Hester, in the wood, he suffers the most freakish temptations to various
blasphemy on returning to the town: he meets a deacon, and desires to
utter evil suggestions concerning the communion-supper; then a pious and
exemplary old dame, fortunately deaf, into whose ear a mad impulse urges
him to whisper what then seemed to him an "unanswerable argument against
the immortality of the soul," and after muttering some incoherent words,
he sees "an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like
the _shine of the celestial city_ on her face." Then comes the most
frightful temptation of all, as he sees approaching him a maiden newly
won into his flock. "She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in
Paradise. The minister knew well that he himself was enshrined within
the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about
his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a
religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young
girl away from her mother's side, and thrown her into the pathway of
this sorely tempted, or--shall we not rather say?--this lost and
desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered to him to
condense into small compass and drop into her tender bosom a germ of
evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit
betimes." Now, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, "poor Christian was
so confounded, that he did not know his own voice.... Just when he was
come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones
got behind him and stepped up softly to him, and, whisperingly,
suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had
proceeded from his own mind." I need not enlarge upon the similar drift
of these two extracts; still less mark the matured, detailed, and
vividly human and dramatic superiority of Hawthorne's use of the element
common to both.

For other reading in early boyhood he had Spenser (it is said that the