Does Baglioni like Rappaccini? What does he say about him?

Professor Pietro
Baglioni does not like Doctor Rappaccini.  When Giovanni first brings up Rappaccini's name,
Baglioni's demeanor changes immediately, and he doesn't respond with the same cordiality that
has characterized his speech and manner until now. He says, "The truth is, our worshipful
Doctor Rappaccini...

Are there similes, metaphors, allusions, personification, or parallel constructions used in chapter 13 of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter?

The narrator says, of
,

The links that united her to the rest of humankindlinks
of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the materialhad all been broken. Here was the iron
link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break.

Here, the "links" created between people by their relationships are compared,
via metaphors, to flowers, silk, and gold (as weaker, more fragile
kinds of connections), as well as to iron, which describes the incredibly strong and powerful
connection that exists between Hester andas a result of their shared sin/crime.

The narrator also uses when he describes Hester's actions
whenever people in town are sick or in need of assistance. He says, "None so self-devoted
as Hester when pestilence stalked through the town." This gives pestilence, another word
for disease, the human ability to stalk, or purposefully stride, among the people and affect
them negatively.

The narrator uses a to
describe the letter as a symbol of hope...

What happens after Hamlet decides to pretend he is mad?

Immediately after Princespeaks with his
father's ghost and discovers thatcommitted regicide, he informsthat he will "put an antic
disposition on," which means that he will feign madness. 's decision to feign madness can
be interpreted as a way to protect himself from Claudius. Hamlet is aware that he is in a
dangerous, precarious situation and knows that Claudius is capable of killing him. Hamlet also
desires to get closer to Claudius in order to kill him and believes that feigning madness will
make Claudius less suspicious of him.

After Hamlet proceeds to feign madness,
Claudius andspy on him andis confounded and heartbroken by his unsettling behavior. Polonius
believes that Hamlet is mad because Ophelia has ended their relationship. Hamlet also has actors
reenact the death of his father and confirms 's story when he witnesses Claudius leave the
theater following the Mousetrap scene. Later on, Polonius spies on Hamlet behind an arras in 's
room and Hamlet kills him. Ophelia ends up committing suicide andreturns from France focused on
avenging his father and sister's deaths. In an attempt to get rid of Hamlet, Claudius sends him
to England with secret instructions for the king to execute him. However, Hamlet discovers
Claudius's letter, survives the journey, and returns to Denmark, where he eventually spars
Laertes in a deadly fencing match.

In the Introduction to The Scarlet Letter, "The Custom-House," in what war did General Miller fight?

In
's novel , the General
is a minor character who appears in the Introduction
called "The Custom
House." This Introduction, originally written by Hawthorne as an
independent
and unrelated short story, sets the frame from which the story of ,and
Reverendis
told. General Miller is the head
customs collector at Salem Custom
House, a government installation for
collecting customs duties on items coming into America
through the Salem
seaport. He enters the story because the narrator of "The Custom
House," who
is presumed to be Nathaniel Hawthorne himself speaking as the narrator, takes
a
position at there and thus meets that General and the other colorful
employees, who all shave
either inherited their rather low-key work positions
in customs or been awarded their positions
as retirement rewards for other
services rendered to the government.

Typical
of this
trend, General Miller was awarded his position for
his
service in and record as a war hero of the War of
1812. At the time
that the narrator meets him, he has served
twenty years at the Salem Custom House:

[T]he Collector, our gallant old General, who, after his brilliant

military service, subsequently to which he had ruled over a wild Western territory, had
come
hither, twenty years before, to spend the decline of his varied and
honourable life.

This Introduction is
relevant to the story of The Scarlet
Letter because it
is at the Custom House, or "Custom-House" as the
Introduction puts it, that
the narrator finds the package that tells the story of Hester Prynne.
The
General is important to the story because it can be argued that Hawthorne uses him
to
foreshadow both the great weight that an error can have on a conscience
imbued with keen
integrity and the ability of some, like Hester and Pearl, to
survive great plights:

His integrity
was perfect; it was a law of nature with him, rather
than a choice or a
principle; .... A stain on his conscience, ... would trouble such a man ...

though to a far greater degree ... I had met with a person thoroughly adapted to the
situation
which he held.

