 a
singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the
things of this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood the
minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered
letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the
connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and
solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the
daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.
    There was witchcraft in little Pearl's eyes; and her face, as she glanced
upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression
frequently so elfish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale's, and pointed
across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his
eyes towards the zenith.
    Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric
appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity
than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a
supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf
of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was
known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any
marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement
down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously
warned by some spectacle of this nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by
multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely
eyewitness, who beheld the wonder through the colored, magnifying, and
distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his
after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations
should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A
scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a
people's doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as
betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of
peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual
discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of
record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered
mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense,
and secret pain, had extended his egotism over
