In truth,
all through the haunted forest there could
be nothing more frightful than the figure
of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black
pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied
gestures, now giving vent to an inspiration
of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth
such laughter as set all the echoes of the
forest laughing like demons around him. The
fiend in his own shape is less hideous than
when he rages in the breast of man. Thus
sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering
among the trees, he saw a red light before
him, as when the felled trunks and branches
of a clearing have been set on fire, and
throw up their lurid blaze against the sky,
at the hour of midnight. He paused, in a
lull of the tempest that had driven him onward,
and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn,
rolling solemnly from a distance with the
weight of many voices. He knew the tune;
it was a familiar one in the choir of the
village meetinghouse. The verse died heavily
away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not
of human voices, but of all the sounds of
the benighted wilderness pealing in awful
harmony together. Goodman Brown cried out,
and his cry was lost to his own ear by its
unison with the cry of the desert.
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