The Scarlet Letter: A RomanceRoutledge, 1851 - 309 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
Ann Hutchinson answered Hester Art thou Arthur Dimmesdale aspect beauty beheld beneath bosom breast breath brook brought character child clergyman cried Custom-house dark deep Dimmes Dimmesdale's Dost thou earth earthly England evil eyes face fancy father felt forest gaze gleam Governor Bellingham grave grey hand hath heart Hester Prynne hither human ignominy imagination impulse infant kind King's Chapel knew laughed light likewise little Pearl look magistrates man's market-place mind minister minister's Mistress Hibbins moral murmur nature ness never Old Manse old Roger Chillingworth once pale passed passion perhaps personage physician pillory poor Prynne's Puritan racter recognised Reverend scaffold scarlet letter scene secret seemed seen shadow shame sinful smile solemn sorrow soul speak spirit step stood strange sunshine Surveyor sympathy thee thou hast thought tion token torture town tremulous truth venerable voice whispered wild Wilt thou woman yonder young
Popular passages
Page 320 - The angel and apostle of the coining revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful ; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy ; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end I So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter.
Page 316 - Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister — mutual victims as they have been — may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmuted into golden love.
Page 16 - Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
Page 245 - For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.
Page 59 - The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Page 151 - So Roger Chillingworth — the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician — strove to go deep into his patient's bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern.
Page 67 - ... so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time, — was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself.
Page 188 - ... 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.
Page 108 - Man had marked this woman's sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven!
Page 292 - ... so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista...