REFERENCES:
W. S. Kennedy: John Greenleaf Whittier, his Life, Genius, and Writings, 1882.
S. T. Pickard: Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, 1894.
Richard Burton: John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘Beacon Biographies,’ 1901.
T. W. Higginson: John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘English Men of Letters,’ 1902.
G. R. Carpenter: John Greenleaf Whittier, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1903.
I
HIS LIFE
John Greenleaf Whittier was born at East Haverhill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807. His father, John Whittier, a farmer, was noted for probity, sound judgment, and great physical strength. A man of few words, he always spoke to the point, as when, in relation to public charities with which he had officially to do, he said: ‘There are the Lord’s poor and the Devil’s poor; there ought to be a distinction made between them by the overseers of the poor.’ He had imperfect sympathy with his son’s literary aspirations, but it were unjust to say that he was wholly opposed to them.
Whatever lack there may have been on this score was abundantly made up to the youth by his beautiful and saintly mother. Abigail (Hussey) Whittier was her husband’s junior by twenty-one years. From her the poet inherited his brilliant black eyes, a physical trait (mistakenly) supposed to have been derived from the old colonial minister, Stephen Bachiler, that enterprising and turbulent spirit who came to America at the age of seventy, founded cities, disputed the authority of the clergy, and finally astonished friend and enemy alike by marrying for the third time at the age of eighty-nine.
Young Whittier was apparently destined to the toilsome life of his farmer ancestors. He suffered under the ‘toughening process’ to which New England country lads were formerly subjected, and became in consequence a lifelong valetudinarian.
With his frail physique and uncertain health the ‘Quaker Poet’ affords a marked contrast, not alone to his own father, but to that mighty ancestor Thomas Whittier, founder of the American family, who at sixty-eight years of age was able to do his share in hewing the oak timbers for a new house in which he proposed to pass his declining days. The building was erected about 1688. Thomas Whittier enjoyed the use of it until his death in 1696. Five generations of Whittiers were harbored beneath its roof, and here the poet was born. Although not a Quaker himself, Thomas Whittier was a friend of the Friends, and for taking the part of certain unlicensed exhorters was for a time deprived of his rights as a freeman.
Whittier was early a reader and soon devoured the contents of his father’s slender library. So insatiable was his thirst for books that he would walk miles to borrow a volume of biography or travel. At the age of fourteen he became fascinated with the poems of Burns, and under their stimulus began to make rhymes himself.[35] On his first visit to Boston he bought a copy of Shakespeare. Scott’s novels he borrowed, to read them delightedly but with a troubled conscience.
His poetic aspirations were encouraged by his elder sister, Mary, who, without Whittier’s knowledge, sent the verses entitled ‘The Exile’s Departure’ to the Newburyport ‘Free Press,’ a short-lived journal edited by young William Lloyd Garrison. They appeared in the issue of June 8, 1826. Whittier has described his emotions on first seeing himself in print. The paper was thrown to him by the news-carrier. ‘My uncle and I were mending fences. I took up the sheet, and was surprised and overjoyed to see my lines in the “Poet’s Corner.” I stood gazing at them in wonder, and my uncle had to call me several times to my work before I could recover myself.’
Other poems were offered and accepted. Curious to see his contributor, Garrison drove over from Newburyport to the Whittier farm. The bashful country boy could with difficulty be persuaded to meet his guest. Then began a lifelong friendship not uncheckered by differences without which friendship itself lacks zest.
Garrison urged on Whittier’s parents the importance of giving the youth an education. Backed up by the influence of A. W. Thayer, editor of the Haverhill ‘Gazette,’ who offered to take the lad into his own home, Whittier got his father’s consent to his attending the newly established Haverhill Academy. He paid for one term of six months by making slippers, an art he learned from one of the farm hands, and for another term by teaching school, which seemed to him a less enviable mode of life than cobbling.
The favor accorded his verse stimulated invention. During 1827–28 he published, under assumed names, nearly a hundred poems in the Haverhill ‘Gazette’ alone. A plan for bringing out a collection of these fugitive pieces under the title of Poems of Adrian came, however, to nothing.
