但是,海丝特·白兰天生具有勇敢和活跃的气质,加之这多年来不仅被人视如陌窖,而且为社会所摒弃,所以就形成了那样一种思考问题的高度,对牧师来说简直难以企及。她一直漫无目标地在道德的荒野中徘徊;那荒野同这荒林一样广漠、一样错综、一样阴森,而他俩如今正在这幽暗的林中进行决定他们命运的会谈。她的智慧和心灵在这里适得其所,她在荒漠之处自由漫游,正如野蛮的印第安人以林为家。在过去这些年中,她以陌生人的目光看待人类的风俗制度,以及由教士和立法者所建立的一切;她几乎和印第安人一样,以不屑的态度批评牧师的丝带、法官的黑袍、颈手枷、绞刑架、家庭或教会。她的命运发展的趋向始终是放纵她自由的。红字则是她进入其他妇女不敢涉足的禁区的通行证。耻辱,绝望,孤寂!——这些就是她的教师,而且是一些严格粗野的教师,他们既使她坚强,也教会她出岔于。
The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience calculatedto lead him beyond the scopeof generally received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressedone of the most sacred of them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched, with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts- for those it was easy to arrange- but each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergyman of that day stood, he was only the more trammelledby its regulations, its principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmedhim in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the frettingof an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.
【英文名著精选阅读:《红字》第十八章(上)】相关文章:
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