The House of The Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 10 Page 12

with the world: breaking what seems its own promise in their nature; withholding their proper food, and setting poison before them for a banquet; and thus — when it might so easily, as one would think, have been adjusted otherwise — making their existence a strangeness, a solitude, and torment.

All his life long, he had been learning how to be wretched, as one learns a foreign tongue; and now, with the lesson thoroughly by heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little airy happiness. Frequently there was a dim shadow of doubt in his eyes. “Take my hand, Phoebe,” he would say, “and pinch it hard with your little fingers! Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain!” Evidently, he desired this prick of a trifling anguish, in order