The Scarlet Letter

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester's face with a look in which

hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and

a kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely

hinted at, but dared not speak.

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. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in

desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in

his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged

point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or

legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more

reverence than the Indian would feel for the 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.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an

experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally

received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so

fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them. But this

had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.

Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and

minuteness, not his acts--for those it was easy to arrange--but

each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of

the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was

only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and

even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order

inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who

kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the

fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer

within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole

seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a

preparation for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such

a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation

of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat that he was

broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was

darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it;

that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a

hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the balance;

that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and

the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this

poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick,

miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and

sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy

doom which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth

spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human

soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched

and guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again

into the citadel, and might even in his subsequent assaults,

select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had

formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall, and near

it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his

unforgotten triumph.