Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual life of old,
Inward, grand with awe and reverence; outward, mean and coarse and cold;
Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and vulgar clay,
Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of hodden gray.
A number of the poems turn on the witchcraft persecutions: ‘Mabel Martin,’ ‘The Witch of Wenham,’ and the fine ‘Prophecy of Samuel Sewall.’ In The Tent on the Beach are two more: ‘The Wreck of the Rivermouth’ and ‘The Changeling.’
Whittier was always ready to speak on the injustice of injustice. His Quaker ancestors used to receive gifts of forty stripes save one. They were martyrs for the cause of religious liberty. And the sufferings of the New England Quakers was a subject always to the poet’s hand. He contemplated the wrongs that had been righted and was grateful therefor; but it was a part of his mission to teach his readers what progress had been made since the days in which state and church united to persecute a harmless if sometimes extravagant people. The lesson may be found in such poems as ‘How the Women went from Dover’ and ‘The King’s Missive.’ Whittier knew that injustice is always ridiculous, and a grim humor plays at times about his treatment of events in that dreadful day, as in the story of Thomas Macy. The most characteristic setting of his general theme is to be found in the spirited ballad of ‘Cassandra Southwick.’ The incident is told dramatically by the heroine herself, but the passion which glows through the verse is true Whittier.
V
VOICES OF FREEDOM, SONGS OF LABOR, IN WAR TIME
The militant note in Whittier’s verse was sounded early. In 1832, when he was twenty-five years old, he wrote the stanzas ‘To William Lloyd Garrison.’ They were followed by ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (1833), ‘The Slave-Ships’ (1834), ‘The Hunters of Men’ and ‘Stanzas for the Times’ (1835), ‘Clerical Oppressors’ (1836), and the stinging ‘Pastoral Letter’ (1837). He was now fairly embarked on his mission.
The brunt of his attack fell on supine Northern politicians, clerical apologists, and anxious business men who feared agitation might injure their Southern trade. Nothing was more abhorrent to Whittier than traffic in human flesh. He marvelled that it was not abhorrent to every one, and strove with all his power to make it so. America, in his belief, was a by-word among the nations, forever prating of ‘liberty’ while she bought and sold slaves.
As he was the assailant of timid vote-seekers, money-getters, and ministers who defended slavery ‘on scriptural grounds,’ so was Whittier the eulogist of all who made sacrifices for the cause, or who, like ‘Randolph of Roanoke,’ a man with every traditional motive to cling to the peculiar institution, testified against it. Voices of Freedom is a record of the guerilla warfare which Whittier waged during forty years against slavery. With the additions he made to it in the progress of the struggle, it became not only the largest division of his work but one of the most notable. The history of Abolitionism is written here. ‘The Pastoral Letter’ was Whittier’s response to the body of Congregational ministers who deprecated the discussion of slavery as tending to make trouble in the churches. ‘Massachusetts to Virginia’ was called out by Latimer’s case. ‘Texas,’ ‘Faneuil Hall,’ and the lines ‘To a Southern Statesman’ are a protest against the annexation of territory ‘sufficient for six new slave states.’ ‘For Righteousness’ Sake’ was inscribed to friends ‘under arrest for treason against the slave power.’ The fine closing stanza deserves to be better known:—