On Hester Prynne's story, therefore, I bestowed much thought.
It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour, while
pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing, with a
hundredfold repetition, the long extent from the front door of
the Custom-House to the side entrance, and back again. Great
were the weariness and annoyance of the old Inspector and the
Weighers and Gaugers, whose slumbers were disturbed by the
unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and returning
footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to say
that the Surveyor was walking the quarter-deck. They probably
fancied that my sole object--and, indeed, the sole object for
which a sane man could ever put himself into voluntary
motion--was to get an appetite for dinner. And, to say the
truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally
blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much
indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a
Custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility,
that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come,
I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would ever have
been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a
tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered
malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual
forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead
corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin
of contemptuous defiance. "What have you to do with us?" that
expression seemed to say. "The little power you might have once
possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have
bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go then, and earn
your wages!" In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own
fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle
Sam claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched
numbness held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore
walks and rambles into the country, whenever--which was seldom
and reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating
charm of Nature which used to give me such freshness and
activity of thought, the moment that I stepped across the
threshold of the Old Manse. The same torpor, as regarded the
capacity for intellectual effort, accompanied me home, and
weighed upon me in the chamber which I most absurdly termed my
study. Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the
deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and
the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the
next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued
description.