houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks;
the doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing
up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned
earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the
marketplace, margined with green on either side;--all were
visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to
give another moral interpretation to the things of this
world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the
minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne,
with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and
little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting-link
between these two. They stood in the noon of that strange
and solemn splendour, as if it were the light that is to
reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all
that belong to one another."

That is imaginative, impressive, poetic; but when, almost immediately
afterwards, the author goes on to say 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," we
feel that he goes too far and is in danger of crossing the line that
separates the sublime from its intimate neighbour. We are tempted to
say that this is not moral tragedy, but physical comedy. In the same
way, too much is made of the intimation that Hester's badge had a
scorching property, and that if one touched it one would immediately
withdraw one's hand. Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which
shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the
spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search
is of the very essence of poetry. But in such a process discretion is
everything, and when the image becomes importunate it is in danger of
seeming to stand for nothing more serious than itself. When Hester
meets the minister by appointment in the forest, and sits talking with
him while little Pearl wanders away and plays by the edge of the
brook, the child is represented as at last making her way over to the
other side of the woodland stream, and disporting herself there in a
manner which makes her mother feel herself, "in some indistinct and
tantalising manner, estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her
lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in
which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now v