In order to portray the characters and describe the setting and events the author of the analysed passage resorts to the following devices:

Lexical

• methaphor:

"That mysterious emblem was never once withdrawn. It shook with his measured breath, as he gave out the psalm; it threw its obscurity between him and the holy page, as he read the Scriptures; and while he prayed, the veil lay heavily on his uplifted countenance." 

(to pay the reader's attention and help to imagine the details)

"Elizabeth, I will," said he, "so far as my vow may suffer me"

 (to underline that he won't change his decision)

• simily:

"The cause of so much amazement may appear sufficiently slight. Mr. Hooper, a gentlemanly person, of about thirty, though still a bachelor, was dressed with due clerical neatness, as if a careful wife had starched his band, and brushed the weekly dust from his Sunday's garb."

  (to underline that Mr. Hooper was a tidy gentleman, who pays attention to his look)

"Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister, as his black veil to them." 

(to underline how much people pay attention to the minister's black veil and dislike it)

" Each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought."

(to underline how much the citizens dislike the veil)

"A few shook, their sagacious heads, intimating that they could penetrate the mystery; while one or two affirmed that there was no mystery at all, but only that Mr. Hooper's eyes were so weakened by the midnight lamp as to require a shade."

"How strange," said a lady, "that a simple black veil, such as any woman might wear on her bonnet, should become such a terrible thing on Mr. Hooper's face."

" All through life that piece of crepe had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, arid kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and still it lay upon his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity."

"After performing the ceremony, Mr. Hooper raised a glass of wine to his lips, wishing happiness to the new-married couple in a strain of mild pleasantry that ought to have brightened the features of the guests, like a cheerful gleam from the hearth."

• oxymoron:

" And yet the faint, sad smile, so often there, now seemed to glimmer from its obscurity, and linger on Father Hooper's lips."

" Father Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse, with a faint smile lingering on the lips"

• personification:

"The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's face, throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghostlike from head to foot. Do you not feel it so?" 

(it's a personification of the black veil, which can not influence a person)

" The people trembled, though they but darkly understood him when he prayed that they, and himself, and all of mortal race, might be ready, as he trusted this young maiden had been, for the dreadful hour that should snatch the veil from their faces." 

(it's  a personification of the veil too)

"I had a fancy," replied she, "that the minister and the maiden's spirit were walking hand in hand."

Syntactical

• polysyndeton

" All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world: it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love, and kept him in that saddest of all prisons, his own heart; and still it lay upon his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber, and shade him from the sunshine of eternity."

"...he paid due reverence to the hoary heads, saluted the middle-aged with kind dignity as their friend and spiritual guide, greeted the young with mingled authority and love, and laid his hands on the little children's heads to bless them."

"Know, then, this veil is a type and a symbol, and I am bound to wear it ever, both in light and darkness, in solitude and before the gaze of multitudes, and as with strangers, so with my familiar friends."
"In this manner Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish."

Graphic

• capitalization

"THE SEXTON stood in the porch of Milford meetinghouse, pulling busily at the bell rope."