The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne [best non fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

ldManse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enoughto find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seizethe public by the button, and talk of my three years' experiencein a Custom-House. The example of the famous "P. P. , Clerk ofthis Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truthseems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth uponthe wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling asidehis volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understandhim better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Someauthors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves insuch confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly beaddressed only and exclusively to the one heart andmind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at largeon the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segmentof the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existenceby bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous,however,