1 Not seldom she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow.
2 It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 3 A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION 4 It was carelessly at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION 5 Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 6 There he stood, with a border of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his grey eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking, like those of Hester's infant, in the unadulterated sunshine.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION 7 Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 8 The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION 9 They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 10 It was not an age of delicacy; and her position, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self-perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 11 The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and gristly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 12 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 13 Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes we know not whither.
14 Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION 15 She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 16 Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE 17 Next rose before her in memory's picture-gallery, the intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion with the misshapen scholar: a new life, but feeding itself on time-worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall.
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