Here is deserved praise of Whittier's studies of Nature, and of his anti-slavery Tyrtæan verse, while the poet betrays his own affection for the sonorous, heroic song of early mediaeval France, "The Song of Roland".
The circumstances of Lowell's birth and career were as different as possible from those of the tuneful farm-boy. Lowell, like Holmes, Emerson, and so many others, was of the hereditarily cultivated class of New England, clergymen from generation to generation. He was born at his father's place, Elmwood, near Cambridge, was educated at Harvard, lived there, as Matthew Arnold said of himself at Balliol, "as if it had been a great country house," was sent down, for some frolic, to Concord, where he met the sage Emerson, "chaffed" that philosopher and Carlyle in rhymes, and displayed, generally, the gaiety of the undergraduate. Mr. Lowell, in fact, in manner and personal appearance, was, though an enthusiastic patriot, like anything but a "foreigner". He was called to the bar, but preferred literature to law, and wrote prose and verse for the magazines. In 1846 he began the first set of "The Biglow Papers," very lively studies in American politics as rurally understood by the Rev. Hosea Wilbur and Bird o' Freedom Sawin. In satiric and humorous poetry, in dialect, he was supreme from the first. In 1848, he produced "A Fable for Critics"; the idea may have been suggested by Suckling's rhymed and bantering criticism of contemporary minstrels, in his "Session of the Poets". The rhymes in "The Festival of the Poets" are more than Hudibrastic; the measure is anapæstic. It is the work of a young man who is amusing himself in a crowd of scribblers, each claiming to be "the American Scott," "the American Dante," and so forth. Hawthorne finds a place and Cooper.
Here's Cooper, who's written six volumes to show
He's as good as a lord: well, let's grant that he's so;
But he need take no pains to convince us he's not
(As his enemies say) the American Scott.
Of Emerson
His prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
Is some of it pr—; no, it's not even prose.
All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he's got,
To I don't (nor they either) exactly know what.
As for Bryant, somebody
Calls B. the American Wordsworth; but Wordsworth
May be rated at more than your whole tuneful herd's worth,
cries this patriot.
Whittier's manliness is applauded,
But his grammar's not always correct, nor his rhymes,
And he's prone to repeat his own lyrics sometimes.