understand, was no mere impulse of unreflecting emotion. It was due to her vision of the possibility of reconstructing their shattered lives, and this vision in turn was the consequence of her internal emancipation from the power of the Puritan system of ideas: "She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the seashore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door." This free speculative impulse in Hester, her reach—ing out for "spiritual laws" not generally recognized—by the society of her time, makes her a Transcendentalist before the appointed hour.
In the forest scene Hawthorne represents Nature as in mysterious and joyous sympathy with the bliss of the lovers in their vision of a new life together. That he does not accept Nature as moral oracle, however, he indicates by an emphatic parenthesis—"that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth." On the other hand, his giving the solution of the problem to Arthur Dimmesdale does not prove by any means that his sympathies were wholly on the side of the Puritans. His comment upon the
