6.Nathaniel_Hawthorne.pptVIP

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804—1864);Nathaniel Hawthorne;Influences of Salem witch trials on Hawthorne ; Hawthorne’s Major Works ;Hawthorne’s Major Works;Hawthorne’s point of view;Hawthorne’s point of view;Hawthorne’s point of view;Hawthorne’s point of view;Hawthorne’s point of view;Hawthorne’s point of view;The Scarlet Letter;Textual Reading: Chapter 1 The Prison-Door  ; The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery（墓地）, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson‘s lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated（拥挤的）sepulchres（坟墓）in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. ;Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed（皱眉头的）and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous（沉重的）iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot（小片草地）, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial（相宜的）in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. ;; This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of