oubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would
ever have been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a
tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered malleable
by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual forge. They would
take neither the glow of passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but
retained all the rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face
with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. "What have you
to do with us?" that expression seemed to say. "The little power you
might once have possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You
have bartered it for a pittance of the public gold. Go, then, and earn
your wages!" In short, the almost torpid creatures of my own fancy
twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.

It was not merely during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam
claimed as his share of my daily life, that this wretched numbness
held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks, and
rambles into the country, whenever--which was seldom and
reluctantly--I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of
Nature, which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought
the moment that I stepped across the threshold of the Old Manse. The
same torpor, as regarded the capacity for intellectual effort,
accompanied me home, and weighed upon me in the chamber which I most
absurdly termed my study. Nor did it quit me, when, late at night, I
sat in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire
and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the
next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued
description.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might
well be deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so
distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a
morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the most suitable for a
romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is
the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs,
with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a
work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the
bookcase; the picture on the wall;--all