The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne: With Portraits, Illustrations, and Facsimiles, Volume 6

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Houghton, Mifflin, 1900
 

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Page 290 - Methought the germ of it was dead in me! O Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem to have flung myself— sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened — down upon these forest-leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the better life! Why did we not find it sooner?" "Let us not look back,
Page 280 - That old man's revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart" Thou and I, Hester, never did so!" " Never, never ! " whispered she. " What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so ! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it ? " " Hush, Hester 1 " said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground.
Page 236 - Thus, Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clew in the dark labyrinth of mind ; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice ; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere.
Page 78 - Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood whose infant was to redeem the world.
Page 192 - I know all?" said Roger Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated intelligence, on the minister's face. "Be it so! But, again! He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
Page 181 - He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself.
Page 51 - Glancing at the looking-glass, we behold — deep within its haunted verge — the smouldering glow of the half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove farther from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative.
Page 66 - The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.
Page xix - I found it impossible to relieve the shadows of the story with so much light as I would gladly have thrown in. Keeping so close to its point as the tale does, and diversified no otherwise than by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it will weary very many people and disgust some.
Page 294 - A fox, startled from his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said, — but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable, — came up, and smelt of Pearl's robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognized a kindred wildness in the human...

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