Garrison, who had been doing editorial work in Boston for the Colliers, publishers of ‘The Philanthropist’ and ‘The American Manufacturer,’ advised their getting Whittier to take his place. Whittier edited the ‘Manufacturer’ from January to August, 1829, when he was summoned home by the illness of his father. But he had had a taste of journalism and politics, and relished both. From January to July, 1830, he edited the Haverhill ‘Gazette.’ His newspaper work made him acquainted with George Prentice of ‘The New England Review,’ published in Hartford. When Prentice left Connecticut for Kentucky, where he was to spend six months and write a campaign life of Henry Clay, he urged the owners of the ‘Review’ to engage Whittier as his substitute. Whittier was responsible for the conduct of the paper for a year and a half (July, 1830, to January, 1832). In spite of many drawbacks, his father’s death, his own illness, a disappointment in love, the period of his Hartford residence was the happiest and the most stimulating he had yet known. He printed his first volume, Legends of New England, a medley of prose and verse, edited The Literary Remains of John G. C. Brainard (the sketch of Brainard’s life prefixed to the volume throws much light on Whittier’s reading), and brought out the narrative poem Moll Pitcher, a story of the once famous ‘Lynn Pythoness.’
On his return to Haverhill he played his part in local politics and was talked of for Congress. Somewhat later he was drawn into the anti-slavery movement and for the next twenty-seven years this was his life. He was a member of the legislature in 1835, and was reëlected the next year; but in general terms it may be said that in publishing Justice and Expediency, and in uniting himself with the small, unpopular, and exasperating party of Abolitionists, he sacrificed hope of political advancement. He gave to the cause time, health, reputation, and when he had it to give, money. In company with Abolitionist leaders and orators he encountered mobs and speculated philosophically on the chance of losing his life.
In 1837 he acted as a secretary to the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York. From 1838 to 1840 he edited ‘The Pennsylvania Freeman,’ published in Philadelphia. During an Abolitionist convention, Pennsylvania Hall, in which were the offices of the ‘Freeman,’ was sacked and burned by a pro-slavery mob. Whittier, disguised in a wig and a long overcoat, mingled with the rioters and contrived to save a few of his papers. It was a more dangerous rabble than that he encountered during the George Thomson riot at Concord, New Hampshire, three years earlier. Whittier once remarked that he never really feared for his life, but that he had no mind to a coat of tar and feathers.
A true son of Essex, he soon wearied of city life. ‘I would rather live an obscure New England farmer,’ he said. ‘I would rather see the sunset light streaming through the valley of the Merrimac than to look out for many months upon brick walls, and Sam Weller’s “werry beautiful landscape of chimney-pots.”’
He really had no choice in the matter, having been warned to give up editorial work if he would keep his precarious hold on life. He obeyed the warning. But with Whittier journalism was a disease. He had a relapse in 1844, when he took charge of the ‘Middlesex Standard’ of Lowell, and again, in 1845–46, when he was virtual editor of the ‘Essex Transcript’ in Amesbury.
No restriction was placed on his doing work at home. He wrote unceasingly, prose and verse, reaching his literary audience through the ‘Democratic Review’ and his audience of reformers through Bailey’s paper, ‘The National Era,’ both published in Washington. Whittier was corresponding editor of the ‘Era’ from 1847 to 1850, and printed in its columns, besides political articles, such now famous poems as ‘Maud Muller,’ ‘Ichabod,’ ‘Tauler,’ and ‘The Chapel of the Hermits.’
The list of Whittier’s chief publications up to the year 1857 contains seventeen titles: Legends of New England, 1831; Moll Pitcher, 1832 (revised edition 1840); Justice and Expediency, 1833; Mogg Megone, 1836; Poems written during the Progress of the Abolition Question, etc., 1837 (unauthorized issue); Poems, 1838; Lays of my Home and Other Poems, 1843; The Stranger in Lowell, 1845; Voices of Freedom, 1846; The Supernaturalism of New England, 1847; Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal, 1849; Poems, 1849;[36] Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, 1850; Songs of Labor and Other Poems, 1850; The Chapel of the Hermits and Other Poems, 1853; Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 1854; The Panorama and Other Poems, 1856.
