As regards the form of his poetry, Holmes is a survival of the eighteenth century. In his boyhood, he was a devoted admirer of Pope, but instead of abandoning the style of the Augustans, as Bryant and Lowell abandoned or outgrew it, he chose rather to perfect himself in it; until, somewhat more plastic than it was in his models, somewhat modernised and provincial, that style became his normal accent. Having Holmes’ purpose in view, one may add that no poet in America has acquired a surer control over his medium. Within this medium he was able to unite sparkle, humour, clearness, good sense, and oratorical emphasis. It is the opinion of several very able critics that no one in his century can vie with him in the art of writing verses for an occasion. Here is the source not only of his strength but also of his weakness. A large proportion of his verse is of mainly local or temporary interest. The poems which he offered year by year at the exercises of the Harvard Commencement will year by year engender less enthusiasm. A constructive criticism, however, will lay stress, not on his inheritance of New England provincialism or his slight tendency to be flippant, but on his kindliness, his inexhaustible good humour, his quick and darting intellectual curiosity, and on the appeal which his sprightly moralising makes to the young. It is not a little thing to say of a wit and a power of epigram like his that they were ever genial, and ever on the side of something better than a merely conventional morality.
John Greenleaf Whittier.—In so brief a section, it has seemed impossible to offer more than a few scattered remarks on the poetry that arose in both the North and the South in connection with slavery and the Civil War. Something has been said of Confederate writers, including Timrod and Lanier; more might be added on the patriotic verse of Lowell and Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes, and a throng of lesser men, who sang to the North of courage and consolation, or attacked those whom they considered the foes of the Republic at home or abroad. One poetess, yet living, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe (born in 1819), immortalised herself in 1862 by her “Battle-Hymn of the Republic,” a piece breathing the very essence of righteousness and love of country, and having a value out of all proportion to the rest of her work. Something similar must be said of Thomas B. Read (1822–72) and his popular “Sheridan’s Ride” (1865). The true bard of the battle-field and bivouac, of course, was Walt Whitman, who, as a nurse in the Union army, had actual experience of war. If, however, any one person is to be singled out from his century as the proclaimer of American freedom, this must be Whittier; and that too, it might almost be said, in spite of his heredity, his early hopes, and his natural bent. At least, his Quaker blood and his love for the peaceful ways of nature would not designate him for the office of poet militant. Furthermore, if Whittier’s art and sentiment in the progress of years elicit more and more admiration from qualified arbiters, such admiration will be mainly bestowed, not on his war lyrics or his denunciations of slavery, but on his hymns, his legends of New England, and his rustic idyls—above all, on “Snow Bound.”
He was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807, springing from pious English stock, in a family that belonged to the Society of Friends. A minute and animated picture of his home and its inmates is given in “Snow Bound.” Whittier’s opportunities for regular schooling were slender. Though he did not inherit the rugged strength of his ancestors, his help was required on the farm; and his father, without absolutely discouraging the lad’s effort to win an education, was reluctant to see him busied with a useless or dangerous plaything such as their sect generally regarded poetry. The boy attended district school, read the few books that were in his home, and even managed to obtain copies of Burns and Shakespeare, and a novel, perused in secret, of Scott. His mother was inwardly gratified by the lines which he wrote under the inspiration of Burns. When his sister clandestinely forwarded one of his poems to The Free Press of Newburyport, and thus paved the way for an acquaintance between Whittier and the editor, William Lloyd Garrison, the trend of the young man’s life was determined. Thanks to the influence of Garrison, and by the strictest husbanding of his own means, Whittier was able to pass, in all, a year at the new Haverhill Academy. “Thus ended his school-days,” says his biographer, Pickard; “but this was only the beginning of his student life. By wide and well-chosen reading, he was constantly adding to his stores of information. While revelling in the fields of English literature, he became familiar through translations with ancient and current literature of other nations, and kept abreast of all political and reformatory movements.” In the development of his thought, he owed most to the Bible, to the tracts of the Friends, and to the poetry of Burns. The mainspring of his activity, whether as student, poet, politician, or anti-slavery agitator, was an intense desire to be useful to his kind, coupled with a burning belief in the sacredness of individual liberty. During his early manhood, he continued to write verse, sending it to various New England periodicals; and he became editor, successively of a Boston trade journal, of The Haverhill Gazette, and of The New England Magazine. Journalism helped him to enter politics, and in 1832 the Whigs of his native place seemed ready to elect him to Congress. After careful deliberation, he renounced his political aspirations, not without an inward struggle, and decided to lend his energies to the abolition of negro slavery, to assist the discredited and obscure band led by Garrison. “My lad,” so in after years he counselled a youth of fifteen, “if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.” With all his idealism—let us rather say, on account of his thoroughgoing idealism—Whittier was thoroughly practical. He had keen insight into the characters of men, and knew how to turn their motives, both good and bad, to account; his political sagacity, which, with his untiring industry, made him one of the most capable workers on the side of Abolition, was largely responsible for the rise of Charles Sumner to a position of beneficent influence. Ever frail in health, yet labouring on, and subjected more than once to personal violence at the hands of opponents, Whittier had the satisfaction of seeing the movement which he championed emerge from persecution into triumph. Regarded superficially, his devotion delayed his own progress as an artist, and his best poetry came late. In a deeper sense, he could not have developed into the poet that he became without living the life that he did.
