One day our excursion is into the romantic valley of the Deerfield by the old stage-road over the Hoosac range, the route which Hawthorne took with his friends Birch and Leach. The many turns by which the road accomplishes the ascent afford constantly varying vistas of the valley out of which we rise, and progressively widening prospects of the forest-clad mountains beyond. At the summit we are in the centre of the magnificent panorama of mountains--glowing now with autumnal crimson and gold--which extorted from Henry Clay the declaration that he had "never beheld anything so beautiful."
On the bare and wind-swept plain which lies along the summit are a few farm-dwellings. Among these at the time of Hawthorne's visit--before the great tunnel had pierced the mountain and superseded the stage-route--was a homely wayside inn, afterward a farm-house, at whose bar passengers were wont to "wet their whistles." It may be assumed that the romancer and his companions failed not to conform to this time-honored custom, for it was in that rude bar-room--since a farm-kitchen--that Hawthorne met the itinerant Jew with a diorama of execrable scratchings which he carried upon his back and exhibited as "specimens of the fine arts;" in that room also the novelist witnessed the whimsical performance of the usually sensible and sedate old dog, who periodically broke out in an infuriated pursuit of his own tail, "as if one half of his body were at deadly enmity with the other." These incidents were carefully noted at the time for possible future use, and in such choice diction that when, many years afterward, he wove them into the fabric of a tale of "The Snow Image" volume, he transcribed them from his diary to his manuscript essentially unchanged. This instance illustrates the method of this consummate literary artist and his alertness to perceive and utilize the details of real life. His journals abundantly show that he was by no means the aphelxian dreamer he has been adjudged.
As we descend into the deep valley we find a wild gulf where a brooklet from the top of Hoosac falls a hundred feet into a rock-bordered pool, whence it hastens to lose itself in the river; and a mile or two farther along the Deerfield we come to the Natural Arch which Hawthorne visited. It is in one of the wildest parts of the picturesque valley, where mountain-walls rise a thousand feet on either side. Through a mass of rock projecting from the margin the stream has wrought for itself a symmetrically arched passage as large as and very like the door-way of an Old-World cathedral. The summit of the arch and the water-worn pillars upon either side display "pot-holes" and other evidences of erosion, and in the bed of the current lie fragments of similarly attrite rocks which seem to indicate that at some period a series of arches spanned the entire space from mountain to mountain. Hawthorne's pleasing fancy makes this arch the entrance to an enchanted palace which has all vanished except the door-way that "now opens only into nothingness and empty space."