The Scarlet Letter

Pearl laughed again.

But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far

and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by

one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often

observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the

atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly

illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.

The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It

showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of

mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to

familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses,

with their jutting storeys and quaint gable-peaks; the doorsteps

and thresholds with the early grass springing up about them; the

garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the wheel-track,

little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green on

either side--all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect

that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things

of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood

the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne,

with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little

Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those

two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn

splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all

secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one

another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as

she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile

which made its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her

hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed across the street. But

he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes

towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all

meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred

with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as

so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing

spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the

midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to

have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt

whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New

England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of

which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some

spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by

multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the

faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through

the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his

imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought.

It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations

should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of

heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for

Providence to write a people's doom upon. The belief was a

favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their

infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of

peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an

individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on

the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be

the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,

rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and

secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of

nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a

fitting page for his soul's history and fate.