On the first day of December, 1851, he left Lenox with his wife and children, betaking himself for the winter to West Newton, a suburban village a few miles west of Boston, on the Charles River; there to remain until he could effect the purchase of a house which could serve him as a settled home. The house that he finally selected was an old one in the town of Concord, about a mile easterly from the centre of the village on the road to Lexington, and was then the property of Mrs. Bronson Alcott. During the winter at West Newton he wrote "The Blithedale Romance," which was published early in 1852. In the brief term of two years and a half from the moment of his leaving the Custom House at Salem, he had thus produced four books,--"The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," "A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls," and "The Blithedale Romance,"--three of them being the principal works of his lifetime, with which "The Marble Faun" alone stands in the same category. Early in the summer of 1852 he took up his residence in his new home, The Wayside, of which he thus discoursed to Mr. George William Curtis, on the 14th of July, 1852:-- MY DEAR HOWADJI,--I think (and am glad to think) that you will find it necessary to come hither in order to write your Concord Sketches; and as for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestiveness about it and no venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing it. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hill-side behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hill-side is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,--the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze