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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne on 2008-11-27
- Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed
  Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for
  his sins, that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of
  the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should
  have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No
  aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable;
  no success of mine—if my life, beyond its domestic
  scope, had ever been brightened by success—would they deem
  otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. “What
  is he?” murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the
  other. “A writer of story-books! What kind of a business
  in life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to
  mankind in his day and generation—may that be? Why, the
  degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!” Such
  are the compliments bandied between my great-grandsires and
  myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me
  as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves
  with mine.
- The new inhabitant—who came himself from a foreign land,
  or whose father or grandfather came—has little claim to be
  called a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity
  with which an old settler, over whom his third century is
  creeping, clings to the spot where his successive generations have
  been imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for
  him
- 28 more annotations...
- - The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for
    their venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a
    politician, and though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither
    received nor held his office with any reference to political services.
    Had it been otherwise,—had an active politician been put into
    this influential post, to assume the easy task of making head
    against a Whig Collector, whose infirmities withheld him from
    the personal administration of his office,—hardly a man of the
    old corps would have drawn the breath of official life, within a
    month after the exterminating angel had come up the Custom-House
    steps.
  - “People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale,
    her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such
    a scandal should have come upon his congregation.”
  - The door of the jail being flung open from within, there
    appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into
    sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with
    a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This
    personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole
    dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his
    business to administer in its final and closest application to the
    offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he
    laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he
    thus drew forward; until, on the threshold of the prison-door,
    she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and
    force of character, and stepped into the open air, as if by her
    own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some
    three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face
    from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore,
    had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of
    a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.
  - The rust
  - ants of Boston;
    all with their eyes intently fastened on the
    iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any
    other population, or at a later period in the history of New England,
    the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies
    of these good people would have augured some awful business
    in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated
    execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence
    of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment.
    But, in that early severity of the Puritan
  - Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her[66]
    breast, that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward
    at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure
    herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes!—these[67]
    were her realities,—all else had vanished!
  - civilized and savage costume
  - betwixt
  - whether Pearl were
    a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after
    playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage
    floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that
    look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested
    her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she
    were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering
    light, that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not
    whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards
    the child,—to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably
    began,—to snatch her to her bosom, with a close pressure
    and earnest kisses,—not so much from overflowing love, as to
    assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly
    delusive. But Pearl's laugh, when she was caught, though full of
    merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before.
  - “Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.
    
    “O, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.
    
    But, while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance
    up and down, with the humorsome gesticulation of a little imp,
    whose next freak might be to fly up the chimney.
    
    “Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.
    
    Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the
    moment, with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was
    Pearl's wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted
    whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell of her
    existence, and might not now reveal herself.
    
    “Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing
    her antics.
    
    “Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!”
    said the mother, half playfully; for it was often the case that
    a sportive impulse came over her, in the midst of her deepest
    suffering. “Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee
    hither.”
    
    “Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to
    Hester, and pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell
    me!”
    
    “Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.
    
    But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness
    of the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness,[117]
    or because an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her
    small forefinger, and touched the scarlet letter.
    
    “He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no
    Heavenly Father!”
    
    “Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered
    the mother, suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into this
    world. He sent even me, thy mother. Then, much more, thee!
    Or, if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence didst thou
    come?”
    
    “Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously,
    but laughing, and capering about the floor. “It is thou that
    must tell me!”
  - His form grew emaciated;
    his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a certain melancholy
    prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any slight
    alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart,
    with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain.
  - He to whom only the outward and physical evil
    is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is
    called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as
    whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom
    of some ailment in the spiritual part. Your pardon, once again,
    good Sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence. You, Sir,
    of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest
    conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit
    whereof it is the instrument.”
  - While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and
    tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over
    to the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.
    Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred
    office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His
    intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing
    and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of
    preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily
    life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed
    the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent
    as several of them were.
  - scaffold
  - Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham's lamp, the old
    lady quickly extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she
    went up among the clouds. The minister saw nothing further
    of her motions. The magistrate, after a wary observation of the
    darkness,—into which, nevertheless, he could see but little further
    than he might into a mill-stone,—retired from the window.
  - Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again
    stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought.
  - “Peace, Hester, peace!” replied the old man, with gloomy
    sternness. “It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such
    power as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten,
    comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we
    suffer. By thy first step awry thou didst plant the germ of
    evil; but since that moment, it has all been a dark necessity.
    Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of
    typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a
    fiend's office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black
    flower blossom as it may! Now go thy ways, and deal as thou
    wilt with yonder man.”
  - a deformed old figure,
  - “Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not love you.
    It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something
    on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing, a good way[225]
    off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but
    a child. It will not flee from me; for I wear nothing on my
    bosom yet!”
  - “Run away, child,” answered her mother, “and catch the
    sunshine! It will soon be gone.”
  - But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity,
    and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed,
    from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation
    as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered,
    without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate
    and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of
    which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide
    their fate.
  - clerical band, the judicial
    robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The
    tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The
    scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women
    dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been
    her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her
    strong, but taught her much amiss.
  - “Mother,” said she, “was that the same minister that kissed
    me by the brook?”
  - “I could not be sure that it was he; so strange he looked,”
    continued the child. “Else I would have run to him, and bid
    him kiss me now, before all the people; even as he did yonder
    among the dark old trees. What would the minister have said,
    mother? Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and
    scowled on me, and bid me be gone?”
  - Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr.
    Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose eccentricities—or
    insanity, as we should term it—led her to do what few of
    the towns-people would have ventured on; to begin a conversation
    with the wearer of the scarlet letter, in public. It was
    Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a
    triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and
    a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession. As
    this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her
    no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in all
    the works of necromancy that were continually going forward,
    the crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch
    of her garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous
    folds. Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne,—kindly as so
    many now felt towards the latter,—the dread inspired by Mistress
    Hibbins was doubled, and caused a general movement
    from that part of the market-place in which the two women
    stood.
  - nd Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken
    shame! But where was little Pearl? If still alive, she
    must now have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood.
  - But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne here, in
    New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had
    found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and
    here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore,
    and resumed,—of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate
    of that iron period would have imposed it,—resumed the
    symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards
    did it quit her bosom.
  - But, in the lapse of the toilsome,
    thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester's life,
    the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the
    world's scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something
    to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence
    too.
Lecture 11: The Origins of the French Revolution on 2007-01-29
- that is, those men and women who made
  conscious choices - sensed in their hearts and minds that they were witnessing the birth
  of a new age.
burell9history » Out Line on 2007-01-14
- The 3 Estates
  First Estate-Clergy
  -
spells on 2007-01-08
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