[18] The Emperor has translated Whittier's "Cry of a Lost Soul" into Portuguese, and has sent to the poet several specimens of the Amazonian bird whose peculiar note suggested the poem.
[19] Mrs. Sargent's "Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club," pp. 301, 302.
[20] The same sterling material that went to the making of the Quaker went also to the making of the Puritan farmer-and-artisan victors of Naseby, and Worcester, and Marston Moor. The same faults characterized each class. In stiff-backed independence and scorn of the gilt-edged poetry of conventional manners, and in the absurd extreme to which they carried that independence and scorn, the Quaker and the Puritan were alike. Only the Quaker out-puritaned the Puritan,—was much more consistent in his fanatical purism, scrawny asceticism, and contempt for distinguished manners and the noble imaginative arts.
[21] In his work "No Cross, No Crown."
[22] Their ideas on this subject are very well stated in the following words taken from a Quaker pamphlet by Mary Brook: "Solomon saith, 'The preparations of the heart in man, and the answer of the tongue, are from the Lord.' If the Lord alone can prepare the heart, stir it up, or incline it towards unfeigned holiness, how can any man approach him acceptably, till his heart be prepared by him?—and how can he know this preparation except he wait in silence to feel it?"
[23] See Appendix I.
[24] Mrs. John T. Sargent's "Sketches and Reminiscences of the Radical Club."
[25] Hear Whittier himself on the subject:—
"Without intending any disparagement of my peaceable ancestry for many generations, I have still strong suspicions that somewhat of the old Norman blood, something of the grim Berserker spirit, has been bequeathed to me. How else can I account for the intense childish eagerness with which I listened to the stories of old campaigners who sometimes fought their battles over again in my hearing? Why did I, in my young fancy, go up with Jonathan, the son of Saul, to smite the garrisoned Philistines of Michmash, or with the fierce son of Nun against the cities of Canaan? Why was Mr. Greatheart, in Pilgrim's Progress, my favorite character? What gave such fascination to the grand Homeric encounter between Christian and Apollyon in the valley? Why did I follow Ossian over Morven's battle-fields, exulting in the vulture-screams of the blind scald over his fallen enemies? Still, later, why did the newspapers furnish me with subjects for hero-worship in the half-demented Sir Gregor McGregor, and Ypsilanti at the head of his knavish Greeks? I can account for it only on the supposition that the mischief was inherited,—an heirloom from the old sea-kings of the ninth century."—Prose Works, II., 390, 391.
[26] The beginning of this decade nearly coincides with the fourth or final period in our classification, upon the consideration of which we shall now enter.