Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated. - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.