Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
From a miniature by Porter about 1838
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
NOTE
The occasion for this little volume is the celebration of the centenary of Whittier’s birth. The sketch of his life aims to present the chief formative influences which affected his career and determined the character of his poetry. The poems have been chosen with the intention of illustrating, first, the circumstances of Whittier’s boyhood and the themes to which his poetic imagination naturally turned, then the political and social struggle which engrossed so many of his years, and finally that mood of devout resting and waiting in which his long life closed.
CONTENTS
NOTE
The frontispiece portrait of Whittier is from a miniature by Porter, painted about 1838. The portrait which faces page 36 is from an ambrotype taken about 1857. Both the miniature and ambrotype are in the possession of Samuel T. Pickard, Amesbury, Mass.
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER A SKETCH OF HIS LIFE
The loneliness of the homestead in which Whittier was born, on December 17, 1807, has been described by the poet himself and emphasized by his biographers. It is a solitary spot, even to-day. The farmhouse, built by the poet’s great-great-grandfather in 1688, has been preserved by the affectionate solicitude of the Whittier Homestead Association. After the ravages of fire and of time it has been scrupulously restored. The old-fashioned garden, the lawn sloping to the brook, the very stepping-stones, the beehives, the bridle-post, the worn door-stone, the barn across the road, even the surrounding woods of pine and oak, are all, as nearly as may be, precisely what they were a hundred years ago. The shadow of Job’s Hill still darkens the pleasant little stream and the narrow meadows of the homestead. In the dusk of August evenings the deer come out to feed among the alders. The neighborhood remains sparsely settled. No other house is within sight or hearing. Even in summer the rural quiet is scarcely broken, and the winter landscape makes an almost sombre impression of physical seclusion.
The intellectual isolation of the poet’s youth has likewise been impressed upon every reader of “Snow-Bound.” The books in that Quaker farmhouse were few and unattractive. The local newspaper came once a week. The teachers of the district school often knew scarcely more literature than their scholars. In the Friends’ meeting-house at Amesbury, which the Whittiers faithfully attended, there was little of that intellectual stimulus which the sermons of an highly educated clergy then offered to the orthodox. The hour of the New England lyceum—that curiously effective though short-lived popular university—had not yet come. Yet our own generation, bewildered by far too many newspapers, magazines, and books, is apt to forget that a few vitalizing ideas may more than make good the lack of printed matter. Whittier, who was to become the poet of Freedom, felt even in boyhood, in that secluded valley of the Merrimac, the pulse of the great European movement of emancipation which has transformed, and is still transforming, our modern world. “My father,” he wrote afterwards, “was an old-fashioned Democrat, and really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights which reaffirmed the Declaration of Independence.” In his poem “Democracy” he reasserts his own and his father’s faith: —
Not even the terrors of the French Revolution, it seems, could shake the silent John Whittier’s steadfast belief in the natural rights of man. He entertained in the old farmhouse William Forster, the distinguished British advocate of abolition. He transmitted to his boys a hatred of “priests and kings” which befitted the descendants of forbears who had felt the weight of the displeasure of the Puritan theocracy. Not that the Whittiers were agitators: they were taciturn, self-respecting landholders, who—in the phrase which a famous American poet, also of Quaker stock, afterward applied to himself—wore their hats as they pleased, indoors and out. But the Whittiers were so used to quiet independence that it never occurred to them to brag of it.
