The Scarlet Letter

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale's feelings as he returned from

his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical

energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway

among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude

natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he

remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across the

plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush,

climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in

short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable

activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how

feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he had toiled

over the same ground, only two days before. As he drew near the

town, he took an impression of change from the series of

familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed not

yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago,

since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each former trace

of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of

the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a

weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested one. Not

the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of

change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he

met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the

little town. They looked neither older nor younger now; the

beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe

of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to

describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on

whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the

minister's deepest sense seemed to inform him of their

mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably as

he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so

very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr.

Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had

seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming

about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed,

indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a

change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the

intervening space of a single day had operated on his

consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's own will,

and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had

wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore,

but the same minister returned not from the forest. He might

have said to the friends who greeted him--"I am not the man for

whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn

into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy

brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure,

his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not

flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no

doubt, would still have insisted with him--"Thou art thyself the

man!" but the error would have been their own, not his.