While Hawthorne had affection for the house, perhaps it was the hillside behind it, from the top of which peaceful Concord lay spread out, that he liked the best. He wore a path up its steep side and paced its narrow peak while musing about what to write. The hill was also a way to avoid intrusions. His neighbor Bronson Alcott described him up there, “screened behind the shrubbery and disappearing like a hare into the bush when surprised.” Hawthorne once said; “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Indeed, it still exists, though houses have grown up on the other side of the hill, startlingly close as one ascends to the top.
The fact that the hill was little more than a nub (its “peak” can be reached in minutes) would have been, to Hawthorne, beside the point. His imagination was able to make of the humble hill a windswept pinnacle rising above the mist on which he was the solitary adventurer. Such a flight of fancy was not unusual for him. Out of his imagination and his Yankee background he was able to turn the New England countryside—the white steepled churches, the public roads, the tree-furred rolling hills—into settings of gothic suspense and fear.