This moral freedom of the New England Quakers, touched as it was with the humanitarian passion of the later eighteenth century, was the poet’s spiritual heritage. Judged by material standards, his lot was one of hardship. The Whittier farm was both rocky and swampy. Only the most stubborn toil could wring from it a livelihood. In the harsh labor of the farm the two boys helped as best they could, but John Greenleaf was slender and delicate, and suffered life-long injury by attempting tasks beyond his strength. The winters were like iron; underclothing was almost unknown; the houses were poorly warmed and the churches not at all; and the food, in farmers’ homes, lacked variety and was ill-cooked. Though the poet’s body never recovered from these privations of his youth, the sufferings grew light when, in middle and later life, he weighed them against the happiness of home affection and the endless pleasures of a boy’s life out of doors. “The Barefoot Boy,” “Snow-Bound,” and “In School-Days” tell the story more charmingly and with more truth than it can ever be told in prose. Few households are better known to American readers than the inmates of the ancient homestead under Job’s Hill. In the “Flemish pictures” of the gifted son we behold the reticent, laborious father, the benignant mother,—like Goethe’s mother, a natural story-teller,—the gracious maiden aunt, the uncle with his “prodigies of rod and gun,” the grave elder sister, and the brilliant Elizabeth. These, with the boyish schoolmaster and the “half-welcome” casual guest, are still grouped for us before the great hearth in the ample living-room, waiting
a bloom that never fades from the memory of the born New Englander. Indeed, such was Whittier’s fidelity to the impressions made upon him in his youth, so unerring was his instinct for what was truly characteristic of the time and place, that these poems written about his boyhood portray, with a vividness rarely equalled in our literature, not only a mode of outward life, but a type of thought and feeling which possesses a permanent significance to all who would understand the American mind.
It was easier for Whittier, after all, to picture the East Haverhill homestead and its other inmates than to draw the portrait of himself in youth. We know that he was tall, frail, clear-colored, with those wonderful dark “Bachiler eyes” which now prove not to have been true Bachiler eyes at all. He was shy,—with a painful shyness which lasted throughout his life,—but he was prouder than a cavalier. Consciousness of intellectual power came to him early; behind him was a long line of clean-lived farmers whose lips, although “to caution trained” by Quaker breeding, could speak decisively when there was need. Poverty had taught him that respect and sympathy for the poor which is one of the noblest forms of class-pride. It would have been hard to find in all New England a country boy whose mind was so perfectly prepared for the visitation of a master-poet; and the poet, by some special gift of fortune, proved to be Robert Burns.
The story of that revealing experience is familiar enough: how a “pawky” wandering Scotchman sang “Bonny Doon” and “Highland Mary” and “Auld Lang Syne” over his mug of cider in the Whittier kitchen; and then how Joshua Coffin, the boy’s first schoolmaster, loaned him that copy of Burns which proved to be his passport to the wonder-world:—
He had already scribbled verses upon the beam of his mother’s loom, and like the boy Alfred Tennyson, only two years younger than himself, in the far-away Lincolnshire rectory, he had loved to fill his slate with rhymes. But from the moment that he read Burns this boyish delight in mere jingling sounds deepened into a sense that he, too, might become a poet. At sixteen he was composing with extraordinary fluency and with considerable skill. At eighteen he had written verses which his sister Mary thought good enough to be printed, and a poem which she sent surreptitiously to William Lloyd Garrison, the twenty-year-old editor of the “Newburyport Free Press,” was accepted and published on June 8, 1826. This printing of “The Exile’s Departure” in the poet’s corner of a struggling local newspaper was a fateful event for Whittier. Everybody knows the instant and generous interest aroused in the youthful editor: how he drove out to East Haverhill, unearthed his bashful poet,—who was at that moment crawling under the barn after a stolen hen’s nest,—and urged his father to give Greenleaf something better than a district schooling. “Sir, poetry will not give him bread!” exclaimed John Whittier, as sternly as Carlyle’s father might have said it. But the upshot was that the gaunt lad got his term at the Haverhill Academy, paying his way by making shoes.
He continued to write poems in astonishing profusion, taught school himself for a term in his native township, then took a final term at the Academy, and at twenty-one the ways were parting before his feet. A scheme for the publication of his poems by subscription had failed. His health seemed too frail for effective farm labor. His ignorance of the classics, as well as his lack of funds, barred the doors of a college course. He decided to earn his bread by journalism, and became at the end of his twenty-first year the editor of “The American Manufacturer” in Boston. The choice was significant. For three years he had been heralded as an unlettered “poet,” a sort of local phenomenon who was possibly destined, as Garrison had prophesied, to rank “among the bards of his country.” Yet here he was, turning, with a Yankee’s shrewd facility, to politics and affairs.
