The Scarlet Letter

Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was

the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or,

at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of

imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially

her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up

other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on

the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were

lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those

steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and

immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports,

childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden

years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with

recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life;

one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of

similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an

instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the

exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight

and hardness of the reality.

Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of

view that revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which

she had been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that

miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old

England, and her paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone,

with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half obliterated

shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility.

She saw her father's face, with its bold brow, and reverend

white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff;

her mother's, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love

which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since

her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle

remonstrance in her daughter's pathway. She saw her own face,

glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior

of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it.

There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in

years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and

bleared by the lamp-light that had served them to pore over many

ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange,

penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the

human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester

Prynne's womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly

deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right.

Next rose before her in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate

and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge

cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint

in architecture, of a continental city; where new life had

awaited her, still in connexion with the misshapen scholar: a

new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft

of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these

shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan,

settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and levelling

their stern regards at Hester Prynne--yes, at herself--who stood

on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the

letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold

thread, upon her bosom.