When the Reverend Mr. Wilson confronts the little girl Pearl in The Scarlet Letter (Chapter 8), his mind is stymied by the fullness of her being, but his imagination responds to what she is and nostalgically recalls a religion and its sacramental art that could comprehend in her what baffles the Puritan and Ramistic approach of either/or: “Methinks I have seen just such figures, when the sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land.” It seems that ever since the Puritan logic of exclusion our major writers have longed for such an “imagined place” as the floor of the church in the old land,Where finally the way the world feelsreally means how things are,in dear detail,by ideal light all around us.