He was led, no doubt,—as in the more momentous crisis of 1833, when he obeyed Garrison’s call and turned Abolitionist,—by an instinct deeper than any conscious analysis of his powers. He knew that he had what he called a “knack of rhyming,” and he had learned from Burns to find material for poetry all about him. Yet he possessed at this time but a scanty equipment for the long road which a poet must travel. His physical endowment was impoverished. That full-blooded life of the senses, which taught Burns and Goethe at fourteen such secrets of human rapture and dismay, was impossible for the Quaker stripling. He was color-blind. His ear barely recognized a tune. The bodily sensations of odor, taste, and touch are scarcely to be felt in his poetry. He was indeed “no Greek,” as Whitman said of him long afterward; and at the outset of his career, as at its close, he cared but little for literature as an art. To conceive of any of the arts as a religion, or as an embodiment, for sense perception, of the highest potencies of the human spirit, would have seemed almost blasphemous to this follower of the “inward light.” He wrote to Lucy Hooper that a long poem, “unless consecrated to the sacred interests of religion and humanity, would be a criminal waste of life.” Parthenon and Pantheon were in his eyes less significant and memorable than Pennsylvania Hall, the Abolitionist headquarters in Philadelphia. In an editorial in “The Freeman” in 1838, prefacing a reprint of “A Psalm of Life,” which had just been published in the New York “Knickerbocker,” Whittier declared: “It is very seldom that we find an article of poetry so full of excellent philosophy and COMMON SENSE as the following. We know not who the author may be, but he or she is no common man or woman. These nine simple verses are worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live—the moral steam enginery of an age of action.”
One who could utter this amazing verdict upon the “Psalm of Life” certainly seems less fitted for poetry than for journalism and politics: and indeed Whittier’s aptitude for affairs, even at twenty-one, was extraordinary. His political editorials for the “Manufacturer”—a Clay journal which advocated a protective tariff—were skilfully written from the first. Subsequent editorial engagements in Haverhill, Hartford, and Philadelphia, although rendered brief by his wretched health, nevertheless widened his acquaintance and increased his self-confidence. His judgment was canny. His knowledge of local conditions, at first in his native town and county, and afterward throughout New England and the Eastern States, was singularly exact. He seemed to perceive, as by some actual visualization, how people were thinking and feeling in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and other communities which he had observed at first hand; and he employed a correspondingly accurate and as it were topographical imagination when he wrote of affairs in Kansas, Paris, or Italy.
Men were never abstractions to him. They were concrete persons, with ambitions to be tempted, generosities to be wakened, weaknesses to be utilized. His own county of Essex was then, as now, noted for the adroitness of its politicians, but at twenty-five John Greenleaf Whittier could beat the best of them at their own game. He was tireless in personal persuasion, in secret correspondence, in fighting fire with fire. He read Burke, and was prompt to apply Burke’s principle: “When bad men combine, the good should associate.” A Whig himself until the formation of the Liberty party, he was willing, as his friend Garrison was not, to compromise on non-essentials for the sake of bringing things to pass. The hand of a master is revealed in his published letters to Caleb Cushing and to Henry Clay. It was he who devised the coalitions which sent Cushing, the Whig, and Rantoul, the Democrat, to Congress, which made Boutwell governor of Massachusetts and sent Sumner to the United States Senate. When Sumner was struck down in the Senate chamber and his indignant constituents held mass meetings to voice their horror, Whittier was self-controlled enough to declare: “It seems to me to be no time for the indulgence of mere emotions.... The North is not united for freedom as the South is for slavery.... We must forget, forgive, and UNITE.” No utterance could be more characteristic of the man. In public affairs he knew what he wanted to compass, and he was as willing to lobby or to trade votes as to write an editorial or a lyric, provided the good cause could be thereby made to prosper. Extremists thought that he yielded to considerations of mere expediency; but his was rather the versatility of the born political fighter, who can use more weapons than one. Underneath all questions of policy, lay his inherited democratic sympathy with the ordinary man. At the height of his fame he loved to sit upon a cracker barrel in the grocery store at Amesbury, and talk politics. “I am a man,” he wrote to his biographer Underwood in 1883, “and not a mere verse-maker.”
