The Scarlet Letter

It is my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order

of composition, my faculties would not have been found so

pointless and inefficacious. I might, for instance, have

contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran

shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most

ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he

did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous

gifts as a story-teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque

force of his style, and the humourous colouring which nature

taught him how to throw over his descriptions, the result, I

honestly believe, would have been something new in literature.

Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a

folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so

intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into

another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world

out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty

of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual

circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to diffuse

thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day,

and thus to make it a bright transparency; to spiritualise the

burden that began to weigh so heavily; to seek, resolutely, the

true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and

wearisome incidents, and ordinary characters with which I was

now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was

spread out before me seemed dull and commonplace only because I

had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall

ever write was there; leaf after leaf presenting itself to me,

just as it was written out by the reality of the flitting hour,

and vanishing as fast as written, only because my brain wanted

the insight, and my hand the cunning, to transcribe it. At some

future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered

fragments and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find

the letters turn to gold upon the page.

These perceptions had come too late. At the Instant, I was only

conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a

hopeless toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about

this state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably

poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor

of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything

but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect

is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like

ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a

smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the fact there could be

no doubt and, examining myself and others, I was led to

conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the

character, not very favourable to the mode of life in question.

In some other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these

effects. Suffice it here to say that a Custom-House officer of

long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or

respectable personage, for many reasons; one of them, the tenure

by which he holds his situation, and another, the very nature of

his business, which--though, I trust, an honest one--is of such

a sort that he does not share in the united effort of mankind.