The founding of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ (1857) gave Whittier a more assured place. His work was sought and the pay was generous. He became an overseer of Harvard College in 1858. In 1860 the college made him a Master of Arts, and in 1866 a Doctor of Laws.
His home for many years was in Amesbury, the farm at East Haverhill having been sold in 1836. After the death of his mother and younger sister he passed much of his time with kinsfolk at the house known as ‘Oak Knoll,’ in Danvers. For all his admiration of women, Whittier never married. He enjoyed allusions to a supposititious Mrs. Whittier. Writing to his niece, Mrs. Pickard, about some friend who was unhappy over political defeat, Whittier said: ‘I told him I had been in the same predicament ... and got abused worse than he did, for I was charged with ill-treating my wife!’
Whittier was a birthright member of the Society of Friends and influential in their councils. His advice was much sought and freely given in terms of blended modesty, good sense, and humor.
During the last twenty years of his life Whittier published the following volumes: Home Ballads and Poems, 1860; In War Time and Other Poems, 1864; National Lyrics, 1865; Snow-Bound, 1866; The Tent on the Beach and Other Poems, 1867; Among the Hills and Other Poems, 1869; Ballads of New England, 1870; Miriam and Other Poems, 1871; The Pennsylvania Pilgrim and Other Poems, 1872; Mabel Martin, 1874; Hazel-Blossoms, 1875; The Vision of Echard and Other Poems, 1878; The King’s Missive and Other Poems, 1881; The Bay of Seven Islands and Other Poems, 1883; Saint Gregory’s Guest and Recent Poems, 1886; At Sundown, 1892.
The honors accorded him on his seventieth, eightieth, and eighty-fourth anniversaries gave Whittier much happiness. He was especially pleased to learn that the bells of St. Boniface, in Winnipeg, Manitoba (celebrated in his ‘Red River Voyageur’), were rung for him at midnight of December 17, 1891. Said the poet in his letter to Archbishop Tâché: ‘Such a delicate and beautiful tribute has deeply moved me. I shall never forget it.’
Nothing was left undone that the tenderest love and wisest solicitude could do for his comfort. His last illness was brief. He died at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, on September 7, 1892.
II
WHITTIER’S CHARACTER
Whittier’s shyness was proverbial. Those who knew him also knew that beneath that shyness was a masterful spirit. Evasion and inconclusiveness on the part of those with whom he dealt would not avail. Whittier wanted to know where public men stood and for what they stood. A politician himself, he understood the art of dealing with politicians. To a certain candidate he said: ‘Thee cannot expect the votes of our people unless thee speak more plainly.’ Being in great need of the votes of ‘our people,’ the candidate was compelled to speak at once and to use the words Whittier put into his mouth.
Another possessed of like skill in controlling men might have grown despotic. Not so Whittier. Tactful and conciliatory, no grain of selfishness was to be found in his composition. He worked for the cause alone.
His physical courage, of which there are abundant illustrations, was fully equal to his moral courage. The nerve required to face a disciplined enemy, as in war, is always admirable; one would not wish to underestimate it. But it is a type of courage not difficult to comprehend. A glamour hangs about the battlefield. Men are carried on by the esprit de corps. They do wonders and marvel at their own courage afterwards. Facing a mob is another matter. A mob is an assassin; the last thing it wants is fair play. Whittier had no experiences like those to which Bailey and Garrison were subjected, but he had enough to try his mettle.
He was one of the most modest of men, holding his achievements, literary and otherwise, at far lower estimate than did the public. To an anxious inquirer Whittier said that he did not think ‘Maud Muller’ worth serious analysis. He asked for criticism on his verses, and was not slow to act upon it when given. His open-mindedness is shown in the way he accepted Lowell’s suggestion about the refrain of ‘Skipper Ireson’s Ride.’ He defended himself when the criticism touched his motives or impugned his love of truth. Charged with having boasted that his story of ‘Barbara Frietchie’ would live until it got beyond reach of correction, Whittier replied: ‘Those who know me will bear witness that I am not in the habit of boasting of anything whatever, least of all of congratulating myself upon a doubtful statement outliving the possibility of correction.... I have no pride of authorship to interfere with my allegiance to truth.’
