'The winds are up while mortals sleep;
The stars look forth while eyes are shut;
The bolted snow lies drifted deep
Around our poor and lonely hut.
'With silent step and listening ear,
With bow and arrow, dog and gun,
We'll mark his track, for his prowl we hear,
Now is our time—come on, come on.'
O'er many a fence, through many a wood,
Following the dog's bewildered scent,
In anxious haste and earnest mood,
The Indian and the white man went.
The gun is cock'd, the bow is bent,
The dog stands with uplifted paw;
And ball and arrow swift are sent,
Aim'd at the prowler's very jaw.
—The ball, to kill that fox, is run
Not in a mould by mortals made!
The arrow which that fox should shun
Was never shap'd from earthly reed!
The Indian Druids of the wood
Know where the fatal arrows grow—
They spring not by the summer flood,
They pierce not through the winter snow!"[12]
Whittier's Introduction to Brainard's poems reveals a mind matured by much reading and thought. We hardly recognize in the author and editor of Hartford the shy girlish boy we so recently left on the farm at Haverhill. There has evidently been a good deal of midnight oil burned since then.
The following sentiments respecting the resources and the proper field of the American poet show that thus early had Whittier taken the manly and patriotic resolution to find in his native land the chief sources of poetic inspiration: "It has been often said that the New World is deficient in the elements of poetry and romance; that its bards must of necessity linger over the classic ruins of other lands; and draw their sketches of character from foreign sources, and paint Nature under the soft beauty of an Eastern sky. On the contrary, New England is full of romance; and her writers would do well to follow the example of Brainard. The great forest which our fathers penetrated, the red men, their struggle and their disappearance, the powwow and the war-dance, the savage inroad and the English sally, the tale of superstition and the scenes of witchcraft,—all these are rich materials of poetry. We have, indeed, no classic vale of Tempe, no haunted Parnassus, no temple gray with years, and hallowed by the gorgeous pageantry of idol worship, no towers and castles over whose moonlight ruins gathers the green pall of the ivy; but we have mountains pillaring a sky as blue as that which bends over classic Olympus, streams as bright and beautiful as those of Greece and Italy, and forests richer and nobler than those which of old were haunted by sylph and dryad."
It is easy to see here a foreshadowing of "Mogg Megone," "The Bridal of Pennacook," the "Supernaturalism of New England," and a hundred poems and ballads of Whittier's founded on native themes. The sentiments in the quotation just made remind one of Emerson's "Nature," the preface of Whitman to his first portentous quarto, "Leaves of Grass," and Wordsworth's essay on the nature of the poetic art. But however laudable was the Quaker poet's resolve to choose indigenous subjects, it cannot be said that either he or Bryant attained to more than an indigeneity of theme. In form and style they are imitative. Emerson and Whitman are our only purely original poets.