"Ye smiler with ye knif under ye cloke!" What a picture in that line of Chaucer!
The Puritan was a man of severities. He never forgot that God struck Oza and buried Pharaoh in the sea. He went through the world wearing his creed, like a sword, solely for aggressive purposes.
The deficiency of gentle manners, in one not bred to their practice, can nearly always be supplied by sensibility or by tact.
"Take them, O great eternity!
Our little life is but a gust
Which bends the branches of thy tree
And trails its blossoms thro' the dust."
I never knew a critic to note the metaphor in these musical lines of Longfellow, but it seems to me quite haunting and overpowering, and of extraordinary beauty.