From this passage, too, readers may note the power of Baldwin’s cadenced language, especially in the almost incantatory repetition that occurs in the biblical exhortations so often quoted or sung to the characters. The narrator not only tells a tale but also probes into character. His language is richly symbolic, laden with explicit and implicit meaning, and his point of view is not so omniscient, not so distant or so direct, that his reader does not share his sorrowful compassion for Elizabeth, his mistrust for the puritanical Gabriel, and his self-imposed quandary over John, for whom he seems to oppose happiness with holiness.