The Scarlet Letter

After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange

their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was

more than one account of what had been witnessed on the

scaffold.

Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast

of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER--the very semblance of

that worn by Hester Prynne--imprinted in the flesh. As regarded

its origin there were various explanations, all of which must

necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirmed that the

Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne

first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of

penance--which he afterwards, in so many futile methods,

followed out--by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others

contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long

time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent

necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of

magic and poisonous drugs. Others, again and those best able to

appreciate the minister's peculiar sensibility, and the

wonderful operation of his spirit upon the body--whispered their

belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active

tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and

at last manifesting Heaven's dreadful judgment by the visible

presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these

theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the

portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office,

erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation

has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were

spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have

removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that

there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a

new-born infant's. Neither, by their report, had his dying words

acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any--the

slightest--connexion on his part, with the guilt for which

Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to

these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that

he was dying--conscious, also, that the reverence of the

multitude placed him already among saints and angels--had

desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen

woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the

choicest of man's own righteousness. After exhausting life in

his efforts for mankind's spiritual good, he had made the manner

of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the

mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite

Purity, we are sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the

holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as

to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and

repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would

look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth so momentous,

we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale's

story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a

man's friends--and especially a clergyman's--will sometimes

uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine

on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained

creature of the dust.