that kept him sporting and away from reading, had devised a seemingly
harsh plan of luring him into his proper element.

It was more likely after this episode than before, that Bunyan took that
hold upon him so fraught with consequences. He went every Sunday to his
grandmother Hathorne's, and every Sunday he would lay hands upon the
book; then, going to a particular three-cornered chair in a particular
corner of the room, "he would read it by the hour, without once
speaking." I have already suggested the relations of the three minds,
Milton, Bunyan, and Hawthorne. The more obvious effect of this reading
is the allegorical turn which it gave the boy's thoughts, manifest in
many of his shorter productions while a young man; the most curious and
complete issue being that of "The Celestial Railroad," in the "Mosses,"
where Christian's pilgrimage is so deftly parodied in a railroad route
to the heavenly goal. Full of keen satire, it does not, as it might at
first seem, tend to diminish Bunyan's dignity, but inspires one with a
novel sense of it, as one is made to gradually pierce the shams of
certain modern cant. But a more profound consequence was the direction
of Hawthorne's expanding thought toward sin and its various and occult
manifestations. Imagine the impression upon a mind so fine, so
exquisitely responsive, and so well prepared for grave revery as
Hawthorne's, which a passage like the following would make. In his
discourse with Talkative, Faithful says: "A man may cry out against sin,
of policy; but he cannot abhor it but by virtue of a godly antipathy. I
have heard many cry out against sin in the pulpit, who can abide it well
enough in the heart, house, and conversation."

Here is almost the motive and the moral of "The Scarlet Letter." But
Hawthorne refined upon it unspeakably, and probed many fathoms deeper,
when he perceived that there might be motives far more complex than that