WHITTIER'S UNCOLLECTED POEMS
IV
WHITTIER'S UNCOLLECTED POEMS
Between the years 1826 and 1835, Mr. Whittier was writing literally hundreds of poems which he never permitted to be collected in any edition of his works; and not only so, but he preserved no copies of them, in later years destroying such as came to his notice. Some of these verses went the rounds of the newspaper press of the country, giving him a widespread reputation as a poet. But in much of his early work we see traces of ambition for fame, and a feeling that the world was treating him harshly. When the change came over his spirit to which reference has been made in a preceding chapter, sweetening all the springs of life, he lost interest in these early productions, some of which were giving him the fame that in his earlier years he so much craved. It was this radical change which no doubt influenced him in his later life to omit from his collected works most of the verses written previous to it. I have in my possession more than three hundred poems which I have found in the files of old newspapers, the great mass of which I would by no means reproduce, although I find nothing of which a young writer of that period need be ashamed. A few of these verses are given below as specimens of the work he saw fit to discard.
The following poem, written when he was nineteen years of age, during his first term in the Haverhill Academy, shows in one or two stanzas the feeling that the world is giving him the cold shoulder:—
I WOULD NOT LOSE THAT ROMANCE WILD
I would not lose that romance wild,
That high and gifted feeling—
The power that made me fancy's child,
The clime of song revealing,
For all the power, for all the gold,
That slaves to pride and avarice hold.
I know that there are those who deem
But lightly of the lyre;—
Who ne'er have felt one blissful beam
Of song-enkindled fire
Steal o'er their spirits, as the light
Of morning o'er the face of night.