Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth--with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance that it overflows upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom it would have been bright in Hester’s eyes and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale’s. This liberation of her passion made of Hester a different woman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. Thus, insists Hawthorne, Hester’s misfortunes liberated her. The scarlet letter (that is, if we judge her sin rightly) served her now as a passport with which to penetrate into regions where women scarcely dared go: “Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.” Dimmesdale, too, reaches the same result. The basis of his optimism since Hester rescued him from his neuroses is amoral (should one say immoral!) as that of the woman he loves: His decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region. At that moment Dimmesdale’s spirit “rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth.” It is with good reason that the minister, upon issuing from the forest hurled a defy at his former parishioners: 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 I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk and near a melancholy brook!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. The transformation, the conversion of Dimmesdale freed from repression, is complete. It overthrows his whole philosophy of life. It makes of him an amoralist and a Nietzschean. Listen to Hawthorne: