1 And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 2 The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 3 It would be greatly for the public behoof if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 4 On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 5 There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 6 The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 7 It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 8 She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised as its indication.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 9 But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 10 The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
11 Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 12 In Hester Prynne's instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 13 Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the prison-door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air as if by her own free will.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 14 In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 15 In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 16 Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play.
The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel HawthorneContextHighlight In II. THE MARKET-PLACE 17 In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel.
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