He was a stanch friend, and a helpful neighbor. His filial piety was deep—no trait of his character was more pronounced. He was the most devoted of sons, the best of brothers.
The seriousness of Whittier’s temper and mind was relieved by a keen sense of humor which found expression in many engaging ways. His letters written in young manhood are at times almost boisterously mirthful. His humor grew subdued as he became older, but it never lost its charm. Those who were nearest him realized how much it contributed to making him the most companionable of men.
III
THE LITERARY CRAFTSMAN
‘I have left one bad rhyme ... to preserve my well known character in that respect,’ says Whittier in a letter to Fields, his publisher. The charge of laxity in rhymes was the one most often brought against him. He labored under two capital disadvantages; he was self-taught and he wrote always for a moral purpose. His objection to reprinting Mogg Megone grew out of the feeling, not that it was bad poetry,—though he had no delusions about its artistic value,—but that it was not calculated to do good. Ethics, rather than art, were uppermost in his thought. There has never been question of his native power. He could be exquisitely felicitous, but, having acquired the habit of writing for a cause, of sacrificing nicety of phrase for vigor of thought and rapidity of utterance, being eager always to strike a blow at the critical moment, he found it difficult to write with a dominant artistic motive. He wrote better (technically speaking) the older he grew. It is difficult to realize as we listen to the rich strains of his later years that Whittier could have been as inharmonious as he often was in the first period of his poetic life. He confessed his defect. To Fields he once said: ‘It’s lucky that other folks’ ears are not so sensitive as thine.’
His variety of metres, if not great, was sufficiently ample to preclude the feeling of sameness. His verse never comes laden with scholarly suggestion in rhythm or thought, with the faint sweet echoes of old-time poetry, as does Longfellow’s. Whittier was not ‘literary,’ though he made a noble addition to the literature of his country.
Whittier’s prose has been ignored rather than underestimated. It is clear and forceful, often impassioned, and sometimes eloquent. Whether a reputation could be based on it is another matter. Certainly it has not been accorded the popular favor it deserves. Among a thousand readers, for example, who know Snow-Bound there are possibly two or three who have read Margaret Smith’s Journal.
Of the seven prose sketches in Legends of New England not one was thought by the author worth preserving. He also suppressed much of the contents of the two volumes published some fifteen years after the Legends. Both these later books, The Stranger in Lowell and The Supernaturalism of New England, ought to be reprinted as they came first from Whittier’s hand.
The Stranger in Lowell, a volume of more or less related essays, is in part a record of impressions made on the author during a brief residence in the new manufacturing town by the Merrimac. The extraordinary growth of ‘The City of a Day’ was then, and is still, a legitimate cause for wonder. All the eighteen papers are readable, and that entitled ‘The Yankee Zincali’ is a little classic. Whittier’s next volume of prose, The Supernaturalism of New England, consists of nine chapters on witches, wizards, ghosts, apparitions, haunted houses, charms, and the like. It is rather a wide survey of the subject, from the Indian powahs to the Irish Presbyterians who settled in New Hampshire in 1720, and brought with them, ‘among other strange matters, potatoes and fairies.’ Whittier dwells on these traditions of his country with deep interest and sets them forth with no little humor. It is a fault of the book that he does not dwell on them at greater length.
Leaves from Margaret Smith’s Journal is an admirable study of colonial New England in 1678. The style is sweet, the narrative flowing, the characters, many of them historical, are consistent and lifelike, and the tone of delicate irony running through the book is most engaging. Genuinely illuminating to the student of manners are such passages in the journal as those describing the ordination of Mr. Brock at Reading, the meeting at the inn with a son of Mr. Increase Mather, ‘a pert talkative lad’ abounding in anecdotes of the miraculous, the antics of Mr. Corbet’s negro boy Sam, and the encounter on the way back to Boston with the good old deacon under the influence of flip. A strong and engrossing plot might have made the book more popular, as it might also have been inconsistent with the artlessness of what purports to be a young girl’s journal.
