Most of our longest English words off-hand;
Was quite familiar in Low Dutch and Spanish,
And thought of studying modern Greek and Danish;
and whose father, a man of newly affected silence that spoke “unutterable things,” was established in a mortgaged house filled with servants and “whatever is necessary for a ‘genteel liver’” and buttressed with a coach and half a dozen unpaid-for horses. At the same time the countryside was developing a native but not altogether admirable Yankee type. At their best, Halleck[8] wrote,
The people of today
Appear good, honest, quiet men enough
And hospitable too—for ready pay;
With manners like their roads, a little rough,
And hands whose grasp is warm and welcoming, though tough.
And at their worst Whittier[9] looked back a half century, to 1818, and recalled them as