Dim seen across the gathering shade,
A vast and ghostly cavalcade.
The change from the mist and confusion of the brief tempest to the clear after effect was never better rendered:—
Suddenly seaward swept the squall;
The low sun smote through cloudy rack;
The Shoals stood clear in the light, and all
The trend of the coast lay hard and black.
Among the Hills, Miriam, and The Pennsylvania Pilgrim come next in order of publication. The first is a romance of New England country life; the second is ‘Oriental and purely fiction;’ the third, partly historical and partly imaginative, is an attempt to reconstruct life in Penn’s colony towards the close of the Seventeenth Century. Whittier said of The Pennsylvania Pilgrim: ‘It is as long as Snow-Bound, and better, but nobody will find it out.’ The poet felt that too little had been said in praise of the humanizing influences at work in the colonies by the Schuylkill and the Delaware. The Pilgrim Father here celebrated is Daniel Pastorius, who planted the settlement of Germantown. He was the first American abolitionist. The poem abounds in happy pictures of scenery, and in tenderly humorous sketches of the quaint characters who found peace, shelter, and, above all, toleration, under the beneficent rule of Pastorius.
The Vision of Echard will serve to introduce Whittier’s distinctively religious poems. A characteristic performance, it admirably illustrates his manner, diction, cast of thought. First, the scenes of great natural beauty, where historical memories are overlaid and blended with ideas of ceremonial pomp associated with formal religion; and then, projected on this rich background, the dreamer and his dream. The blended walls of sapphire in Echard’s vision ‘blazed with the thought of God:’—
Ye bow to ghastly symbols,