". . . The color, so to speak, of _The House of the Seven Gables_ is admirable. But the story has a sort of expansive quality which never wholly fructifies, and as I lately laid it down, after reading it for the third time, I had a sense of having interested myself in a magnificent fragment. Yet the book has a great fascination, and of all of those of its author"s productions which I have read over while writing this sketch, it is perhaps tine one that has gained most by re-perusal. If it be true of the others that the pure, natural quality of the imaginative strain is their great merit, this is at least as true of _The House the Seven Gables,_ the charm of which is in a peculiar degree of the kind that we fail to reduce to its grounds -- like that of the sweetness of a piece of music, or the softness of fine September weather. It is vague, indefinable, ineffable; but it is the sort of thing we must always point to in justification of the high claim that we make for Hawthorne. . . ."