"The crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands,
With solemn lips of question, like the Sphinx in Egypt's sands!
This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;
This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin;
Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal's cloudy crown,
We call the dews of blessing or the bolts of cursing down.
"By all for which the Martyrs bore their agony and shame,
By all the warning words of truth with which the Prophets came,
By the Future which awaits us, by all the hopes which cast
Their faint and trembling beams across the darkness of the Past,
And by the blessed thought of Him who for Earth's freedom died,
O my people! O my brothers! let us choose the righteous side.
"So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way,
To wed Penobscot's waters to San Francisco's bay,
To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales with grain,
And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train;
The mighty West shall bless the East, and sea shall answer sea,
And mountain unto mountain call, 'Praise God, for we are free!'"
These are less to be named poems than pieces of rhythmic oratory,—oratory crystallized into poetic form, and carrying that deeper significance and force which from all vitalized form are inseparable. A poem, every work of Art, must rest in itself; oratory is a means toward a specific effect. The man who writes poems may have aims which underlie and suffuse his work; but they must not be partial, they must be coextensive with the whole spirit of man, and must enter his work as the air enters his nostrils. The moment a definite, partial effect is sought, the attitude of poetry begins to be lost. These battle-pieces are therefore a warfare for the possession of the poet's ideal, not the joyous life-breath of that ideal already victorious in him. And the other poems of this first great epoch in his poetical life, though always powerful, often beautiful, yet never, we think, show a perfect resting upon his own poetic heart.
In the year 1850 appeared the "Songs of Labor, and other Poems"; and in these we reach the transition to his second epoch. Here he has already recognized the pure ground of the poem,—
"Art's perfect forms no moral need,
And beauty is its own excuse,"—
but his modesty declines attempting that perfection, and assigns him a lower place. He must still seek definite uses, though this use be to lend imagination or poetic depth to daily labor:—
"But for the dull and flowerless weed
Some healing virtue still must plead,
And the rough ore must find its honors in its use.
"So haply these my simple lays
Of homely toil may serve to show
The orchard-bloom and tasselled maize
That skirt and gladden duty's ways,
The unsung beauty hid life's common things below."
Not pure gold as yet, but genuine silver. The aim at a definite use is still apparent, as he himself perceives; but there is nevertheless a constant native play into them of ideal feeling. It is no longer a struggle for room to draw poetic breath in, but only the absence of a perfectly free and unconscious poetic respiration. Yet they are sterling poems, with the stamp of the mint upon them. And some of the strains are such as no living man but Whittier has proven his power to produce. "Ichabod," for example, is the purest and profoundest moral lament, to the best of our knowledge, in modern literature, whether American or European. It is the grief of angels in arms over a traitor brother slain on the battle-fields of heaven.