regular ticking of one of Willard's
clocks, in which one could fancy, after long listening, a certain kind
of rhythm or tune, but which yet was only a poverty-stricken _tick,
tick_ after all,--and that he had never seen a sweet-water on a trellis
growing so fairly, or in forms so pleasing to his eye, as a fox-grape
over a scrub-oak in a swamp. He added I know not what, to the effect
that the sweet-water would only be the more disfigured by having its
leaves starched and ironed out, and that Peg[=a]sus (so he called him)
hardly looked right with his mane and tail in curl-papers. These and
other such opinions I did not long strive to eradicate, attributing them
rather to a defective education and senses untuned by too long
familiarity with purely natural objects, than to a perverted moral
sense. I was the more inclined to this leniency since sufficient
evidence was not to seek, that his verses, as wanting as they certainly
were in classic polish and point, had somehow taken hold of the public
ear in a surprising manner. So, only setting him right as to the
quantity of the proper name Pegasus, I left him to follow the bent of
his natural genius.

There are two things upon which it would seem fitting to dilate somewhat
more largely in this place,--the Yankee character and the Yankee
dialect. And, first, of the Yankee character, which has wanted neither
open maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies in the persons of those
unskilful painters who have given to it that hardness, angularity, and
want of proper perspective, which, in truth, belonged, not to their
subject, but to their own niggard and unskilful pencil.

New England was not so much the colony of a mother country, as a Hagar
driven forth into the wilderness. The little self-exiled band which came
hither in 1620 came, not to seek gold, but to found a democracy. They
came that they might have the privilege to work and pray, to sit upon
hard benches and listen to painful preachers as long as they would, yea,
even unto thirty-seventhly, if the spirit so willed it. And surely, if
the Greek might boast his Thermopylae, where three hundred men fell in
resisting the Persian, we may well be proud of our Plymouth Rock, where
a handful of men, women, and children not merely faced, but vanquished,
winter, famine, the wilderness, and the yet more invincible _storge_
that drew them back to the green island far away. These found no lotus
growing upon the surly shore, the taste