Compare the characters of Rip van Winkle with the character of Mr. Hooper in the Minister's Black Veil?

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Rip Van Winkle is a "simple good-natured fellow" living in a small village in upper New York during the time that New York is a colony of Great Britain. To the neighbors he is known as a kind and helpful man, always eager to play with children or help with a chore. To his wife, however, he is known as a lazy and useless man, who neglects his own children and leaves his own fields untended and his fences broken. She scolds him and he avoids her, spending hours at a time sitting on a bench outside the local inn talking over the events of the day with other men, or fishing or hunting with little success. Rip is off in the mountains one day, sitting and looking at the scenery, when he encounters a stranger and follows him into a hollow. He finds a group of silent men in old-fashioned clothing and, sneaking some of their liquor, falls fast asleep. When he awakens twenty years later, it is into a different world. Gradually, he learns that his wife and dog have died, his children have grown up, and the colony of New York is now part of the United States of America. He goes home to live with his daughter and spends the rest of his days telling stories on the bench by the inn, "having nothing to do at home."

The Reverend Mr. Hooper is a minister in the small town of Milford, Connecticut, who shocks his congregation by appearing at Sunday services with a black veil covering nearly his entire face—only his mouth and chin are exposed. He wears this veil throughout the service to the dismay and bewilderment of his parishioners. Hooper is engaged to be married to Elizabeth, but abandons his marriage plans when she insists that he remove the veil or adequately explain its meaning. He can do neither. The mystery of the black veil isolates Hooper from his parish and his community, and this isolation is evident in his despairing cry to Elizabeth: "Oh! you know not how lonely I am, and how frightened, to be alone behind my black veil." Despite the loneliness the veil causes him to experience, he never removes it. As he is dying, he explains that he has worn the veil as an outward symbol of humankind's hoarding of secret sins. Hooper hides his face with the mysterious black veil even into death.