This glimpse at the later revelations of his character is essential to an understanding of the spiritual crisis which confronted him in 1833, when he was only twenty-six. He loved power, and had already exercised it in the congenial field of politics. The road to preferment lay that way. It is true that he had continued to compose abundantly, both in prose and in verse. His writings were favorably noticed. Yet he saw no career for himself as a man of letters. “I have done with poetry and literature,” he wrote to a friend in 1832. Repeated disappointments in love had darkened his spirit. The death of his father had forced him back to the old farm to support his mother and sisters. Black care sat very close behind him. Discouraged, lonely, with ambitions ungratified and great powers of which he was but half aware, he paused, like some knight who had lost his way in an enchanted forest. Then blew the clear unmistakable trumpet call which broke the spell and summoned him to action. Although an anti-slavery man by native instinct, Whittier had never given his adherence to the sect of Abolitionists. Now came a letter from Garrison (March 22, 1833): “My brother, there are upwards of two million of our countrymen who are doomed to the most horrible servitude which ever cursed our race and blackened the page of history. There are one hundred thousand of their offspring kidnapped annually from their birth. The southern portion of our country is going down to destruction, physically and morally, with a swift descent, carrying other portions with her. This, then, is a time for the philanthropist—any friend of his country, to put forth his energies, in order to let the oppressed go free, and sustain the republic. The cause is worthy of Gabriel—yea, the God of hosts places himself at its head. Whittier, enlist! Your talents, zeal, influence—all are needed.”[1]
The spirit of Burns, years before, had whispered to the boy that he, too, had the poet-soul, yet facile versifying was all that had seemed to come of it, and the young man had turned to politics. Now the living voice of Garrison called him away from partisan ambitions to enlist in a doubtful and perilous measure of moral reform. He obeyed, and—so strange are the mysteries of personality—found in that new service to humanity not only the inspiration which made him a genuine poet, but the popular recognition which set the seal upon his fame.
The immediate cost of obedience to his conscience was heavy. The generation of Americans born since the Civil War look back upon the Abolitionists as victors after thirty years of agitation, as the dictators of national policy. Their statues are in public places. Their theories have prevailed. But in the early thirties they suffered such ostracism and even martyrdom as only a few historical students now realize. Churches, colleges, and courts were against them, for reasons which were adequate enough. They were dangerous members of society. To-day we endeavor to exclude Anarchists from American soil; the leading Abolitionists, like the Russian Revolutionists of the present hour, preached Anarchy in the name of Humanity. Whittier, trained to quietism, non-resistance, and respect for law, and skilled as he had become in feeling the pulse of public opinion, knew perfectly well what company he was henceforth to keep. To be an active Abolitionist was to join the outcasts.
His first act of allegiance was to write and publish at his own expense a pamphlet entitled “Justice and Expediency,” which pleaded for immediate emancipation by peaceful means. In December, 1833, he was a delegate from Massachusetts at the founding in Philadelphia of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Whittier was the youngest member. Thirty years later he wrote to Garrison, who had been his companion upon that memorable journey: “I am not insensible to literary reputation. I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-will of my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book.” No words could better illustrate his devotion to the cause of the slave. Yet he did not surrender his right of private judgment as to the best means to be employed. Garrison lost patience, ere long, with Whittier’s willingness to further the cause by compromise and concession, and the friends parted, to come together again in later years. The movement for emancipation needed both men and both methods; but Whittier’s method—less heroic than Garrison’s, less intolerant than Sumner’s, less virulent than that of Wendell Phillips—was like Abraham Lincoln’s in its patience, shrewdness, and sympathy.
Whittier faced hostile mobs with perfect courage, and with a touch of the humor which is rarely revealed in his writings. When the Philadelphia rioters looted and burned Pennsylvania Hall, he disguised himself in a wig and long white overcoat, mingled with the mob, and saved his own editorial papers. He brought not only courage and finesse, but high journalistic skill, to the service of the Abolitionists. His pamphlets, his editorials in the “Freeman,” “Middlesex Standard,” “National Era,” and other newspapers, were trenchant, caustic, and far-sighted. Invalidism and the care of his mother’s family kept him almost constantly at Amesbury, whither he had removed after the sale of his birthplace in 1836. But Whittier’s was no home-keeping mind, and there is scarcely a political event of importance, either in this country or abroad, which is not reflected in his prose and verse produced during the thirty years ending with the close of the Civil War.
