which passeth show), while they themselves are rugged in their decay, believe that he will go heavenward before them, and command their children to lay their old bones close to their young pastor’s holy grave; and all this time, perchance, when he is thinking of his grave, he questions with himself whether the grass will ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be buried. Irresistibly affecting is the climax, when he stands in the pulpit preaching the election sermon (so envied a privilege!), exalted to the very proudest eminence of superiority to which the gifts of intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and whitest sanctity could exalt a New England priest in those early days,—and meanwhile his much-enduring partner-in-guilt, Hester Prynne, is standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast—still burning into it! There remains but for him to mount that scaffold—in haste, as one in articulo mortis, to take his shame upon him—and to lay open the awful secret, "though it be red like scarlet," before venerable elders, and holy fellow-pastors, and the people at large, whose great heart is appalled, yet overflowing with tearful sympathy. The injured husband, again, is presented with memorable intensity of colouring. He quietly pitches his tent beside the dissembler, who knows him not; and then proceeds—festinat lentè—with the finesse of a Machiavel, and the fiendish glee of a Mephistophiles, to unwind the nexus of the tragedy only to involve his victim inextricably in its toils. One feels how fitting it is that, when he has gained his purpose, old Roger Chillingworth should droop and his whole nature collapse—that all his strength and energy, all his vital and intellectual force, should seem at once to desert him, so that he withers up, shrivels away, and almost vanishes from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies welting in the sun—such being the self-generated retribution of one who has made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge. His it is to drain the dregs of the bitter truth, that
To be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And what shall we say of Hester Prynne, his ill-mated, ill-fated bride? Gazing at so mournful a wreck, we are reminded of the pathos and significance in the words of One of old time, of One who spake as never man spake: "Seest thou this woman?" The distinguishing characteristic of Christian ethics has been said to lie in the recognition of the fact, that the poor benighted pariah of social life will often, in the simple utterance of a cheerful hope in his behalf, see a window opening in heaven, and faces radiant with promise-looking out upon him.[1] Mr. Hawthorne's "searching of dark bosoms" has taught him a humane pyschology. He will not judge by the mere hearing of the ear or seeing of the eye; he can quite appreciate and illustrate by history—if history be philosophy teaching by example—the pregnant paradox of poor discrowned Lear, ending with "And then, handy-dandy, which is the justice, and which is the thief?" Not that he palliates the sin, or acts as counsel for the defendant; on the contrary, few have so explicitly surrounded the sin with ineffaceable deformities, or the criminal with agonising woes. But h
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- ↑ Thomas de Quincey.
