The Scarlet Letter

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.