Yet his chief function during the long anti-slavery struggle was that of chartered poet to the cause. No sooner had he abandoned his dream of personal advancement than the Byronic melancholy, the weak imitations of Scott, and the echoes of Mrs. Felicia Hemans disappear from his verse. He was studying the prose of Milton and Burke, those organ-voices of English liberty. From Burns and Byron he now caught only the passion for justice and the common rights of all. He forgot himself. He forgot, for the time being, those pleasant themes of New England legend and history, which earlier and later touched his meditative fancy. The cause of negro emancipation in America—to his mind only one phase of the struggle for a wider human freedom everywhere—stirred and deepened his whole nature. There is scarcely a type of political and social verse which is not represented in his work during this period. He wrote personal lyrics in praise of living leaders, and mournful salutes to the dead; hymns to be sung in churches, and campaign songs for the town hall. The touching lines to “Randolph of Roanoke” are a knightly tribute to an opponent. The generous and noble “Lost Occasion” was written after Webster’s death to supplement, rather than to retract, the terrific “Ichabod” addressed to Webster after his defence of the Fugitive Slave Law. Not since Burns had any poet dared pillory the clergy in such derisive and indignant strains as marked “Clerical Oppressors,” “The Pastoral Letter,” and “A Sabbath Scene.” The selfishness of commercialism, and its “paltry pedler cries” which exalt “banks” and “tariffs” above the man, have never been arraigned more powerfully than in “The Pine-Tree” and “Moloch in State Street.” Such poems are class and party verse of the purest type.
Whittier’s direct contact with the soil and his intense interest in localities made him also an unequalled interpreter of sectional feeling. “Massachusetts to Virginia” is perhaps the finest example of this sort of political verse, but he wrote many similar poems hardly less striking; and such was the flexibility of Whittier’s imagination when inspired by the common cause that he expressed not only the mood of the New England but also of the Middle States, and of that “Wild West,” as he called it, which was so soon to combine with his “roused North.” Much of this political poetry was, in the nature of the case, only a sort of rhymed oratory, scarcely differing, save in rhetorical and metrical structure, from the speeches of Beecher and Wendell Phillips. Sometimes it was rhymed journalism, of the kind which Greeley was using in his sturdy iterative editorials. Much of it, no doubt, has already met the oblivion which attends most pamphlets or stanzas “for the times.” Harshness of tone, over-severity in judgment of men and measures, diffuseness of style, a faulty ear for rhymes, are frequently in evidence. Yet these blemishes scarcely affected the immediate value of Whittier’s verse for controversial purposes. Its faults of taste and form were rightly forgotten in its communicative energy of emotion, its lambent scorn of evil things, its prophet-like exaltation. Long before armed conflict ended the debate, Whittier’s poetry had won the attention not only of his section, but of the entire North, and as the conflict proceeded his verse sounded more and more clearly that national note which had been the burden of the great and maligned Webster’s speeches for union. Only now it was to be a union redeemed. We must be “first pure, then peaceable,” the Quaker poet had maintained, and the fine close of his ballad “Barbara Frietchie,” like his “Laus Deo” which “sang itself” in church while the bells were ringing to celebrate the passing of slavery, is echoed to-day in the hearts of true Americans everywhere.
