At this time his old bond with Eleanor revived over her well-chosen wedding gift. It was a first edition of The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s novel about a New England family curse blighting the descendants of a man who had perpetrated murder during the witchcraft frenzy in the seventeenth century. A ‘Bull’s Eye’, Eliot said, ‘exactly right’. A young woman in the novel, Phoebe, a ray of sun, transforms the gloom of the old Puritan house (Hawthorne’s model, which still stands in Salem, with its dark corners emblematic of dark minds). ‘The dry-rot of the old timbers of the skeleton frame was stayed’. The young woman kindles ‘the heart’s household fire’ of the forlorn inhabitant.
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