In a general way his work may be divided into two parts—that produced during his more active interest in journalism and politics, and that produced after his retirement. In 1831 he published his “Legends of New England in Prose and Verse,” a pamphlet, and in 1832, another pamphlet, “Moll Pitcher,” neither of them of much interest save in comparison with his better choice of subjects and better handling at a later date. A third pamphlet, “Justice and Expediency” (1833), published at his own expense and with a full consciousness of its probable effect, was the document that severed him from the dominant party and openly leagued him with the Abolitionists. “Mogg Megone” (1836), his first bound volume, which he afterward vainly tried to suppress, was published after he became a secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The next year (1837), Isaac Knapp, without consulting Whittier, issued a collection of “Poems Written during the Progress of the Abolition Movement in America.” It was followed in 1838 by an authorised collection. The poet represented Haverhill in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835; ill-health prevented his finishing a second term. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia to aid “the venerable anti-slavery pioneer Benjamin Lundy, who was editing The National Enquirer,” afterward called The Pennsylvania Freeman. In 1840 he retired to Amesbury, Massachusetts, taking up his abode with his mother and his sister Elizabeth. He never married. At Amesbury and at Danvers, in the same county, he spent the remainder of his life in quiet. The record is one of domestic peace and literary endeavour, whose first fruits were “Lays of my Home, and Other Poems” (1843). With this volume Whittier’s writings began to be remunerative. Some of the more noteworthy subsequent dates in his life are as follows: Of his prose works, “The Stranger in Lowell” appeared in 1845, “Supernaturalism in New England” in 1847, “Literary Recollections” in 1854. From the founding of The Atlantic Monthly, in 1857, Whittier was a most welcome contributor. He also edited John Woolman’s Journal, and in other ways displayed interest in the writings of the Friends. “Voices of Freedom” (1849) was the first comprehensive edition of his poems. He published “Songs of Labour” in 1850, “A Sabbath Scene” in 1853, “Home Ballads” in 1860, “National Lyrics” in 1865. After the war, his most important publications included “Snow Bound” (1866), “Maud Muller” (1867), “Ballads of New England” (1869), “Miriam and Other Poems” (1871), “Mabel Martin” (1874), “Hazel Blossoms” (1875), “Poems of Nature” (1885), “St. Gregory’s Quest, and Recent Poems” (1886). His last collection, “At Sundown” (1890), was dedicated to E. C. Stedman, and closed with a valediction to Dr. Holmes. Many of Whittier’s poems were first published in magazines; “Maud Muller” appeared in The National Era, in 1854.
Whittier’s personality was one of indescribable attractiveness. He was gentle, yet full of repressed fire, an ardent nature that had steadily submitted to the Christian spirit of self-control. He had the inward beauty that springs from generous impulses under the habitual guidance of principle and forethought. Toward his opponents he showed no rancour; he strove against parties, not individuals; and he commanded the respect of his adversaries. If he had a foible, it was his delight in playful teasing. He never visited a theatre or a circus in his life. He is described in his early manhood as “tall, slight, and very erect,” of a distinguished presence, yet bashful—but never awkward. His eye was brilliant and expressive. In maturity, his face in repose was almost stern, but a smile would light up his entire countenance. “His voice in reading was of a quality entirely different from that in conversation—much fuller and deeper.” In later years, “while retaining a lively interest in all literary and political matters and keeping abreast of current events, he dwelt most intently ... upon the great spiritual and eternal realities of God. By the open fire in the evening he would talk for hours upon sacred themes, ever grateful for the rich blessings of his life and looking with reverent curiosity towards the future.... There was not the shadow of a doubt in his mind concerning the immortality of the soul.” He died after a stroke of paralysis, on September 7, 1892, and was buried at Amesbury.
