The minister's own will,
and Hester's will, and the fate that grew between them, had
wrought this transformation. It was the same town as heretofore,
but the same minister returned not from the forest. He might
have said to the friends who greeted him--"I am not the man for
whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn
into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy
brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure,
his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled brow, be not
flung down there, like a cast-off garment!" His friends, no
doubt, would still have insisted with him--"Thou art thyself the
man!" but the error would have been their own, not his.
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling.
In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral
code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the
impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled
minister. At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild,
wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once
involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing
out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse.
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