And how refreshing it is to find a judge making love by talking
“Of the grass and flowers and trees,
Of the singing birds and humming bees”!
We are less edified, however, when, in after-years, we find him a married man, sipping the golden wine but longing for the wayside well and the barefoot maiden:
“And the proud man sighed, with secret pain:
‘Ah! that I were free again!’”
In reading Whittier we seldom come upon a thought so perfectly expressed that it can never after
occur to us except in the words in which he has clothed it. It is a poet’s privilege thus to marry thoughts to words in a union so divine that no man may put them asunder; and where this high power is wanting the mens divinior is not found. For our own part, we hardly recall a line of Whittier that we should care to remember. Nothing that he has written has been more frequently quoted than the couplet:
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen.
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”