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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: ground just long enough for his own ruin, and is then thrust out,
with sinews all unstrung, to totter along the difficult footpath
of life as he best may. Conscious of his own infirmity -- that
his tempered steel and elasticity are lost -- he for ever
afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support external
to himself. His pervading and continual hope -- a hallucination,
which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of
impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like
the convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief
space after death -- is, that finally, and in no long time, by
some happy coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to
The Scarlet Letter |
