“So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame
The prayerless heart of man.”
What artist ever drew with brush a more perfect picture of midsummer heat than Whittier in his prelude to the poem, “Among the Hills”:
“The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind
Wing-weary with its long flight from the south, Unfelt.”
Then the sharp call of the locust stabbing “the noon-silence;” the driver asleep on his haycart; the sheep huddled against the shade of the stone-wall; and
“Through the open door
A drowsy smell of flowers—grey heliotrope