To study the chronological order of his poems from “The Exile’s Departure,” written in 1825, to “Snow-Bound,” written just forty years later, is to watch the steady broadening and clarifying of Whittier’s spirit. He found in the community of emotion wrought by a moral and political crisis the secret of command over his own nature and over the modes of poetic expression. By 1840 the worst hour of persecution for the Abolitionists was already past. There were no more mobs for Whittier to face. He remained, for the most part, quietly at Amesbury. In 1845 he began to contribute the spirited “Songs of Labor” to the “Democratic Review,” thus antedating Whitman by ten years in celebrating the American workingman. By 1847, in the “Proem” written to introduce the first general collection of his poems, he has already learned to regard himself as a singer whose nature inclined him to the “old melodious lays” of Spenser and Sidney, although his lot had fallen in stormy times:—
He does not regret his choice, but there is some yearning over the lost Arcady. In the enforced leisure of his frequent invalidism Whittier read very widely, and legend and dreamy fancy alternate in his verse with satirical invective and eloquent humanitarianism. The tragic “Ichabod” and the mordant irony of “A Sabbath Scene” are followed by the charming lines “To My Old Schoolmaster.” The poem on Burns, so fresh with “the dews of boyhood’s morning,” and the ballad of “Maud Muller,” where the pathos of our human “might have been” is expressed with such artless adequacy, date from the thrilling year of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. The Kansas emigrants were actually singing
while Whittier was writing “The Barefoot Boy” in 1855. The “Burial of Barber” is succeeded by “Mary Garvin.” After the storm, come the bird voices.
When “The Atlantic Monthly” was founded in 1857, Whittier contributed to its early numbers, not his timely and impassioned “Moloch in State Street” and “Le Marais du Cygne,” but rather “The Gift of Tritemius,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and “Telling the Bees.” In other words, it was as a man of letters and not as a controversialist that he joined this distinguished company of fellow contributors. Whittier was just turning fifty, in that year. The hair was thin above his noticeably high forehead; his face and figure spare as in youth; his deep-set dark eyes still aglow; the lips clean-shaven, nervous, resolute. Like another invalid, he was destined to long life, but of the thirty-five years then remaining to him, the succeeding ten were the most fruitful. Aside from those poems, already mentioned, inspired by the course and outcome of the War for the Union, his most characteristic productions during this decade are suggested by such titles as “My Psalm,” “My Playmate,” “The River Path,” “Cobbler Keezar’s Vision,” “Mountain Pictures,” “Andrew Rykman’s Prayer,” and “The Eternal Goodness.” These are grave, sweet, quiet poems, devout and consolatory.
Whittier’s mother died in 1857, and his favorite sister, the gifted Elizabeth, in 1864, thus leaving the Amesbury house desolate. The poet’s memories of his birthplace, only six miles away, but now in other hands, grew increasingly tender in his new loneliness, and he set himself to sketch, in an idyl longer than it was his wont to write, the scenes and persons dearest to his boyhood. “A homely picture of old New England homes,” he called it in a note to Fields, his friendly publisher. The poem was “Snow-Bound,” and it proved at once to be what it has since remained, the most popular of his productions; notable, not so much for sensuous beauty or for any fresh range of thought, as for its vividness, its fidelity of homely detail, its unerring feeling for the sentiment of the hearthside.
The surprising profits of “Snow-Bound” made Whittier—to whom, as he himself said, the doors of magazines and publishing houses had been shut for twenty years of his life—a well-to-do man henceforward. He never married. But he prided himself upon never losing a friend, and many homes were graciously offered to him in his old age. After the marriage of his niece in 1876, he became for a large part of each year the guest of his cousins at Oak Knoll, Danvers. In this stately and beautiful home, and in many friendly houses in Boston, he met frequently some of the best men and women of his time. His relations with the chief American authors of his day were cordial, although scarcely intimate. Most of them gathered in honor of his seventieth birthday at a dinner given by the publishers of “The Atlantic,” and the subsequent anniversaries of his birth were very generally noticed. But his life was essentially a solitary one. Professor Carpenter has noted in his admirable study of Whittier that his most familiar acquaintances and correspondents, in his later life, were women. “In old age his was the point of view, the theory of life, of the woman of gentle tastes, literary interests, and religious feeling. The best accounts of his later life are those of Mrs. Claflin and Mrs. Fields, in whose houses he was often a guest; and they have much to say of his sincere friendliness and quiet talk, his shy avoidance of notoriety or even of a large group of people, his keen sense of humor, his tales of his youth, his quaintly serious comments on life, his sudden comings and goings as inclination moved, and of the rare occasions when, deeply moved, he spoke of the great issues of religion with beautiful earnestness and simple faith. And it is pleasant to think of this farmer’s lad, who had lived for forty years in all but poverty for the love of God and his fellows, taking an innocent delight in the luxury of great houses and in the sheltered life of those protected from hardship and privation. After his long warfare this was a just reward.”[2]
