The Last Leaf eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 289 pages of information about The Last Leaf.

The Last Leaf eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 289 pages of information about The Last Leaf.

  “Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul,
  As the swift seasons roll! 
  Leave thy low vaulted past,
  Let each new temple, nobler than the last
  Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
  Till thou at length art free,
  Leaving thine out-grown shell
  By life’s unresting sea!”

The fame of James Russell Lowell, too, in these years was incipient.  As a writer he had shown himself to be elegantly schooled, but in the Fable for Critics and the Biglow Papers, he had burst forth as a most effective and slashing satirist.  His culture was closely and perfectly fitted, but when scratched, revealing in full proportions the “Whang-doodle” Yankee.  The whang, however, handling with all the deftness in the world the broadest and subtlest themes, and the doodle standing for a patriotism of the noblest.  Those who came into close connection with him say that he grew morbidly fastidious, shrinking from coarse contacts and was happy at last only in a delicate environment.  When in health, nevertheless, he was a Yankee of the truest, though sublimated by his genius and superb accomplishments.  I know a little inn far away among the hills on whose porch half concealed by the honeysuckle, Lowell is said often to have sat listening to the dialect of the farmers who “vanned” and “vummed” as they disputed together in the evenings after the chores were done.  Lowell had the dialect in his very bones, and loved it, but took pains to confirm his knowledge of it by studying on the sod.

“An’ yit I love the unhighschooled ways Ol’ farmers hed when I was younger—­ Their talk wuz meatier and would stay, While book-froth seems to whet your hunger.  For puttin’ in a downright lick ’twixt humbug’s eyes, there’s few can metch it.  An’ then it helves my thoughts as slick, ez stret grained hickory does a hetchet.”

On one occasion I heard Lowell tell a story in which he surrendered himself fully to the rustic heredity that was in him, flinging aside the accretions of culture.  “It is strange,” he said, “how even the moral sense of men may become warped.  In a certain Cape Cod village, for instance, it had long been the custom to profit from the wrecks that happened upon the dangerous shore, until at last the setting of false lights and the appropriation of the lost cargoes became a legitimate business.  One Sunday a congregation at church (they were rigid Puritans and punctilious about worship) was startled by the news that a West India ship loaded with sugar was going to pieces on the rocks near by.  The birds of prey flocked to make prize of the booty.  A good deacon bagged a large quantity of sugar, piling it on the shore while he went for his oxen to carry it home.  The bad boys, however, resolved to play a trick on the deacon; they emptied out the sugar and filled the bags with clean, brown sand, which counterfeited well.  This the deacon laboriously carted to his barn, and only came to a sense of his loss when his

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Project Gutenberg
The Last Leaf from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.