Old Portraits and Modern Sketches is a volume of character studies of ancient worthies (such as Bunyan, Ellwood, Baxter, Marvell) and of two or three moderns (like William Leggett, to whom Whittier pays a generous tribute). Literary Recreations and Miscellanies consists of a reprint of material used in earlier books, together with a group of reviews and other papers.
IV
NARRATIVE AND LEGENDARY VERSE
Whittier’s instinct drew him irresistibly to native themes. He believed that the American poet should write about America. ‘New England is full of Romance,’ he had said in his sketch of Brainard. ‘The great forest which our fathers penetrated—the red men—their struggle and their disappearance—the Powwow and the War-dance—the savage inroad and the English sally—the tale of superstition, and the scenes of Witchcraft,—all these are rich materials of poetry.’ And it is safe to assume that Whittier never questioned the wisdom of his own choice of subjects, though he was often dissatisfied with the treatment.
Much of Whittier’s early verse died a natural death. More ought in his opinion to have done so. He marvelled at the ‘feline tenacity of life’ exhibited by certain poems and thought it flat contradiction of the theory of the survival of the fittest. He destroyed every copy of Legends of New England that he could get his hands on. He would have been glad to suppress Mogg Megone. ‘Is there no way to lay the ghosts of unlucky rhymes?’ he asked, when the question was raised of reprinting the story in the ‘blue and gold’ volumes of 1857. It had appeared in the first collected edition (1849), and again in 1870; but when the definitive edition was published (1888), Mogg Megone was consigned to ‘the limbo of an appendix,’ and printed in type small enough to make the reading a torture.
The plot is imaginary, but the characters are for the most part historical. The outlaw Bonython sells his daughter to the Saco chief Hegone, or, as he was commonly called, Mogg Megone. The girl murders the savage as he lies drunk in her father’s hut. For Mogg had boasted of killing her seducer. She flies to the settlement of the Norridgewock Indians to confess to the Jesuit Sebastian Ralle, and is repulsed by the angry priest, whose plans are thwarted by Megone’s untimely death. Wandering about in agony, she sees the attack by the English on Norridgewock, when Ralle was shot at the foot of the cross, and later is found by Castine and his men, dead in the forest. The poem is spirited and abounds in incident, but it is melodramatic. It lacks the magic of Whittier’s art. Nevertheless he unjustly depreciated it.
A better performance is ‘The Bridal of Pennacook,’ with its strongly marked characters of Passaconaway, Weetamoo, and Winnepurkit, its contrasting pictures of the rich Merrimac valley and the wild Saugus marshes. Along with this story of Indian life may be read ‘The Fountain’ and the musical stanzas of the ‘Funeral Tree of the Sokokis.’ ‘The Truce of Piscataqua’ and ‘Nauhaught, the Deacon’ are later poems illustrating Indian character.
Living in what had been for many years one of the border towns of Massachusetts, Whittier was naturally drawn to themes, partly historic, partly legendary, touching the struggles between French, English, and Indians. ‘Pentucket’ commemorates Hertel de Rouville’s night attack on Haverhill. ‘St. John,’ a ballad of Acadia, describes the sack of La Tour’s fortress by his rival, D’Aulnay. ‘Mary Garvin’ and ‘The Ranger’ are ‘border’ ballads.
Now and then he rhymes ‘a wild and wondrous story,’ such as ‘The Garrison of Cape Ann,’ which he found in the Magnalia Christi:—
Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual life of old,
Inward, grand with awe and reverence; outward, mean and coarse and cold;
Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and vulgar clay,
Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of hodden gray.
A number of the poems turn on the witchcraft persecutions: ‘Mabel Martin,’ ‘The Witch of Wenham,’ and the fine ‘Prophecy of Samuel Sewall.’ In The Tent on the Beach are two more: ‘The Wreck of the Rivermouth’ and ‘The Changeling.’
Whittier was always ready to speak on the injustice of injustice. His Quaker ancestors used to receive gifts of forty stripes save one. They were martyrs for the cause of religious liberty. And the sufferings of the New England Quakers was a subject always to the poet’s hand. He contemplated the wrongs that had been righted and was grateful therefor; but it was a part of his mission to teach his readers what progress had been made since the days in which state and church united to persecute a harmless if sometimes extravagant people. The lesson may be found in such poems as ‘How the Women went from Dover’ and ‘The King’s Missive.’ Whittier knew that injustice is always ridiculous, and a grim humor plays at times about his treatment of events in that dreadful day, as in the story of Thomas Macy. The most characteristic setting of his general theme is to be found in the spirited ballad of ‘Cassandra Southwick.’ The incident is told dramatically by the heroine herself, but the passion which glows through the verse is true Whittier.
