blazing spear, a sword
of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky,
prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded
by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for
good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to
Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously
warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen
by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith
of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the colored,
magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it
more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea,
that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful
hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be
deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people's doom upon. The
belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that
their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an
individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the
same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the
symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered
morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had
extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the
firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his
soul's history and fate!

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and
heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there
the appearance of an immense letter,--the letter A,--marked out in
lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at
that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such
shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little
definiteness, that another's guilt might have seen another symbol in
it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterized Mr. Dimmesdale's
psychological state, at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward
to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl
was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at
no great distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him,
with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his
features, as to all