There were many great works of writing during the romantic period of writing. Many works that captured the readers imagination. They would give people thoughts and fantasies of things that could happen. It used many depictions of and how things were during that time period. They were also very creative. These romantic stories captured great detail and imagery for the reader. Romantic stories of this time period used much symbolism in them as well. Many of them were often short stories that readers were able to finish in one sitting. Even the novels are commendable and hard to put down because of the excitement and anticipation that the stories build up. According to American Short Stories, Fourth Edition romanticism is an ardent interest in the emotions and the imagination; an awareness of the mystery, ecstasy, and yearning locked up in the human heart. It is also a fondness for the picturesque, exotic and sensational manifestations of these feelings, like imagery and symbolism; a search for new realms of experience, a thirst for novelty and a desire to live intensely. In the book The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the story shows the characteristics of being a novel of the romantic period.
             Hawthorne showed great imagery. First of all, a great example of how Hawthorne captured imagery was the way that he explained the prison. Hawthorne explains the prison, "the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous 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, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congen...