V
VOICES OF FREEDOM, SONGS OF LABOR, IN WAR TIME
The militant note in Whittier’s verse was sounded early. In 1832, when he was twenty-five years old, he wrote the stanzas ‘To William Lloyd Garrison.’ They were followed by ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (1833), ‘The Slave-Ships’ (1834), ‘The Hunters of Men’ and ‘Stanzas for the Times’ (1835), ‘Clerical Oppressors’ (1836), and the stinging ‘Pastoral Letter’ (1837). He was now fairly embarked on his mission.
The brunt of his attack fell on supine Northern politicians, clerical apologists, and anxious business men who feared agitation might injure their Southern trade. Nothing was more abhorrent to Whittier than traffic in human flesh. He marvelled that it was not abhorrent to every one, and strove with all his power to make it so. America, in his belief, was a by-word among the nations, forever prating of ‘liberty’ while she bought and sold slaves.
As he was the assailant of timid vote-seekers, money-getters, and ministers who defended slavery ‘on scriptural grounds,’ so was Whittier the eulogist of all who made sacrifices for the cause, or who, like ‘Randolph of Roanoke,’ a man with every traditional motive to cling to the peculiar institution, testified against it. Voices of Freedom is a record of the guerilla warfare which Whittier waged during forty years against slavery. With the additions he made to it in the progress of the struggle, it became not only the largest division of his work but one of the most notable. The history of Abolitionism is written here. ‘The Pastoral Letter’ was Whittier’s response to the body of Congregational ministers who deprecated the discussion of slavery as tending to make trouble in the churches. ‘Massachusetts to Virginia’ was called out by Latimer’s case. ‘Texas,’ ‘Faneuil Hall,’ and the lines ‘To a Southern Statesman’ are a protest against the annexation of territory ‘sufficient for six new slave states.’ ‘For Righteousness’ Sake’ was inscribed to friends ‘under arrest for treason against the slave power.’ The fine closing stanza deserves to be better known:—
God’s ways seem dark, but, soon or late,
They touch the shining hills of day;
The evil cannot brook delay,
The good can well afford to wait.
Give ermined knaves their hour of crime;
Ye have the future grand and great,
The safe appeal of Truth to Time!
‘The Kansas Emigrants’ celebrates the Western advance, the coming of the new Pilgrims, armed with the Bible and free schools. ‘Le Marais du Cygne’ was written on hearing of the Kansas massacre in May, 1858. ‘The Quakers are Out,’ a campaign song (not included in the collected writings), celebrates the Republican victory in Pennsylvania on the eve of the National election:—
Away with misgiving—away with all doubt,
For Lincoln goes in, when the Quakers are out!
Not the least notable among these poems is ‘The Summons,’ in which the poet contrasts the quiet of summer with the distant tumult of approaching war, and his knowledge of his place in the approaching struggle with consciousness of his inability to act.
The Voices of Freedom are often harsh and discordant. Lines were written in hot haste and sent to press before the ink had time to dry. The needs of the moment were imperative. There was little time to correct and no time to polish. Had Whittier possessed a lyric gift approximating that of Hugo or Swinburne, how wonderful must have been his contribution to our literature. For the cause was great and his devotion single. Much of the verse, however, is journalism.
He rises easily to poetic heights. ‘Massachusetts to Virginia’ has a magnificent swing and pulsates with passion. When Webster’s defection spread anger, consternation, and grief through the ranks of the party of Freedom, Whittier penned the burning stanzas to which he gave the title ‘Ichabod.’ This anti-slavery poem was published in Songs of Labor, and is justly accounted one of the loftiest expressions of Whittier’s genius.
