" This theme of
self-punished revenge, as we know, was afterward thoroughly wrought out
in "The Scarlet Letter." Another form in which the thought of this
pervading falsehood in earthly affairs comes to him is the frightful
fancy of people being poisoned by communion-wine. Thus does the
insincerity and corruption of man, the lie that is hidden in nearly
every life and almost every act, rise and thrust itself before him,
whichever way he turns, like a serpent in his path. He is in the
position of the father confessor of whom he at one time thinks, and of
"his reflections on character, and the contrast of the inward man with
the outward, as he looks around his congregation, all whose secret sins
are known to him." But Hawthorne does not let this hissing serpent
either rout him or poison him. He is determined to visit the ways of
life, to find the exit of the maze, and so tries every opening,
unalarmed. The serpent is in all: it proves to be a deathless,
large-coiled hydra, encircling the young explorer's virgin soul, as it
does that of every pure aspirer, and trying to drive him back on
himself, with a sting in his heart that shall curse him with a life-long
venom. It does, indeed, force him to recoil, but not with any mortal
wound. He retires in profound sorrow, acknowledging that earth holds
nothing perfect, that his dream of ideal beings leading an ideal life,
which, in spite of the knowledge of evil, he has been cherishing for so
many years, is a dream to be fulfilled in the hereafter alone.
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