Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/224

 IX.

From May, 1885, when Randall suffered a slight stroke of paralysis on the railway train going to Stow, and yet succeeded in reaching home without much assistance, he experienced considerable difficulty in conversing, not from any apparent failure in intelligence, but from some inability to command as readily as before his unusually large and rich vocabulary, and still more from a lack of command over the muscles involved in speech. These difficulties gradually wore away to a large extent, but he never again indulged himself in those long and varied mono- logues which had always possessed a singular fascination for others as well as myself. A beautiful gentleness came over him. His fiery sarcasms on men and things that stirred his moral indignation, his flashes of wit on general topics, his flights of exuberant imagination, some- times humorous, sometimes grotesque, sometimes lofty, but always original and unlike anybody else's, were soft- ened to a mild reflectiveness that let the benevolence of his nature shine out more purely than ever. What never lost its native energy in the least was the moral sentiment ; his moral perceptions, his astonishing penetra- tion into the core of every character that came under his observation, his insight into private and public conduct, were keen as in his palmiest days. Shams were as trans- parent to him as they ever were, but the old fierceness of wrath at all falsehood or meanness was toned down into a calm pity, a quiet irony, or a tolerant charity that had ceased to expect too much of the "heedless world." The spirit of his old age took on the beauty of the Indian sum-

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