And, to say the
truth, an appetite, sharpened by the east wind that generally
blew along the passage, was the only valuable result of so much
indefatigable exercise. So little adapted is the atmosphere of a
Custom-house to the delicate harvest of fancy and sensibility,
that, had I remained there through ten Presidencies yet to come,
I doubt whether the tale of "The Scarlet Letter" would ever have
been brought before the public eye. My imagination was a
tarnished mirror. It would not reflect, or only with miserable
dimness, the figures with which I did my best to people it. The
characters of the narrative would not be warmed and rendered
malleable by any heat that I could kindle at my intellectual
forge. They would take neither the glow of passion nor the
tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the rigidity of dead
corpses, and stared me in the face with a fixed and ghastly grin
of contemptuous defiance. "What have you to do with us?" that
expression seemed to say. "The little power you might have once
possessed over the tribe of unrealities is gone! You have
bartered it for a pittance of the public gold.
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