the
only barrier betwixt herself and the world had been thrown down, and a
flood of evil consequences would come tumbling through the gap--she
fled into the inner parlor, threw herself into the ancestral
elbow-chair, and wept.

Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer, who
endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and circumstances,
in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring, that so much of the
mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed up with the purest pathos
which life anywhere supplies to him. What tragic dignity, for example,
can be wrought into a scene like this! How can we elevate our history
of retribution for the sin of long ago, when, as one of our most
prominent figures, we are compelled to introduce--not a young and
lovely woman, nor even the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered
by affliction--but a gaunt, sallow, rusty-jointed maiden, in a
long-waisted silk gown, and with the strange horror of a turban on her
head! Her visage is not even ugly. It is redeemed from insignificance
only by the contraction of her eyebrows into a near-sighted scowl.
And, finally, her great life-trial seems to be, that, after sixty years
of idleness, she finds it convenient to earn comfortable bread by
setting up a shop in a small way. Nevertheless, if we look through all
the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find this same entanglement of
something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow.
Life is made up of marble and mud. And, without all the deeper trust
in a comprehensive sympathy above us, we might hence be led to suspect
the insult of a sneer, as well as an immitigable frown, on the iron
countenance of fate. What is called poetic insight is the gift of
discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty
and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.

III The First Customer

MISS HEPZIBAH PYNCHEON sat in the oaken elbow-chair, with her hands
over her face, giving way to that heavy down-sinking of the heart which
most persons have experienced, when the image of hope itself seems
ponderously moulded of lead, on the eve of an enterprise at once
doubtful and momentous. She was suddenly startled by the tinkling
alarum--high, sharp, and irregular--of a little bell. The maiden lady
arose upon her feet, as pale as a ghost at cock-crow; for she was an
enslaved spirit, and this the talis