At the beginning of the quote, it seems that Goodman Brown begins to hear the natural sounds of the forest as various unnatural sounds that would not actually come from trees. There's also some subtler, more complicated personification going on. Here, it seems that nature has always known the truth about people being evil, and because of that, nature is mocking Goodman Brown for coming to this knowledge so late and for feeling so distressed by it. This is fitting, since the story's motif of nature and wilderness associates nature with the evil that lurks at the heart of everything. The clearest example of personification comes at the end, when nature seems to be laughing at Goodman Brown's loss of faith, scorning his naivety for ever thinking that people were inherently good.
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