He was successful as a journalist,
the friend of Freedom's cause
As far away as Paris is,
and also at home, where the negro was concerned. He did not cease when an editor to write poetry, and he translated Homer into blank verse. In reading Bryant's poems we cannot but see that he offered the best wine first, in pieces like "To a Water Fowl" and "The Yellow Violet". The former is full of charm in atmosphere and cadence, though the concluding moral, as in "The Yellow Violet," is inspired by Wordsworth. His best pieces of landscape, pictures of autumn and winter, are somewhat reminiscent of Cooper. "The Ages," a summary of the world's history in the stanza of Spenser, is more remarkable for the happy patriotism of its conclusion than for originality of thought. It is really amusing to see his inability to escape from the charms of the tomb,—tombs of Red Indians, or of conquerors or of kings, "in dusty darkness hid," all are welcome to him; and in "The Child's Funeral" the reader is happily surprised by the discovery that the infant, prematurely placed in the vault, is alive and enjoying himself.
John Greenleaf Whittier.
Whittier (1807-1892) was born of a rural Quaker family in Massachusetts. He was mainly self-taught; he early commenced journalist, on the side of the party opposed to slavery; and he retained no high esteem for his early flights in verse. He wrote much in the journal, "The New Era," which was fortunate enough to publish Mrs. Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and during the great war he was one of the bards who stimulated the valour of the North; much as another Quaker, by waving his hat, encouraged the Duke of Cumberland's dragoons at Prince Charles's rearguard action at Clifton. But there the side befriended by the English Quaker was not victorious. In "Snow-Bound" (1866) (the name-giving piece is a delightful picture of a happy winter's night in such a cottage as that of Whittier's boyhood) Whittier first met a popular success as a poet, though already some of his poems (probably pirated) were not unpopular in England. He was a good, earnest and amiable man, and, as a poet, copious and wholesome, rather than of curious and exquisite distinction. Many of his verses are religious, moral or political, and, despite his love of nature, his lines are not always, where nature is concerned, on a level with the best of Bryant. His stories in ballad or balladish form were naturally popular; "Maud Muller" is perhaps the best known in England; he had a variety of themes, colonial, Red Indian, and generally historical. He even went to the "Rig-Veda"; and catholicity of taste is shown when an American Quaker sings of Soma, the rather mysterious nectar of Indra and other deities of the Indian Olympus. That his poems of war should be energetic, while he was professedly a man of peace, is not so remote from the practice of the earlier Friends as we are apt to suppose.[1]
His life,—his rustic and laborious youth, his irregular education, his absorption in the politics of his own country, his enthusiasm for Freedom's cause,—has a resemblance to the life of Burns, and makes him distinctly a national poet. But it is needless to enumerate the points in Bums which are missing in Whittier!
Perhaps an alien may venture to utter an idea which was in his mind before he found that it had been expressed by a fellow-countryman of the poet. Professor Barrett Wendell writes, concerning some of Whittier's pieces, "they belong to that school of verse which perennially flourishes and withers in the poetical columns of country newspapers". The verse of the country newspaper was the wild-stock of Whittier's rose; the wild-stock of Burns was the folk-song of Scotland. Whittier had to educate himself, and his genius often lifted him far above the artless verse of his youth. He was not wholly unimitative. In his famous appeal, "Massachusetts to Virginia," we read—
And sandy Barnstaple rose up, wet with the salt sea spray;
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narraganset Bay,
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,
And the cheers of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke hill,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle!
It is Macaulay's "Armada"!
There is a mountain peak in America which bears the name of the renowned statesman, Daniel Webster. Whittier, in days before the war, had written against Daniel Webster, more in sorrow than in anger, the poem called "Ichabod".