In a recent and praiseworthy volume of “The Chief American Poets,” Dr. C. H. Page has included a longer list of selections from Whittier than from Longfellow, although the contributions representing Whittier occupy less space. This is significant. Whittier was mainly a writer of short poems. In the ballad he had a form suited to the general taste, and to his aim of stinging a sluggish populace into revolt against slavery. He painted that institution in its most repellent aspects, seeing nought of the glamour which Southern writers have shed over plantation life as it existed before the war. Living in the North, he saw something of escaping and recaptured negroes. His glance was very direct; he described matters simply; he accomplished the task that he set himself. Among his lyrics of the war, “Barbara Frietchie” is altogether the best known—not with complete justice to others, for example “The Watchers.” To his treatment of tales and legends of colonial New England Whittier brought an inveterate hatred of persecution and oppression in every shape. Accordingly, many of his narratives, like “Cassandra Southwick,” touch on wrongs attempted or inflicted upon the early Quakers. As an interpreter of colonial life Whittier comes second only to Hawthorne. As a herald of the beauty in flower and hill and stream, in “The Trailing Arbutus,” “Among the Hills,” “The Merrimac,” he is second to none in America. True, he does not always refrain from what Ruskin has called the pathetic fallacy, so that he descries in the face of nature moods that are really in the heart of man; but he does this more rarely than his contemporaries. In his revelation of humble and rustic types, “Maud Muller,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “The Huskers,” he is almost the equal of Burns or Wordsworth. He is not their rival in perfection of style. More frequently than they he suffers from a bad line; and his rhymes are often defective. Yet one must not conclude that he was inattentive to technique. On the contrary, Whittier was a born artist. But the nice discipline of the ear which so many English poets have owed to the cultivation of Greek and Latin prosody was not vouchsafed to him; and for his manner he missed the advantage of rigorous criticism. The positive excellence of Whittier’s verse is due to the harmonious blending and interworking in him of varied powers. His senses were alert and sure, his humour was fine, his intellect strong, his pathos firm. He was not afraid of a theme that was tragic. His realism might be compared to that of Crabbe, but it is more hopeful. In his religious poems there is a belief more satisfying than transcendental pantheism; and there is a quality of personal joy and optimism which, as we have previously observed, is not typical of American literature.
Best loved and saintliest of our singing train,
Earth’s noblest tributes to thy name belong.
A lifelong record closed without a stain,
A blameless memory shrined in deathless song.
Such was Holmes’ eulogy of Whittier. With it we may take leave of New England.
Bayard Taylor.—A Quaker poet of a different stamp was the meteoric Bayard Taylor (1825–78). His boyhood was distinguished by a passion for roving and for collecting objects of natural history. His devotion to books and his distaste for labour on a Pennsylvania farm did not always please his father, who laughed boisterously, however, when a phrenologist said of the son: “You will never make a farmer of him to any great extent: you will never keep him home; that boy will ramble around the world, and furthermore, he has all the marks of a poet.” At the age of nineteen, having just published “Ximena: or The Battle of Sierra Morena, and Other Poems,” and armed with some introductions from N. P. Willis, Taylor engaged in a Byronic pilgrimage on the Continent. A half-year at Heidelberg rendered him fluent in German. By a circuitous route through northern Germany and Austria he proceeded on foot to Italy, and from Italy through France back to England, supporting himself by correspondence which he sent to The New York Tribune, The Saturday Evening Post, and The United States Gazette, and which on his return to America he collected in “Views Afoot” (1846). Our account of his life thus far gives a faint impression of his physical and mental activity. No adequate narrative may here be essayed of his wandering and eventful career throughout. “Views Afoot” made his reputation. By 1848 he had become head of the literary department of The New York Tribune. In 1849, as correspondent for The Tribune, he spent five months with the gold-diggers in California. In 1850 he married Miss Mary Agnew, who was dying of consumption, and who survived her wedding but two months. In 1851–53 he travelled in Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Ethiopia, Spain, India, and China. In 1856 he broke down from overwork in America—lecturing and writing—and he went to Europe again. In Germany (1857) he married the daughter of an eminent astronomer, P. A. Hansen. In 1857–58 he visited Greece. Two years later, at an expense of $17,000, he had built a home, near his birthplace, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, calling his estate “Cedarcroft.” To settle down in affluence had been his cherished ambition; but this dream, and his haste to realise it, embarrassed him financially, cost him much peace of mind, and eventually cost him his life. He never succeeded in resting. In 1862–63 he was Secretary of the Legation at St. Petersburg. During other intervals, he lectured in America. Among his lectures may be mentioned those delivered at Cornell University in 1870, 1871, 1875, and 1877. A large part of his correspondence is at present housed in the Cornell University Library. His translation of Goethe’s “Faust,” Part First, appeared in 1870; nearly all of the first edition was sold in one day. The Second Part came out in 1871. Excessive labour, an irregular and not abstemious way of life, and, more especially, financial worry told upon his constitution. He was destined never to finish his projected “Life of Goethe.” He had barely entered upon his duties as Minister to Germany when the collapse came. His last words were, “I must be away.”
