The Scarlet Letter. The Blithedale Romance

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Houghton, Osgood, 1878 - 579 pages
 

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Page 18 - From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale, which had blustered against his sire and grandsire.
Page 297 - The angel and apostle of the coming 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 ! So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter.
Page 64 - And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped.
Page 16 - The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town...
Page 245 - At least they shall say of me," thought this exemplary man, " that I leave no public duty unperformed, nor ill performed ! " Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived ! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him ; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak ; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for...
Page 220 - O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this thing! And the shame! — the indelicacy! — the horrible ugliness of this exposure of, a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this! I cannot forgive thee!"
Page 223 - It brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again. In our native land, whether in some remote rural village, or in vast...
Page 296 - Pryune had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially, — in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion...
Page 141 - 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 61 - Goodwives," said a hard-featured dame of fifty, " 1 '11 tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded ? Marry, I trow not !

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