ere'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 wife at night attempted to sweeten his tea from
the bags. This brought out from the deacon the following remark: 'I
declare, when I felt that 'ar sand agrittin' between my teeth, I don't
know but it was wicked, but I e'en a'most wished that there wouldn't
never be another wreck!'" Lowell told the story with all the humour
possible, rendering the deacon's remark with a twang and an emphatic
dwelling on the double negative (a thing which Lowell believed we had
suffered to drop out of polite speech unfortunately) with inimitable
effect and most evident enjoyment. The substratum of the man was
Yankee but probably no other of the stock has so enriched himself with
the best of all lands and times. He had a most delicate sense of what
was best worth while in all literatures and absorbed it to the full.
One of the greatest mistakes I ever made was in neglecting to become a
member of his class in Dante when the opportunity came to me. What
an interpreter he was of the soul of the great Italian, and with what
unerring instinct he penetrated to what was best in the sages and
poets of the world everywhere! His own gifts as poet and thinker were
of the finest, and they were set off with acquirements marvellous
in their rang