d under the walls of
his own church. The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar,
an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale's mind vibrated between two ideas;
either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was
merely dreaming about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no
external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator
of the familiar scene, that the intervening space of a single day had
operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister's
own will, and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore; but
the same minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to
the friends who greeted him,--"I am not the man for whom you take me!
I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a
mossy tree-trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister,
and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy,
pain-wrinkled brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off
garment!" His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with
him,--"Thou art thyself the man!"--but the error would have been their
own, not his.

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In
truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in
that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now
communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step
he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a
sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional; in spite
of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which
opposed the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The
good old man addressed him with the paternal affection and patriarchal
privilege, which his venerable age, his upright and holy character,
and his station in the Church, entitled him to use; and, conjoined
with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister's
professional and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more
beautiful example of how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport
with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower
social rank, and inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now,
during a conversation of some two or three moments between the
Rev