Cool shadows on the greensward lay,
Flowers swung upon the bending spray.
“In vain!—nor dream, nor rest, nor pause
Remain for him who round him draws
The battered mail of Freedom’s cause.
“With soul and strength, with heart and hand,
I turned to Freedom’s struggling band,—
To the sad Helots of our land.”
Here was that self-denial, that experience of longings unfulfilled—through the fulfillment of higher longings—which gave him his depth and power of sympathy in every loss and suffering of others, and courage in the sufferings of his own life, and which ripened and sweetened his nature.
Whittier’s prominence in the anti-slavery conflict is, of course, matter of history. His influence in politics was great; for he had the keenness of insight, the broad vision of the statesman, and the politician’s skill in manipulation which never deteriorated into political trickery in a heart that loved his fellowmen and a soul that abhorred self-seeking. One day in a package of books that went from his home to the doctor’s house, there was slipped in by accident a bit of paper on which were the two following lines in the poet’s handwriting, but unsigned: