Whittier faced hostile mobs with perfect courage, and with a touch of the humor which is rarely revealed in his writings. When the Philadelphia rioters looted and burned Pennsylvania Hall, he disguised himself in a wig and long white overcoat, mingled with the mob, and saved his own editorial papers. He brought not only courage and finesse, but high journalistic skill, to the service of the Abolitionists. His pamphlets, his editorials in the “Freeman,” “Middlesex Standard,” “National Era,” and other newspapers, were trenchant, caustic, and far-sighted. Invalidism and the care of his mother’s family kept him almost constantly at Amesbury, whither he had removed after the sale of his birthplace in 1836. But Whittier’s was no home-keeping mind, and there is scarcely a political event of importance, either in this country or abroad, which is not reflected in his prose and verse produced during the thirty years ending with the close of the Civil War.
Yet his chief function during the long anti-slavery struggle was that of chartered poet to the cause. No sooner had he abandoned his dream of personal advancement than the Byronic melancholy, the weak imitations of Scott, and the echoes of Mrs. Felicia Hemans disappear from his verse. He was studying the prose of Milton and Burke, those organ-voices of English liberty. From Burns and Byron he now caught only the passion for justice and the common rights of all. He forgot himself. He forgot, for the time being, those pleasant themes of New England legend and history, which earlier and later touched his meditative fancy. The cause of negro emancipation in America—to his mind only one phase of the struggle for a wider human freedom everywhere—stirred and deepened his whole nature. There is scarcely a type of political and social verse which is not represented in his work during this period. He wrote personal lyrics in praise of living leaders, and mournful salutes to the dead; hymns to be sung in churches, and campaign songs for the town hall. The touching lines to “Randolph of Roanoke” are a knightly tribute to an opponent. The generous and noble “Lost Occasion” was written after Webster’s death to supplement, rather than to retract, the terrific “Ichabod” addressed to Webster after his defence of the Fugitive Slave Law. Not since Burns had any poet dared pillory the clergy in such derisive and indignant strains as marked “Clerical Oppressors,” “The Pastoral Letter,” and “A Sabbath Scene.” The selfishness of commercialism, and its “paltry pedler cries” which exalt “banks” and “tariffs” above the man, have never been arraigned more powerfully than in “The Pine-Tree” and “Moloch in State Street.” Such poems are class and party verse of the purest type.
Whittier’s direct contact with the soil and his intense interest in localities made him also an unequalled interpreter of sectional feeling. “Massachusetts to Virginia” is perhaps the finest example of this sort of political verse, but he wrote many similar poems hardly less striking; and such was the flexibility of Whittier’s imagination when inspired by the common cause that he expressed not only the mood of the New England but also of the Middle States, and of that “Wild West,” as he called it, which was so soon to combine with his “roused North.” Much of this political poetry was, in the nature of the case, only a sort of rhymed oratory, scarcely differing, save in rhetorical and metrical structure, from the speeches of Beecher and Wendell Phillips. Sometimes it was rhymed journalism, of the kind which Greeley was using in his sturdy iterative editorials. Much of it, no doubt, has already met the oblivion which attends most pamphlets or stanzas “for the times.” Harshness of tone, over-severity in judgment of men and measures, diffuseness of style, a faulty ear for rhymes, are frequently in evidence. Yet these blemishes scarcely affected the immediate value of Whittier’s verse for controversial purposes. Its faults of taste and form were rightly forgotten in its communicative energy of emotion, its lambent scorn of evil things, its prophet-like exaltation. Long before armed conflict ended the debate, Whittier’s poetry had won the attention not only of his section, but of the entire North, and as the conflict proceeded his verse sounded more and more clearly that national note which had been the burden of the great and maligned Webster’s speeches for union. Only now it was to be a union redeemed. We must be “first pure, then peaceable,” the Quaker poet had maintained, and the fine close of his ballad “Barbara Frietchie,” like his “Laus Deo” which “sang itself” in church while the bells were ringing to celebrate the passing of slavery, is echoed to-day in the hearts of true Americans everywhere.
To study the chronological order of his poems from “The Exile’s Departure,” written in 1825, to “Snow-Bound,” written just forty years later, is to watch the steady broadening and clarifying of Whittier’s spirit. He found in the community of emotion wrought by a moral and political crisis the secret of command over his own nature and over the modes of poetic expression. By 1840 the worst hour of persecution for the Abolitionists was already past. There were no more mobs for Whittier to face. He remained, for the most part, quietly at Amesbury. In 1845 he began to contribute the spirited “Songs of Labor” to the “Democratic Review,” thus antedating Whitman by ten years in celebrating the American workingman. By 1847, in the “Proem” written to introduce the first general collection of his poems, he has already learned to regard himself as a singer whose nature inclined him to the “old melodious lays” of Spenser and Sidney, although his lot had fallen in stormy times:—
“The rigor of a frozen clime,
The harshness of an untaught ear,
The jarring words of one whose rhyme
Beat often Labor’s hurried time,
Or Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.”
He does not regret his choice, but there is some yearning over the lost Arcady. In the enforced leisure of his frequent invalidism Whittier read very widely, and legend and dreamy fancy alternate in his verse with satirical invective and eloquent humanitarianism. The tragic “Ichabod” and the mordant irony of “A Sabbath Scene” are followed by the charming lines “To My Old Schoolmaster.” The poem on Burns, so fresh with “the dews of boyhood’s morning,” and the ballad of “Maud Muller,” where the pathos of our human “might have been” is expressed with such artless adequacy, date from the thrilling year of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. The Kansas emigrants were actually singing