After the publication of “Snow-Bound” in 1866, Whittier composed nearly two hundred poems. They celebrate some of his friendships, and indicate the variety of his reading and his interest in progress both in this country and in Europe. They describe, with loving accuracy, the mountains, streams, and shore of New Hampshire, where he usually made his summer pilgrimages. But few of these later poems, pleasant reading as they are, affect materially one’s estimate of Whittier’s poetic powers. His real work was done. Here and there, and notably in the idyl “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim,” there is a grace and ripeness which indicate the Indian Summer of his art, with lovely lines written for the “wise angels” rather than for discordant men. One thinks with a sigh of his description of himself in “The Tent on the Beach”:—
But regrets that he could not have lingered in dream-land are doubly futile; for it was the opinion-mill, after all, that made Whittier a poet. Life taught him deeper secrets than bookish ease could ever have imparted. “The simple fact is,” he wrote to E. L. Godkin, “that I cannot be sufficiently grateful to the Divine Providence that so early called my attention to the great interests of humanity, saving me from the poor ambitions and miserable jealousies of a selfish pursuit of literary reputation.” These words might have been written by one of the saints, and such, in very truth, was Whittier. Poverty, chastity, and obedience were his portion in this life. By the road of renunciation he entered into his spiritual kingdom.
He was not one of the royally endowed, far-shining, “myriad-minded” poets. He was rustic, provincial; a man of his place and time in America. It is doubtful if European readers will ever find him richly suggestive, as they have found Emerson, Poe, and Whitman. But he had a tenacious hold upon certain realities: first, upon the soil of New England, of whose history and legend he became such a sympathetic interpreter; next, upon “the good old cause” of freedom, not only in his own country but in all places where the age-long and still but half-won battle was being waged; and finally, upon some permanent objects of human emotion,—the hill-top, shore and sky, the fireside, the troubled heart that seeks rest in God. Whittier’s poetry has revealed to countless readers the patient continuity of human life, its fundamental unity, and the ultimate peace that hushes its discords. The utter simplicity of his Quaker’s creed has helped him to interpret the religious mood of a generation which has grown impatient of formal doctrine. His hymns are sung by almost every body of Christians, the world over. It is unlikely that the plain old man who passed quietly away in a New Hampshire village on September 7, 1892, aged eighty-five, will ever be reckoned one of the world-poets. But he was, in the best sense of the word, a world’s-man in heart and in action, a sincere and noble soul who hated whatever was evil and helped to make the good prevail; and his verse, fiery and tender and unfeigned, will long be cherished by his countrymen.
SELECTED POEMS
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
From an ambrotype about 1857
THE BAREFOOT BOY
IN SCHOOL-DAYS
THE WHITTIER FAMILY
MY PLAYMATE[4]
TELLING THE BEES[5]
BURNS[6] ON RECEIVING A SPRIG OF HEATHER IN BLOSSOM
THE SHIP-BUILDERS
SKIPPER IRESON’S RIDE[7]
MAUD MULLER[8]
RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE[9]
MASSACHUSETTS TO VIRGINIA[10]
THE PINE-TREE[11]
ICHABOD[12]
THE LOST OCCASION[13]
BARBARA FRIETCHIE[14]
LAUS DEO![15]
ON RECEIVING AN EAGLE’S QUILL FROM LAKE SUPERIOR
MY PSALM
THE ETERNAL GOODNESS
AT LAST[16]
1. Carpenter’s Whittier, p. 118.
2. Carpenter’s Whittier, p. 287.
3. For the circumstances in which Snow-Bound was written, see the prefatory memoir. The passage here given begins with the second night of the storm.
4. See Pickard’s Life of Whittier, pp. 276, 426–428, and Whittier-Land, pp. 66–67.
5. A remarkable custom, brought from the Old Country, formerly prevailed in the rural districts of New England. On the death of a member of the family, the bees were at once informed of the event, and their hives dressed in mourning. This ceremonial was supposed to be necessary to prevent the swarms from leaving their hives and seeking a new home.—Whittier.
