were apt to lose any sense that might have been properly
             their own.  He considered himself a thinker, and was certainly of a
             thoughtful turn, but, with his own path to discover, had perhaps hardly
             yet reached the point where an educated man begins to think.  The true
             value of his character lay in that deep consciousness of inward
             strength, which made all his past vicissitudes seem merely like a
             change of garments; in that enthusiasm, so quiet that he scarcely knew
             of its existence, but which gave a warmth to everything that he laid
             his hand on; in that personal ambition, hidden--from his own as well as
             other eyes--among his more generous impulses, but in which lurked a
             certain efficacy, that might solidify him from a theorist into the
             champion of some practicable cause.  Altogether in his culture and want
             of culture,--in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the
             practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his
             magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever
             the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his
             infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked,--the artist might
             fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his
             native land.

             His career it would be difficult to prefigure.  There appeared to be
             qualities in Holgrave, such as, in a country where everything is free
             to the hand that can grasp it, could hardly fail to put some of the
             world's prizes within his reach.  But these matters are delightfully
             uncertain.  At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of
             just about Holgrave's age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but
             of whom, even after much and careful inquiry, we never happen to hear
             another word.  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.  In that point of
             view, it was a pleasant sight to behold this young man, with so much
             faith in himself, and so fair an appearance of admirable powers,--so
             little harmed, too, by the many tests that had tried his metal,--it was
             pleasant to see him in his kindly intercourse with Phoebe.  Her thought
             had scarcely done him justice when it pronounced him cold; or, if so,
             he had grown warmer now.  Without such purpose on her part, and
             unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a
             home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct.  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
             story-book.  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.   Very possibly, he forgot Phoebe while he talked to her,
             and was moved only by the inevitable tendency of thought, when rendered
             sympathetic by enthusiasm and emotion, to flow into the first safe
             reservoir which it finds.  But, had you peeped at them through the
             chinks of the garden-fence, the young man's earnestness and heightened
             color might have led you to suppose that he was making love to the
             young girl!

             At length, something was said by Holgrave that made it apposite for
             Phoebe to inquire what had first brought him acquainted with her cousin
             Hepzibah, and why he now chose to lodge in the desolate old Pyncheon
             House.  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 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!"

             "But I do not see it," observed Phoebe.

             "For example, then," continued Holgrave:  "a dead man, if he happens to
             have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; 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.
             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! And we
             must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
             on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
             of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to
             interfere.  I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
             houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!"

             "And why not," said Phoebe, "so long as we can be comfortable in them?"

             "But we shall live to see the day, I trust," went on the artist, "when
             no man shall build his house for posterity.  Why should he? He might
             just as reasonably order a durable suit of clothes,--leather, or
             guttapercha, or whatever else lasts longest,--so that his
             great-grandchildren should have the benefit of them, and cut precisely
             the same figure in the world that he himself does.  If each generation
             were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that single change,
             comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform
             which society is now suffering for.  I doubt whether even our public
             edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, 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."

             "How you hate everything old!" said Phoebe in dismay.  "It makes me
             dizzy to think of such a shifting world!"

             "I certainly love nothing mouldy," answered Holgrave.  "Now, this old
             Pyncheon House! Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black
             shingles, and the green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark,
             low-studded rooms--its grime and sordidness, which are the
             crystallization on its walls of the human breath, that has been drawn
             and exhaled here in discontent and anguish? The house ought to be
             purified with fire,--purified till only its ashes remain!"

             "Then why do you live in it?" asked Phoebe, a little piqued.

             "Oh, I am pursuing my studies here; not in books, however," replied
             Holgrave.  "The house, in my view, is expressive of that odious and
             abominable Past, with all its bad influences, against which I have just
             been declaiming.  I dwell in it for a while, that I may know the better
             how to hate it.  By the bye, did you ever hear the story of Maule, the
             wizard, and what happened between him and your immeasurably
             great-grandfather?"

