My Triumph.
To analyze and describe the poetry of Whittier is a comparatively easy task, for it is all essentially lyrical or descriptive, and is resolvable into a few simple elements. His poetry is not profound; but it is sweet and melodious,—now flashing with the fire of freedom and choked with passionate indignation, and now purling and rippling through the tranquil meadows of legend and song. Such a poem as Emerson's "Sphinx," groaning with its weight of mystical meaning, Whittier never wrote, nor could write. Neither is he dramatic, nor skilled in the subtile harmonies of rhythm and metre. As an artist he is easily comprehensible. But to fathom the man,—to drop one's plummet into the infinite depths of the human mind, to peer about with one's little candle among the dusty phantoms and spent forces of the past, and through the endlessly crossing and interblending meshes trace confidently up all the greater and the finer hereditary influences that have moulded a human character,—and then discover and weigh the post-natal forces that have acted upon that character through a long and varied life,—this is a very difficult task, and demands in him who would undertake it a union of historic imagination with caution and modesty.
The moral in Whittier predominates over the æsthetic, the reformer over the artist. "I am a man, and I feel that I am above all else a man." What is the great central element in our poet's character, if it is not that deep, never-smouldering moral fervor, that unquenchable love of freedom, that—
"Hate of tyranny intense,
And hearty in its vehemence,"
which, mixed with the beauty and melody of his soul, gives to his pages a delicate glow as of gold-hot iron; which crowns him the Laureate of Freedom in his day, and imparts to his utterances the manly ring of the prose of Milton and Hugo and the poetry of Byron, Swinburne, and Whitman,—all poets of freedom like himself?