“Taylor,” says Albert H. Smyth, “wrote with such rapidity that he could complete a duodecimo volume in a fortnight.... In a night and a day, he read Victor Hugo’s voluminous ‘La Légende des Siècles,’ and wrote for The Tribune a review of it which fills eighteen pages of his ‘Essays and Literary Notes,’ and contains five considerable poems that are translations in the metre of the original.” His powers of memory are said to have been prodigious. He could repeat not only from his favourite authors but from the futile compositions of poetasters whose manuscripts he had read as an editor and rejected. He was in the habit of carrying his own poetry in his head until the process of correction was ended. Accordingly, the perfection of his “copy,” which was written in the neatest hand imaginable, has led various critics into the error of thinking that he did not revise. His poetry was much more carefully worked out than his prose, upon which he had no thought of building a reputation. He would spend hours on the chiselling of a single couplet. His style resounds with echoes of word and phrase from Byron and Shelley, indeed from the whole circle of his reading in both English and German. Nor is it deficient in individuality. Taylor has a pronounced cadence of his own. Nevertheless his poetry wants some quality or other that would make it lasting. Although in 1896 there was a cult of younger men that studied and imitated him, his immense vogue as a prose writer had already waned; and his eclipse as a poet is now almost complete. In the history of American literature there is nothing stranger than this eclipse. Taylor’s learning was wide and substantial. He shrank from no drudgery of preparation. At the age of fifty he was willing to begin the study of Greek. And it was not merely that he was in touch with his time on all sides, and able by brilliant arts to snare the popular fancy. When he wrote, he knew what he was talking about. His “Poems of the Orient” (1854), containing the Shelley-like “Bedouin Song,” show deep sympathy with the customs and passions of the East. “Ross Browne’s Syrian dragoman, when he listened to the reading of ‘Hassan to his Mare,’ ‘sprang up with tears in his eyes, and protested that the Arabs talked just that way to their horses.’” Taylor had the suffrages of educated critics too. “The Picture of St. John” (1866) Longfellow reckoned “a great poem”; while Lowell said that, except “The Golden Legend,” no American poem could match it in finish and sustained power. “The Masque of the Gods” (1872), an endeavour to combine the ideals of Christianity and Hellenism, also pleased Longfellow. “Lars, a Pastoral Poem” (1873), is a curious tale, with some historical basis; the unwonted background of Norwegian fiords makes part of the setting for a tragic romance among the Quakers. Of Taylor’s dramatic poems we shall hazard no discussion; besides “The Masque of the Gods,” he published “The Prophet” (1874), whose scene is laid among the Mormons, and “Prince Deukalion” (1877), a piece of symbolism in which the author tried to objectify his total conception of human life both here and hereafter. He felt as sure of the other world as of this. In such assurance he possessed the most vitalising belief that can inspire a poetic soul. Why, then, is his poetry now disregarded? Why is it that the production for which the present age is most ready to thank him is his version of Goethe’s “Faust”? A tentative explanation is this. Taylor’s life was full of disquiet. He never enjoyed the solitude necessary to the maturing of poetic sentiment. He was betrayed by temporal ambition into posting over land and ocean without rest. He was too determined to achieve fame. There are times for action, and there are times for a wise passiveness. They also serve who only stand and wait.