by an odd
trick of his imagination he suddenly pictures a "whole tribe of
decorous personages starting into view with the disorder of a
nightmare in their aspects," to look upon their minister.

Hawthorne's delineation of character and motive is as
scrupulously accurate and scientific as Godwin's, but there is
none of Godwin's inhumanity in his attitude. His complete
understanding of human weakness makes pity superfluous and
undignified. He pronounces no judgment and offers no plea for
mercy. His instinct is to present the story as it appeared
through the eyes of those who enacted the drama or who witnessed
it. Stern and inexorable as one of his own witch-judging
ancestors, Hawthorne foils the lovers' plan of escape across the
sea, lets the minister die as soon as he has made the revelation
that gives him his one moment of victory, and in the conclusion
brings Hester back to take up her long-forsaken symbol of shame.
Pearl alone Hawthorne sets free, the spell which bound her human
sympathies broken by the kiss she bestows on her guilty father.
There are few passionate outbursts of feeling, save when Hester
momentarily unlocks her heart in the forest--and even here
Hawthorne's language is extraordinarily restrained:

"'What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it
so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?'
'Hush, Hester!' said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the
ground. 'No; I have not forgotten.'"

Or again, after Dimmesdale has confessed that he has neither
strength nor courage left him to venture into the world: "'Thou
shalt not go alone!' answered she, in a deep whisper. Then all
was spoken."

In _The House of the Seven Gables_ (1851), as in _The Scarlet
Letter_, Hawthorne again presents his scenes in the light of a
single, pervading idea, this time an ancestral curse, symbolised
by the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who condemned an innocent
man for witchcraft.

"To the thoughtful man there will be no tinge of
superstition in what we figuratively express, by
affirming that the ghost of a dead progenitor--perhaps
as a portion of his own punishment--is often doomed to
become the Evil Genius of his family."

Hawthorne wins his effect by presenting the idea to our minds
from different points of view, until we are obsessed by the curse
that broods heavily over the old house. Even the aristocratic
breed of fowls, of "queer, rusty, withered aspect,"