over him, could never gain a knowledge of its
actual nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully,--even, at times,
with horror and the bitterness of hatred,--at the deformed figure of
the old physician. His gestures, his gait, his grizzled beard, his
slightest and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments,
were odious in the clergyman's sight; a token implicitly to be relied
on, of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was
willing to acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign
a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale,
conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's
entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.
He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger
Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from
them, and did his best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he
nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued his habits of social
familiarity with the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities
for perfecting the purpose to which--poor, forlorn creature that he
was, and more wretched than his victim--the avenger had devoted
himself.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by
some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of
his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a
brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great
part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions,
his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a
state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily
life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed
the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of
them were. There were scholars among them, who had spent more years in
acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than
Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more
profoundly versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their
youthful brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind
than his, and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron,
or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion
of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable,
efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were
o