Sentence No. 123 · 28 July 2026
Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Scarlet Letter (1850) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
Notice how the sentence opens with a simile ('Like all other music') and ends with a sweeping qualifier ('wherever educated'). The commas mark a chain of expanding objects — passion, pathos, emotions — each piling onto the verb 'breathed' before the closing image lands.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 7 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. A solitary woman absorbs a distant sermon through stone walls. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
A new sentence from a great book, every day.
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