Whittier also wrote extensively on subjects relating to New England history, witchcraft and colonial traditions. This group includes many of his best ballads, which have done in verse for colonial romance what Hawthorne did in prose in his “Twice-Told Tales” and “Scarlet Letter.” It is these poems that have entitled Whittier to be called “the greatest of American ballad writers.” Among them are to be found “Mabel Martin,” “The Witch of Wenham,” “Marguerite” and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride.” But it is perhaps in the third department of his writings, namely, rural tales and idyls, that the poet is most widely known. These pastoral poems contain the very heart and soul of New England. They are faithful and loving pictures of humble life, simple and peaceful in their subject and in their style. The masterpieces of this class are “Snowbound,” “Maud Muller,” “The Barefoot Boy,” “Among the Hills,” “Telling the Bees,” etc. The relation of these simple experiences of homely character has carried him to the hearts of the people and made him, next to Longfellow, the most popular of American poets. There is a pleasure and a satisfaction in the freshness of Whittier’s homely words and homespun phrases, which we seek in vain in the polished art of cultivated masters. As a poet of nature he has painted the landscapes of New England as Bryant has the larger features of the continent.
Whittier was never married and aside from a few exquisite verses he has given the public no clew to the romance of his youth. His home was presided over for many years by his sister Elizabeth, a most lovely and talented woman, for whom he cherished the deepest affection, and he has written nothing more touching than his tribute to her memory in “Snowbound.” The poet was shy and diffident among strangers and in formal society, but among his friends genial and delightful, with a fund of gentle and delicate humor which gave his conversation a great charm.
Aside from his work as a poet Whittier wrote considerable prose. His first volume was “Legends of New England,” published in 1831, consisting of prose and verse. Subsequent prose publications consisted of contributions to the slave controversy, biographical sketches of English and American reformers, studies of scenery and folk-lore of the Merrimac valley. Those of greatest literary interest were the “Supernaturalisms of New England,” (1847,) and “Literary Recreations and Miscellanies,” (1852.)
In 1836 Whittier became secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and he was all his life interested in public affairs, and wrote much for newspapers and periodicals. In 1838 he began to edit the “Pennsylvania Freeman” in Philadelphia, but in the following year his press was destroyed and his office burned by a pro-slavery mob, and he returned to New England, devoting the larger part of his life, aside from his anti-slavery political writings, to embalming its history and legends in his literature, and so completely has it been done by him it has been declared: “If every other record of the early history and life of New England were lost the story could be constructed again from the pages of Whittier. Traits, habits, facts, traditions, incidents—he holds a torch to the dark places and illumines them every one.”
Mr. Whittier, perhaps, is the most peculiarly American poet of any that our country has produced. The woods and waterfowl of Bryant belong as much to one land as another; and all the rest of our singers—Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and their brethren—with the single exception of Joaquin Miller, might as well have been born in the land of Shakespeare, Milton and Byron as their own. But Whittier is entirely a poet of his own soil. All through his verse we see the elements that created it, and it is interesting to trace his simple life, throughout, in his verses from the time, when like that urchin with whom he asserts brotherhood, and who has won all affections, he ate his
* * * “milk and bread,
Pewter spoon and bowl of wood,
On the door-stone gray and rude.
O’er me, like a regal tent,
Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent,