newwashed

Updated: April 30, 2025

And one has only to read the writings of the two Mathers to perceive that that enemy was to them no metaphysical abstraction, no scholastic definition, no figment of a poetical fancy, but a living, active reality, alternating between the sublimest possibilities of evil and the lowest details of mean mischief; now a "tricksy spirit," disturbing the good-wife's platters or soiling her newwashed linen, and anon riding the storm-cloud and pointing its thunder-bolts; for, as the elder Mather pertinently inquires, "how else is it that our meeting-houses are burned by the lightning?"

John Greenleaf Whittier - The Conflict with Slavery and Others, Complete, Volume VII,: The Works of Whittier: the Conflict with Slavery, Politics: and Reform, the Inner Life and Criticism