             "Yes, indeed!" said Phoebe; "I heard it long ago, from my father, and
             two or three times from my cousin Hepzibah, in the month that I have
             been here.  She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons
             began from that quarrel with the wizard, as you call him.  And you, Mr.
             Holgrave look as if you thought so too!  How singular that you should
             believe what is so very absurd, when you reject many things that are a
             great deal worthier of credit!"

             "I do believe it," said the artist seriously; "not as a superstition,
             however, but as proved by unquestionable facts, and as exemplifying a
             theory.  Now, see:  under those seven gables, at which we now look
             up,--and which old Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his
             descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond
             the present,--under that roof, through a portion of three centuries,
             there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated
             hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death,
             dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,--all, or most of which calamity I
             have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to
             plant and endow a family.  To plant a family! 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."

             "You speak very unceremoniously of my kindred," said Phoebe, debating
             with herself whether she ought to take offence.

             "I speak true thoughts to a true mind!" answered Holgrave, with a
             vehemence which Phoebe had not before witnessed in him.   "The truth is
             as I say! Furthermore, the original perpetrator and father of this
             mischief appears to have perpetuated himself, and still walks the
             street,--at least, his very image, in mind and body,--with the fairest
             prospect of transmitting to posterity as rich and as wretched an
             inheritance as he has received! Do you remember the daguerreotype, and
             its resemblance to the old portrait?"

             "How strangely in earnest you are!" exclaimed Phoebe, looking at him
             with surprise and perplexity; half alarmed and partly inclined to
             laugh.  "You talk of the lunacy of the Pyncheons; is it contagious?"

             "I understand you!" said the artist, coloring and laughing.  "I believe
             I am a little mad.  This subject has taken hold of my mind with the
             strangest tenacity of clutch since I have lodged in yonder old gable.
             As one method of throwing it off, I have put an incident of the
             Pyncheon family history, with which I happen to be acquainted, into the
             form of a legend, and mean to publish it in a magazine."

             "Do you write for the magazines?" inquired Phoebe.

             "Is it possible you did not know it?" cried Holgrave.  "Well, such is
             literary fame! Yes.  Miss Phoebe Pyncheon, among the multitude of my
             marvellous gifts I have that of writing stories; 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?"

             "Yes, if it is not very long," said Phoebe,--and added
             laughingly,--"nor very dull."

             As this latter point was one which the daguerreotypist could not decide
             for himself, he forthwith produced his roll of manuscript, and, while
             the late sunbeams gilded the seven gables, began to read.

 The Daguerreotypist: When Clifford slept, Phoebe was free to follow her own tastes for the remainder of the day and evening. This freedom was essential to Phoebe's health, for the old house had dry-rot in its walls and was not good to breathe. Phoebe began to understand Clifford better, and Clifford liked that she was not so constantly happy, for her eyes seemed larger, darker and deeper. The only youthful mind with whom Phoebe had regular contact was Holgrave. Both were true New England characters. Holgrave did not come from an elite family, and was self-dependent while still a boy. He was now twenty-two and had been a schoolmaster, a salesman and the political editor of a country newspaper. His present phase as a daguerreotypist was likely to be as impermanent as the previous professions. It was remarkable that he had not lost his identity among these various changes. Holgrave made Phoebe uneasy by his lack of reverence for what was fixed. He appeared to study Phoebe, Clifford and Hepzibah; he seemed to be in the quest of mental food, not heart-sustenance. Phoebe asks what Clifford is to Holgrave, and he answers nothing except an odd and incomprehensible world. He views Clifford and Judge Pyncheon as complexities. Holgrave's error lay in supposing that this age was to trade antiquity entirely for what is new. He had a deep consciousness of inward strength and considered himself a thinker. Holgrave hopes to see the day when no man shall build a house for posterity. He even claims that he lives in the house that he finds abominable in order to know how better to hate it. Clifford mentions the story of Maule to Phoebe. Holgrave believes that the Pyncheons that live in the house have been infected with a kind of lunacy. Holgrave has been writing a family history of the Pyncheons that he intends to publish.

