When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to ass...

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in t...

It still lacked half an hour of sunrise, when Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon⁠—we will not say awoke, it being doubtful whether the poor lady had so much as closed her eyes during the brief night of midsummer⁠...

Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself...

Towards noon, Hepzibah saw an elderly gentleman, large and portly, and of remarkably dignified demeanor, passing slowly along on the opposite side of the white and dusty street. On coming within the s...

Phoebe Pyncheon slept, on the night of her arrival, in a chamber that looked down on the garden of the old house. It fronted towards the east, so that at a very seasonable hour a glow of crimson light...

After an early tea, the little country-girl strayed into the garden. The enclosure had formerly been very extensive, but was now contracted within small compass, and hemmed about, partly by high woode...

When Phoebe awoke⁠—which she did with the early twittering of the conjugal couple of robins in the pear-tree⁠—she heard movements below stairs, and, hastening down, found Hepzibah already in the kitch...

Phoebe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer⁠—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright⁠—of Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the lo...

Truly was there something high, generous, and noble in the native composition of our poor old Hepzibah! Or else⁠—and it was quite as probably the case⁠—she had been enriched by poverty, developed by s...

Clifford, except for Phoebe’s more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his mor...

From the inertness, or what we may term the vegetative character, of his ordinary mood, Clifford would perhaps have been content to spend one day after another, interminably⁠—or, at least, throughout ...

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 usuall...

There was a message brought, one day, from the worshipful Gervayse Pyncheon to young Matthew Maule, the carpenter, desiring his immediate presence at the House of the Seven Gables. “And what does your...

Holgrave, plunging into his tale with the energy and absorption natural to a young author, had given a good deal of action to the parts capable of being developed and exemplified in that manner. He no...

Several days passed over the Seven Gables, heavily and drearily enough. In fact (not to attribute the whole gloom of sky and earth to the one inauspicious circumstance of Phoebe’s departure), an easte...

Never had the old house appeared so dismal to poor Hepzibah as when she departed on that wretched errand. There was a strange aspect in it. As she trode along the foot-worn passages, and opened one cr...

Summer as it was, the east wind set poor Hepzibah’s few remaining teeth chattering in her head, as she and Clifford faced it, on their way up Pyncheon Street, and towards the centre of the town. Not m...

Judge Pyncheon, while his two relatives have fled away with such ill-considered haste, still sits in the old parlor, keeping house, as the familiar phrase is, in the absence of its ordinary occupants....

Uncle Venner, trundling a wheelbarrow, was the earliest person stirring in the neighborhood the day after the storm. Pyncheon Street, in front of the House of the Seven Gables, was a far pleasanter sc...

Phoebe, coming so suddenly from the sunny daylight, was altogether bedimmed in such density of shadow as lurked in most of the passages of the old house. She was not at first aware by whom she had bee...

The sudden death of so prominent a member of the social world as the Honorable Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon created a sensation (at least, in the circles more immediately connected with the deceased) which ...