Nathaniel Hawthorne

we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable

was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.

scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for Providence to write a people's doom upon.

She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the scarlet letter

No golden light had ever been so precious as

the gloom of this dark forest

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom!

and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ pipe as he

We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gaiety