How does Oedipus' curiosity ruin him at the end of the play?

I tend to
think that' curiosity is linked to his hamartia, or tragic flaw, of pride.  Oedipus' insistence
on the truth is one in which he is able to fully demonstrate his own curiosity.  Oedipus fails
to demonstrate any humility in this process.  His own desire to solve the riddle of why the
people of Thebes suffers and demonstrate a capacity to almost flaunt the power of
the...

In Coelho's The Alchemist, how are Santiagos sheep important? What lessons has he learned from them and how do they help him in his Personal Legend?

At the
beginning of Coelho's , Santiago has been a shepherd for two years. This is
a good amount of time to acquire many experiences and skills with any job. And Santiago is a
true shepherd who knows each of his flock by name--unlike a sheepherder who drives his sheep
around like dumb animals. This implicitly tells us that Santiago is kind, patient, and talks to
his sheep as if they were friends. (Consequently, the relationship with his sheep is also a
directto how Jesus refers to himself and his followers in the Bible.) The sheep represent the
boy's safety zone where he is at peace and sustaining a life of his own. He thinks about the
sheep often as he searches for his treasure because, if he fails to fulfill his Personal Legend,
he could possibly go back to them and that life.

At other times, he sees them
as a dead-end job. He describes this as follows:

"If
I became a monster today, and decided to kill them, one by one, they would become aware only
after most of the flock had been slaughtered. . . They trust me, and they've forgotten how to
rely on their own instincts, because I lead them to nourishment"(7).

Later, while facing obstacles and failure on his journey, he sees
them as a point of reference to either give up and go back to them, or as a reason to keep going
forward rather than go back. He rationalizes his thinking by saying,

"I know why I want to get back to my flock. . . I understand
sheep; they're no longer a problem, and they can be good friends. On the other hand, I don't
know if the desert can be a friend, and it's in the desert that I have to search for my
treasure. If I don't find it, I can always go home"(65).

We all have a safety zone that is scary to leave or a nice place to go back to if we've
left it. Remembering his safety zone helps the boy to make weigh the consequences of decisions
throughout the journey, and as a result, keeps him moving forward to achieve his
dreams.

What kind of beast is presented in William Blake's "The Tyger"? How it is related to the main theme of the poem?

The tyger is
a "fearful" beast. In the first
stanza, the speaker asks what "immortal hand or
eye" (God) could have created
him. In the fourth stanza, the speaker uses theof God as a
blacksmith
creating the tyger (tiger). Being born of fire and steel, the tiger is, in
Blake's
descriptions, something strong and fierce. In the following stanza,
the speakers asks if the
tiger's creator was happy about his
creation: 

Did he
smile his work to
see? 

Did he who made the lamb make thee? 

The speaker asks if God ("he"), who made the lamb,
also
made the tiger. The lamb represents peace and love. The lamb is often
symbolically synonymous
with Christ in Christian theology. So, the speaker is
asking if God could create something so
loving (the lamb) and yet also create
something so dangerous and ferocious. There are no answers
to the speaker's
questions. This leaves the poem open to different interpretations. Perhaps
God
did make both peaceful and dangerous things in the world to create a
balance and an analogue
with the good/evil dichotomy. Perhaps the tiger (or
other dangerous and evil things the tiger
represents) was created by a fallen
angel, a demiurge, or a devil. The speaker can only
ponder. 

Consider a gross simplification. The speaker asks who created the

tiger and why. This echoes similar questions such as: If God is loving, why did he
create
suffering? Blake goes much deeper in terms of theological and
philosophical questions. But the
general idea concerns how and why the world
contains love and hate, good and evil, peace and

destruction.