I almost think the angels
Who tend life's garden fair,
Drop down the sweet white blossoms
That bloom around us here.
The secret of her popularity is to be seen in such lines as the following from Bury me in a Free Land:
Make me a grave where'er you will,
In a lowly plain or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth's humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave:
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.
Of the Emancipation Proclamation she wrote:
It shall flash through coming ages,
It shall light the distant years;
And eyes now dim with sorrow
Shall be brighter through their tears.
While Mrs. Harper was still prominently before the public appeared Albery A. Whitman, a Methodist minister, whose important collection, Not a Man and Yet a Man, appeared in 1877, and whose long and ambitious poem, Twasinta's Seminoles, or The Rape of Florida (the latter title being the one most used), was issued in 1884. This writer had great love for his work. In the preface to his second volume he wrote of poetry as follows: "I do not believe poetry is on the decline. I do not believe that human advancement extinguishes the torch of sentiment. I can not think that money-getting is the whole business of man. Rather am I convinced that the world is approaching a poetical revolution. The subtle evolution of thought must yet be expressed in song. Poetry is the language of universal sentiment. Torch of the unresting mind, she kindles in advance of all progress. Her waitings are on the threshold of the infinite, where, beckoning man to listen, she interprets the leaves of immortality. Her voice is the voice of Eternity dwelling in all great souls. Her aims are the inducements of heaven, and her triumphs the survival of the Beautiful, the True, and the Good. In her language there is no mistaking of that liberal thought which is the health of mind. A secret interpreter, she waits not for data, phenomena, and manifestations, but anticipates and spells the wishes of Heaven."
The work of Whitman himself is exceedingly baffling. It is to his credit that something about his work at once commands judgment by the highest standards. If we consider it on this basis, we find that it is diffuse, exhibits many lapses in taste, is faulty metrically, as if done in haste, and shows imitation on every hand. It imitates Whittier, Longfellow and Tennyson; Scott, Byron and Moore. The Old Sac Village and Nanawawa's Suitors are very evidently Hiawatha over again, and Custer's Last Ride is simply another version of The Charge of the Light Brigade. And yet, whenever one has about decided that Whitman is not worthy of consideration, the poet insists on a revision of judgment; and he certainly could not have imitated so many writers so readily, if he had not had some solid basis in appreciation. The fact is that he shows a decided faculty for brisk, though not sustained, narration. This may be seen in The House of the Aylors. He has, moreover, a romantic lavishness of description that in spite of all technical faults still has some degree of merit. The following quotations, taken respectively from The Mowers and The Flight of Leeona, with all their extravagance, will exemplify both his weakness and his strength in description: