A vintage appreciation …

… RT’s Reviews and Marginalia: The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

… far more characteristic in its weird intensity and philosophic symbolism is the story of “The Minister's Black Veil”. No one who has read them has ever forgotten the dying man's fateful words: “Why do you tremble at me alone ? Tremble also at each other! Have men avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend, the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a Black Veil!”