The Scarlet Letter

The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most

intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of

something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary

fashions, in the mother and child, and therefore scorned them in

their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their

tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the

bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish

bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value,

and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an

intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful

caprice that so often thwarted her in the child's

manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here,

again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in

herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by

inalienable right, out of Hester's heart. Mother and daughter

stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human

society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated

those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before

Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the

softening influences of maternity.

At home, within and around her mother's cottage, Pearl wanted

not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life

went forth from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated

itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame

wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials--a stick,

a bunch of rags, a flower--were the puppets of Pearl's

witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became

spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her

inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary

personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged,

black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy

utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure

as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their

children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully.

It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw

her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and

dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity--soon

sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of

life--and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It

was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the

northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and

the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more

than was observable in other children of bright faculties;

except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown

more upon the visionary throng which she created. The

singularity lay in the hostile feelings with which the child

regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and mind. She

never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast

the dragon's teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies,

against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly

sad--then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own

heart the cause--to observe, in one so young, this constant

recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the

energies that were to make good her cause in the contest that

must ensue.