And the yell of the hound as he fastens his grip.
All blithe are our hunters, and noble their match—
Though hundreds are caught, there are millions to catch.”
All we maintain is that this is not poetry, fair sample though it be of Whittier’s Voices of Freedom.
Slavery undoubtedly is hateful, and to denounce it cannot but be right. A preacher, however, need not be a poet, even though he should declaim in rhymes; nor is hate of the slave-owner love of the slave, much less love of liberty. We fail to catch in these Voices the swelling sound of freedom. They are rather the echoes of the fierce words of bitter partisan strife. The lips of him who uttered them had not been touched by the burning coal snatched from the altar of liberty, however his heart may have rankled at the thought of Southern cruelty.
Whittier’s rhymes of the war are the natural sequel of his anti-slavery verses. The laureate of abolitionism could but sing, Quaker though he was, the bloody, fratricidal strife which he had helped to kindle. At first, indeed, he seemed to hesitate and to doubt whether it was well to light
“The fires of hell to weld anew the chain
On that red anvil where each blow is pain.”
Safe on freedom’s vantage-ground, he inclined rather to be the sad and helpless spectator of a suicide.
“Why take we up the accursed thing again?