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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: threw herself into the ancestral elbow-chair, and wept.
Our miserable old Hepzibah! It is a heavy annoyance to a writer,
who endeavors to represent nature, its various attitudes and
circumstances, in a reasonably correct outline and true coloring,
that so much of the mean and ludicrous should be hopelessly mixed
up with the purest pathos which life anywhere supplies to him.
What tragic dignity, for example, can be wrought into a scene
like this! How can we elevate our history of retribution for the
sin of long ago, when, as one of our most prominent figures, we
are compelled to introduce--not a young and lovely woman, nor even
the stately remains of beauty, storm-shattered by affliction--but
House of Seven Gables |
