does not depend on the development of the plot.  No attempt is made to complicate the story by concealing the identity of Hester’s lover or of her husband.  The action takes place within the souls and minds of the characters, not in their outward circumstances.  The central chapter of the book is named significantly:  “The Interior of a Heart.”  The moral situation described in The Scarlet Letter did not present itself to Hawthorne abstractly, but as a series of pictures.  He habitually thought in images, and he brooded so long over his conceptions that his descriptions are almost as definite in outline and as vivid in colour as things actually seen.  His pictures do not waver or fade elusively as the mind seeks to realise them.  The prison door, studded with pikes, before which Hester Prynne first stands with the letter on her breast, the pillory where Dimmesdale keeps vigil at midnight, the forest-trees with pale, fitful gleams of sunshine glinting through their leaves, are so distinct that we almost put out our hands to touch them.  Hawthorne’s dream-imagery has the same convincing reality.  The phantasmagoric visions which float through Hester’s consciousness—­the mirrored reflection of her own face in girlhood, her husband’s thin, scholar-like visage, the grey houses of the cathedral city where she had spent her early years—­are more real to her and to us than the blurred faces of the Puritans who throng the marketplace to gaze on her ignominy.  Although the moral tone of the book is one of almost unrelieved gloom, the actual scenes are full of colour and light.  Pearl’s scarlet frock with its fantastic embroideries, the magnificent velvet gown and white ruff of the old dame who rides off by night to the witch-revels in the forest, the group of Red Indians in their deer-skin robes and wampum belts of red and yellow ochre, the bronzed faces and gaudy attire of the Spanish pirates, all stand out in bold relief among the sober greys and browns of the Puritans.  The tense, emotional atmosphere is heightened by the festive brightness of the outer world.

The light of Hawthorne’s imagination is directed mainly on three characters—­Hester, Arthur, and the elf-like child Pearl, the living symbol of their union.  Further in the background lurks the malignant figure of Roger Chillingworth, contriving his fiendish scheme of vengeance, “violating in cold blood the sanctity of a human heart.”  The blaze of the Scarlet Letter compels us by a strange magnetic power to follow Hester Prynne wherever she goes, but her suffering is less acute and her character less intricate than her lover’s.  She bears the outward badge of shame, but after “wandering without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind,” wins a dull respite from anguish as she glides “like a grey and sober shadow” over the threshold of those who are visited by sorrow.  At the last, when Dimmesdale’s spirit is “so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself erect,” Hester has still energy to plan and to act.  His