1 Not seldom she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow.
2 Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 3 It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 4 It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
5 From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 6 It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 7 Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 8 It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child.
9 He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons, and had no more right than one of those portraits would have to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION 10 The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
11 She bore on her breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 12 In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created.
13 Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 14 Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl's birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening influences of maternity.
15 But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION 16 But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 17 Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-window, or standing in the doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the pathway that led townward, and, discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off with a strange contagious fear.
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