In War Time and Other Poems records the anxieties, fears, hopes, and exultations incident to the great conflict between North and South. Says the poet:—
‘... our voices take
A sober tone; our very household songs
Are heavy with a nation’s griefs and wrongs;
And innocent mirth is chastened for the sake
Of the brave hearts that nevermore shall beat,
The eyes that smile no more, the unreturning feet!’
The volume contains ‘Barbara Frietchie,’ perhaps the most popular ballad of the war, based on an incident told to Whittier by Mrs. Southworth, the novelist. One must reconstruct the times to comprehend the extraordinary effect produced by this dramatic little incident. Iconoclasts have made havoc with the story. If their points are well taken, we have one proof more of the superiority of legend over history for poetic purposes. Other noteworthy poems in this volume are ‘Thy Will be Done’ and the magnificent hymn ‘Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Gott.’
We wait beneath the furnace blast
The pangs of transformation;
Not painlessly doth God recast
And mould anew the nation.
Hot burns the fire
Where wrongs expire;
Nor spares the hand
That from the land
Uproots the ancient evil.
VI
SNOW-BOUND, TENT ON THE BEACH, PENNSYLVANIA PILGRIM, VISION OF ECHARD
The volume of 1860, Home Ballads and Poems, contained two perfect examples of Whittier’s art, namely, ‘My Playmate’ and ‘Telling the Bees.’ To inquire what far-off experiences in the poet’s life prompted the making of these exquisite ‘ballads,’ as Whittier called them, were idle, poets being proverbially given to the use of the imagination. The music of the dark pines on Ramoth Hill could be no sweeter than it is. The theme of either poem is common enough among bards, and perennially attractive. ‘My Playmate’ and ‘Telling the Bees,’ together with ‘Amy Wentworth’ and ‘The Countess,’ all show, though in varying degrees, how pregnant with poetic suggestion were the scenes amid which Whittier passed his life. Even that urban and aristocratic little poem ‘Amy Wentworth’ derives half its charm from the world of associations called up by the fog wreaths, the pebbled beach, and the sweet brier blooming on Kittery-side.
The above-named poems, together with ‘The Barefoot Boy’ and ‘In School-Days,’ suggest a phase of Whittier’s genius which found complete expression in the ‘winter idyl,’ a picture of life in the old East Haverhill homestead.
Snow-Bound was published in 1866. What the author thought of it we now know: ‘If it were not mine I should call it pretty good.’ The public decided for itself and bought copies enough to fatten Whittier’s lean purse with ten thousand dollars. The enviously-inclined should remember that the poet was nearly sixty when this happened to him. A twelvemonth later The Tent on the Beach was published and began selling at the rate of a thousand copies a day. Whittier wrote to Fields: ‘This will never do; the swindle is awful; Barnum is a saint to us.’
Readers who find difficulty in comprehending the enthusiasm that Snow-Bound evoked must reflect that there are strange creatures in the world who actually like winter. For them Whittier had a particular message. He has reproduced the atmosphere of the New England landscape under storm-cloud and falling snow with utmost precision. No important detail is wanting, and no detail is emphasized to the injury of the general effect. The exactness and simplicity of the touch are wholly admirable. The result is as exquisite as the means to it are unostentatious.
Snow-Bound is a favorite because of its homely, sweet realism, because of the poetic glow thrown on old-fashioned scenes, because of the variety of moods (which, lying between the extremes of playfulness and deepest feeling, shade naturally from one to the next); and because of the reverential spirit, the high confidence and trust. The poem is autobiographical, but it needs no ‘key’ to give it interest. The characters are types.
In The Tent on the Beach it is related how a poet,[37] a publisher (who in this instance, contrary to the traditions of his race, is a friend of the poet), and a traveller beguile an evening at the seaside with the reading of manuscript verses from the publisher’s portfolio. The tales, eleven in number, with a closing lyric on ‘The Worship of Nature,’ are too uniformly sombre. The one called ‘The Maids of Attitash’ is blithe enough, but the gray tints need even more relief.
Whittier’s power in descriptions of sea and sky is displayed at its best in this volume. One does not soon forget this stanza from the prelude:—
Sometimes a cloud, with thunder black,
Stooped low upon the darkening main,
Piercing the waves along its track
With the slant javelins of rain.
