 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 I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret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 Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale
and this excellent and hoary-
