I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.”
Whittier is, however, far from being a representative American or American poet. He is a Quaker. The broad-brimmed hat, the neat and simple dress, the sober gait, the slow and careful phrase with thee and thou, could not more truly denote him than his verse. Now, whatever idea we may form to ourselves of the typical American, or whether we think such a being exists at all, no one would ever imagine him to be a Quaker.
The American is eager; the Quaker is subdued. The American is loud, with a tendency to boastfulness
and exaggeration; the Quaker is quiet and his language sober. He shuns the conflict and the battle, does not over-estimate his strength; while the American would fight the world, catch the Leviathan, swim the ocean, or do anything most impossible. The Quaker is cautious, the American reckless. The American is aggressive, the Quaker is timid. But it is needless to continue the contrast. A great poet is held by no bonds. His eye glances from earth to heaven—the infinite is his home; and that Whittier should be only a Quaker poet is of itself sufficient evidence that he is not a great poet. But in saying this we affirm only what is universally recognized. He is, indeed, wholly devoid of the creative faculty to which all true poetry owes its life; and yet this alone could have lifted most of the subjects which he has treated out of the dulness and weariness of the commonplace. To transform the real, to invest that which is low or mean or trivial with honor and beauty, is the triumph of the poet’s art, the test of his inspiration. His words, like the light of heaven, clothe the world in a splendor not its own, or, like the morning rays falling on the statue of Memnon, strike from dead and sluggish matter sounds of celestial harmony.
“To him the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Whittier certainly has no fear of trivial and commonplace subjects, but in his treatment of them he rarely, if ever, rises above the level of the verse-maker.
It was the opinion of Keats that a long poem is the test of invention; and if we accept this as a canon of criticism, we shall want no other evidence of Whittier’s poverty of
imagination. All his pieces are short, though few readers, we suppose, have ever wished them longer. He cannot give sprightliness or variety to his verse, which like a sluggish stream creeps languidly along. There is no freshness about him, none of the breeziness of nature, none of its joyousness, exuberance, and exultant strength. In his youth, even, he had all the stiffness and slowness of age with its want of graceful motion. His narrations are interrupted and halting, interspersed with commonplace reflections and wearisome details; and when we have jogged along with him to the end, we are less pleased than fatigued. He never with strong arm bears us on over flood and fell, through hair-breadth escapes, gently at times letting us down amidst smiling homes and pleasant scenes, and again, with more rapid flight, hurrying us on breathless to the goal.
Some of his descriptive pieces have been admired, but to us they seem artificial and mechanical. They are the pictures of a view-hunter. They lack life, warmth, and coloring—the individuality that comes of an informing soul. He remains external to nature, and with careful survey and deliberate purpose sketches this and that trait, till he has his landscape with sloping hills and meadows green, with flower and shrub and tree and everything that one could wish, except that indefinable something which would make the scene stand out from all the earth, familiar as the countenance of a friend or as a spot known from childhood. He has too much the air of a man who says: Come, let us make a description. In fact, he has taken the trouble to tell us that he has considered the story of Mogg Megone