The Scarlet Letter

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it

might well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar

room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its

figures so distinctly--making every object so minutely visible,

yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility--is a medium the

most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his

illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the

well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate

individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a

volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the

book-case; the picture on the wall--all these details, so

completely seen, are so spiritualised by the unusual light, that

they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of

intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this

change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe; the doll,

seated in her little wicker carriage; the hobby-horse--whatever,

in a word, has been used or played with during the day is now

invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness, though

still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore,

the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory,

somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the

Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with

the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here without

affrighting us. It would be too much in keeping with the scene

to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a

form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak

of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt

whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred

from our fireside.

The somewhat dim coal fire has an essential Influence in

producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its

unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness

upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam upon the

polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with

the cold spirituality of the moon-beams, and communicates, as it

were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms

which fancy summons up. It converts them from snow-images into

men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold--deep

within its haunted verge--the smouldering glow of the

half-extinguished anthracite, the white moon-beams on the floor,

and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture,

with one remove further from the actual, and nearer to the

imaginative. Then, at such an hour, and with this scene before

him, if a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things,

and make them look like truth, he need never try to write

romances.

But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,

moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just

alike in my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more

avail than the twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of

susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no great

richness or value, but the best I had--was gone from me.