"Barbara Frietchie" is, of course, the best of these war lyrics. The "Song of the Negro Boatmen" was set to music and sung from Maine to California during the war days:—
"De yam will grow, de cotton blow,
We'll hab de rice an' corn;
O nebber you fear, if nebber you hear
De driver blow his horn!"
After "Voices of Freedom," in the complete edition of Whittier's poems, come a cluster of Biblical, or Old Testament poems,—"Palestine," "Ezekiel," "The Wife of Manoah to her Husband," "The Cities of the Plain," "The Crucifixion," and "The Star of Bethlehem." The best of these, perhaps, are "Cities of the Plain," and "Crucifixion,"—the former intense and thrilling in style, and suggesting the "Sennacherib" and "Waterloo" of Byron; the latter a high, solemn chant, and well calculated to touch the religious heart. Whittier has drawn great refreshment and inspiration from the thrice-winnowed wheat and the living-water wells of Old Testament literature.
Allusion has already been made to the hymns of our poet. Hymn-book makers have had in his poems a very quarry to work. The hymn tinkers, too, have not spared Whittier even while he was alive, and many of his sacred lyrics have been "adapted" after the manner of hymn-book makers. Dr. Martineau's "Hymns of Praise" (1874) contains seven of Whittier's religious songs; the "Unitarian Hymn and Tune Book" (1868) also has seven; the Plymouth Collection (1855) has eleven, and Longfellow and Johnson's "Hymns of the Spirit" (1864) has twenty-two.
The Essex minstrel has written quite a number of children's poems, such as "The Robin," "Red Riding Hood," and "King Solomon and the Ants." He has also compiled two books of selections for children, as has already been mentioned.
Like many authors, Whittier has been attracted, in the autumn of his life, to the rich fields of Oriental literature. His Oriental poems show careful and sympathetic study of eastern books. "The Two Rabbis" and "Shah Akbar" are especially fine. The little touch in the former of "the small weeds that the bees bow with their weight" is a very pretty one. In "The King's Missive" we have a few "Oriental Maxims," being paraphrases of translations from the Sanscrit. "The Dead Feast of the Kol-Folk," and "The Khan's Devil," are also included in the same volume.
Mr. Whittier has also made successful studies in Norse literature, for which his beautiful ballads, the "Dole of Jarl Thorkell," "Kallundborg Church," and "King Volmer and Elsie" are vouchers.