Whittier's simplicity, genuineness, and sympathetic heart stand revealed in those lines.
His youthful work shows traces of the influence of many poets, but he learned most from Robert Burns. Whittier himself says that it was Burns who taught him to see
"… through all familiar things The romance underlying,"
and especially to note that
"Through all his tuneful art, how strong
The human feeling gushes!"
The critics have found three indictments against Whittier; first, for the unequal value of his poetry; second, for its loose rhymes; and third, for too much moralizing. He would probably plead guilty to all of these indictments. His tendency to moralize is certainly excessive, but critics have too frequently forgotten that this very moralizing draws him closer to the heart of suffering humanity. There are times when the majority of human beings feel the need of the consolation which he brings in his religious verse and in such lines as these from Snow-Bound:—
"Alas for him who never sees
The stars shine through his cypress trees
Who, hopeless, lays his dead away,
Nor looks to see the breaking day
Across the mournful marbles play!
Who hath not learned, in hours of faith,
The truth to flesh and sense unknown,
That Life is ever lord of Death
And Love can never lose its own!"
He strives to impress on all the duty of keeping the windows of the heart open to the day and of "finding peace in love's unselfishness."
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 1819-1891
[Illustration: J.R. LOWELL]