Hester at her Needle

It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her--kept by
no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of
the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure--free to return
to her birth-place, or to any other European land, and there
hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as
completely as if emerging into another state of being--and
having also the passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to
her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself
with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law
that had condemned her--it may seem marvellous that this woman
should still call that place her home, where, and where only,
she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a
feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of
doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger
around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and
marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still
the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her
sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the
soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than
the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial
to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild
and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth--even
that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless
maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother's keeping, like
garments put off long ago--were foreign to her, in comparison.
The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to
her inmost soul, but could never be broken.