And when west-wind and sunshine warm
Chased out to sea its wrecks of storm,
They saw the prismy hues in thin spray showers
Where the green buds of waves burst into white froth-flowers!
Even better is the description of the breakers seen by twilight:—
... trampling up the sloping sand,
In lines outreaching far and wide,
The white-maned billows swept to land,
Dim seen across the gathering shade,
A vast and ghostly cavalcade.
The change from the mist and confusion of the brief tempest to the clear after effect was never better rendered:—
Suddenly seaward swept the squall;
The low sun smote through cloudy rack;
The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all
The trend of the coast lay hard and black.
Among the Hills, Miriam, and The Pennsylvania Pilgrim come next in order of publication. The first is a romance of New England country life; the second is ‘Oriental and purely fiction;’ the third, partly historical and partly imaginative, is an attempt to reconstruct life in Penn’s colony towards the close of the Seventeenth Century. Whittier said of The Pennsylvania Pilgrim: ‘It is as long as Snow-Bound, and better, but nobody will find it out.’ The poet felt that too little had been said in praise of the humanizing influences at work in the colonies by the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The Pilgrim Father here celebrated is Daniel Pastorius, who planted the settlement of Germantown. He was the first American abolitionist. The poem abounds in happy pictures of scenery, and in tenderly humorous sketches of the quaint characters who found peace, shelter, and, above all, toleration, under the beneficent rule of Pastorius.
The Vision of Echard will serve to introduce Whittier’s distinctively religious poems. A characteristic performance, it admirably illustrates his manner, diction, cast of thought. First, the scenes of great natural beauty, where historical memories are overlaid and blended with ideas of ceremonial pomp associated with formal religion; and then, projected on this rich background, the dreamer and his dream. The blended walls of sapphire in Echard’s vision ‘blazed with the thought of God:’—
Ye bow to ghastly symbols,
To cross and scourge and thorn;
Ye seek his Syrian manger
Who in the heart is born.
* * * * *
O blind ones, outward groping,
The idle quest forego;
Who listens to His inward voice
Alone of him shall know.
* * * * *
A light, a guide, a warning,
A presence ever near,
Through the deep silence of the flesh
I reach the inward ear.
* * * * *
The stern behest of duty,
The doom-book open thrown,
The heaven ye seek, the hell ye fear,
Are with yourselves alone.
Whittier did not include ‘The Preacher’ among his religious poems. This fine picture of the ‘great awakening’ might be so classified. Also ‘The Chapel of the Hermits,’ ‘Tauler,’ and yet others. In general the religious poems consist of meditations on sacred characters and scenes, poetic settings of Biblical narrative, and reflective poems in which Whittier gives voice to phases of his spiritual life, and above all to a faith so broad that the distinctions of sect and creed are lost in its catholic charity. ‘Questions of Life,’ ‘The Over-Heart,’ ‘Trinitas,’ ‘The Shadow and the Light,’ and ‘The Eternal Goodness’ are the expressions of this lofty and inspiring side of his poetic genius.
Whittier’s singing voice lost none of its flexibility but rather gained as time went on. ‘The Henchman’ was a striking performance for a man of seventy. ‘It is not exactly a Quakerly piece, nor is it didactic, and it has no moral that I know of,’ observed Whittier. He must have known that it had the moral of exquisite beauty. Indeed he admitted that it was ‘not unpoetical.’
His last utterance was a little group of poems, At Sundown, having for the controlling thought the close of life’s day. One of them, ‘Burning Drift-Wood,’ was the poet’s farewell; and with the quotation of four of its stanzas we may bring to an end this brief survey of Whittier’s work.
What matter that it is not May,
That birds have flown, and trees are bare,
That darker grows the shortening day,
And colder blows the wintry air!
The wrecks of passion and desire,
The castles I no more rebuild,
May fitly feed my drift-wood fire,
And warm the hands that age has chilled.
* * * * *
I know the solemn monotone
Of waters calling unto me;
I know from whence the airs have blown
That whisper of the Eternal Sea.
As low my fires of drift-wood burn,
I hear that sea’s deep sound increase.
And, fair in sunset light, discern
Its mirage-lifted Isles of Peace.