only as a framework for sketches of the scenery of New England and of its early inhabitants. His own confession proves his art mechanical. He gets a frame, stretches the canvas, and deliberately proceeds to copy. The true poet fuses man and nature into a union so intimate that both seem part of each. He dreams not of framework and sketches, but of the unity and harmony of life. Where the common eye sees but parts, his sees the living whole. He does not copy, but transforms and re-creates. Before his enraptured gaze the immeasurable heavens break open to their highest, and every height comes out and jutting peak. From him not the humblest flower or blade of grass is hidden; and whatever he beholds becomes the minister of his thought, the slave of his will; passing through his mind receives its coloring, and rises from his page as though some eternal law of harmony had fitted it to this and no other purpose.
Whittier is even feebler in his attempts to portray character than in his description of scenery. To Ruth Bonython he gives “the sunny eye and sunset hair.” “Sunny eye” is poor enough; but who will tell us what “sunset hair” is like? Is it purple or gold or yellow or red? She is “tall and erect,” has a “dark-brown cheek,” “a pure white brow,” “a neck and bosom as white as ever the foam-wreaths that rise on the leaping river”;
“And her eye has a glance more sternly wild
Than even that of a forest child.”
And she talks in the following style:
“A humbled thing of shame and guilt,
Outcast and spurned and lone,
Wrapt in the shadows of my crime,
With withering heart and burning brain,
And tears that fell like fiery rain,