Songs of Labor, and Other Poems. By John G. Whittier. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 12mo.
Whittier’s popularity, great as it is, must be increased by these Songs of Labor. In them, the Ship-Builders, Shoemakers, Drovers, Fishermen, Huskers and Lumbermen, are gifted with vigorous and melodious utterance, in songs whose chime is the very echo of their occupations. The other poems of the collection are of a merit as various as their themes. The best is the poem entitled “Memories,” one of the most exquisitely tender, thoughtful and imaginative poems in our literature. “Pious IX.” and “Elliott,” are essentially battle-pieces, and the rhymes clash together like the crossing of swords. Fierce and hot as the invective of these poems is, we still think the business of wrath is much better done in “Ichabod,” in which rage and scorn take the form of a dirge, and smiting sarcasms are insinuated through the phrases of grief. Throughout the volume we are impressed with the great nature of the author, and the superiority of the man to any thing he has yet produced. He unites, in a singular degree, tenderness with strength, delicate fancy with blazing imagination, sensitive sentiment with sturdy character; and his most exhilarating and trumpet-voiced lyrics have the air of impromptus. In the following lines, for instance, from a poem in the present volume on “The Peace Convention at Brussels,” he extemporises as good heroic verse as Campbell’s:
Still in thy streets, oh Paris! doth the stain
Of blood defy the cleansing autumn rain;
Still breaks the smoke Messina’s ruins through,
And Naples mourns that new Bartholomew,
When squalid beggary, for a dole of bread,
At a crowned murderer’s beck of license, fed
The yawning trenches with her noble dead;
Still, doomed Vienna, through thy stately halls