But if Whittier’s garb is plain, his features hard, and his voice harsh, his poetry, both in subject and in style, seems native here and to spring from the soil. He has himself not inaptly described his verse in the lines which he has prefixed to the Centennial edition of his complete poetical works:
“The rigor of a frozen clime,
The harshness of an untaught ear,
The jarring words of one whose rhyme
Beat often Labor’s hurried time
Or Duty’s rugged march through storm and strife, are here.
“Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,
No rounded art the lack supplies;
Or softer shades of Nature’s face,
Or softer shades of Nature’s face,