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NHNathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life dates: 1804 AD — 1864 AD

Hawthorne’s narrator connects outward signs with concealed burdens. Read Hester’s moment of relief beside Dimmesdale’s inability to recognise an enemy, treating both as descriptions of these characters and circumstances.

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Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Nathaniel Hawthorne with lifetime years 1804–1864 and credits Dartmouth College for this electronic text. It notes a different, improved edition, but the selected counterparts here were checked against eBook 33 itself. This profile does not substitute the unexamined edition. The catalogue HTML ISBN identifies the linked digital text; its underlying print publisher and the composition dates of archive extracts remain unspecified.

Chapter XVIII describes Hester’s relief after she removes the embroidered letter in the forest; she then takes off her cap. The narrator’s contrast between weight and freedom belongs to that moment. Chapter X describes Dimmesdale becoming suspicious of everyone while continuing to receive Chillingworth as a physician and companion. His failure to recognise an enemy is part of their particular relationship, not a universal psychological diagnosis. Both selected extracts match this edition under limited normalization.

Reading this voice

Read the forest scene in Chapter XVIII beside the physician’s visits in Chapter X. Ask how a visible symbol and a concealed relationship shape each character’s experience. The selected narration provides local context, rather than general diagnostic or moral rules.

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Quotations and sayings

04c. 1834 AD
Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,—in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?
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07c. 1834 AD
It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.
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13c. 1834 AD
Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.
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