1 As regarded its origin there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural.
2 Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 3 But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God's gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER 4 Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England Puritans.
5 It had the graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson's home-field, on one side, and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their respective employments, in both minister and man of physic.
6 On the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the mother's soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from her path.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In VII. THE GOVERNOR'S HALL 7 Hester could not but ask herself whether there had not originally been a defect of truth, courage, and loyalty on her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown into a position where so much evil was to be foreboded and nothing auspicious to be hoped.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER 8 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.
9 The mother's impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light of the intervening substance.
10 He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In III. THE RECOGNITION