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We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to see, painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered those saying, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.
We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see, painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as good when occasion comes.
Then was the maid in her grandames beanes, and knew not what should become of her: I heard the Pope tooke pitie on her, and because her trespasse was not voluntary but chancemedly, he assigned her no other punishment but this, to drinke out the rest of the poyson in the glasse that was left, and so goe scot-free.
They painfully gathered in out-of-the-way nooks from the lips of old grandames in chimney corners and wandering singers in obscure villages, the survivals of the primitive superstitions of the people.
Persons came into the world as withered grandames and as old gentlemen with gold-headed canes, and then receded like crabs backward into their maturity, then into their adolescence and babyhood. To return from a protracted voyage was to find your younger friends sunk into pinafores. But the story was really too ridiculous. But in these last few years no doubt I do grow younger.
We behold aged men and grandames, a clergyman with the Puritanic stiffness still in his garb and mien, and a red-coated officer of the old French war; and there comes the shop-keeping Pyncheon of a century ago, with the ruffles turned back from his wrists; and there the periwigged and brocaded gentleman of the artist's legend, with the beautiful and pensive Alice, who brings no pride out of her virgin grave.
It has been told by every generation, handed down by grandames at the fireside, narrated night and day, and the chronicle has changed its complexion somewhat in every age.
From village to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost under the horses' feet; hoary grandsires and grandames caught glimpses of their approach, and hobbled to intercept them at some point of vantage; blind men stared them out of countenance with their sightless orbs; women held up their unwashed babies; cripples displayed their wooden legs, their grievous scars, their dangling, boneless arms, their broken backs, their burden of a hump, or whatever infirmity or deformity Providence had assigned them for an inheritance.
I found them winding of Marcello's corpse. And there was such a solemn melody, 'Twixt doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies, Such as old grandames, watching by the dead, Are wont to outwear the night with. Old Play The mode of entering the great tower of Coningsburgh Castle is very peculiar, and partakes of the rude simplicity of the early times in which it was erected.
Did not Horne, a poet better known to the last generation than to this, point out that though printed as prose, these passages were, perhaps as "the result of harmonious accident," essentially poetry, and "written in blank verse of irregular metres and rhythms, which Southey and Shelley and some other poets have occasionally adopted"? Did he not print part of the passages in this form, substituting only, as a concession to the conventionalities of verse, the word "grandames" for "grandmothers"; and did he not declare of one of the extracts so printed that it was "worthy of the best passages in Wordsworth"?
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