The scene is minutely that of the Whittier homestead.
6. See Carpenter’s Whittier, p. 30.
7. In the valuable and carefully prepared History of Marblehead, published in 1879 by Samuel Roads, Jr., it is stated that the crew of Captain Ireson, rather than himself, were responsible for the abandonment of the disabled vessel. To screen themselves they charged their captain with the crime. In view of this the writer of the ballad addressed the following letter to the historian:
My dear Friend; I heartily thank thee for a copy of thy History of Marblehead. I have read it with great interest and think good use has been made of the abundant material. No town in Essex County has a record more honorable than Marblehead; no one has done more to develop the industrial interests of our New England seaboard, and certainly none have given such evidence of self-sacrificing patriotism. I am glad the story of it has been at last told, and told so well. I have now no doubt that thy version of Skipper Ireson’s ride is the correct one. My verse was founded solely on a fragment of rhyme which I heard from one of my early schoolmates, a native of Marblehead.
I supposed the story to which it referred dated back at least a century. I knew nothing of the participators, and the narrative of the ballad was pure fancy. I am glad for the sake of truth and justice that the real facts are given in thy book. I certainly would not knowingly do injustice to any one, dead or living.
8. The recollection of some descendants of a Hessian deserter in the Revolutionary war bearing the name of Muller doubtless suggested the somewhat infelicitous title of a New England idyl. The poem had no real foundation in fact, though a hint of it may have been found in recalling an incident, trivial in itself, of a journey on the picturesque Maine seaboard with my sister some years before it was written. We had stopped to rest our tired horse under the shade of an apple-tree, and refresh him with water from a little brook which rippled through the stone wall across the road. A very beautiful young girl in scantest summer attire was at work in the hay-field, and as we talked with her we noticed that she strove to hide her bare feet by raking hay over them, blushing as she did so, through the tan of her cheek and neck.—Whittier.
9. Though not published until 1847, several lines indicate that the poem was written not long after Randolph’s death in 1833. In a letter published in July, 1833, Whittier says: “In the last hour of his [Randolph’s] existence, when his soul was struggling from its broken tenement, his latest effort was the confirmation of this generous act of a former period [the manumission of his slaves]. Light rest the turf upon him, beneath his patrimonial oaks! The prayers of many hearts made happy by his benevolence shall linger over his grave and bless it.”
10. Written on reading an account of the proceedings of the citizens of Norfolk, Va., in reference to George Latimer, the alleged fugitive slave, who was seized in Boston without warrant at the request of James B. Grey, of Norfolk, claiming to be his master. The case caused great excitement North and South, and led to the presentation of a petition to Congress, signed by more than fifty thousand citizens of Massachusetts, calling for such laws and proposed amendments to the Constitution as should relieve the Commonwealth from all further participation in the crime of oppression. George Latimer himself was finally given free papers for the sum of four hundred dollars.—Whittier.
11. Written on hearing that the Anti-Slavery Resolves of Stephen C. Phillips had been rejected by the Whig Convention in Faneuil Hall, in 1846.—Whittier.
12. This poem was the outcome of the surprise and grief and forecast of evil consequences which I felt on reading the seventh of March speech of Daniel Webster in support of the “compromise,” and the Fugitive Slave Law. No partisan or personal enmity dictated it. On the contrary my admiration of the splendid personality and intellectual power of the great Senator was never stronger than when I laid down his speech, and, in one of the saddest moments of my life, penned my protest. I saw, as I wrote, with painful clearness its sure results,—the Slave Power arrogant and defiant, strengthened and encouraged to carry out its scheme for the extension of its baleful system, or the dissolution of the Union, the guaranties of personal liberty in the free States broken down, and the whole country made the hunting-ground of slave-catchers. In the horror of such a vision, so soon fearfully fulfilled, if one spoke at all, he could only speak in tones of stern and sorrowful rebuke.
But death softens all resentments, and the consciousness of a common inheritance of frailty and weakness modifies the severity of judgment. Years after, in The Lost Occasion, I gave utterance to an almost universal regret that the great statesman did not live to see the flag which he loved trampled under the feet of Slavery, and, in view of this desecration, make his last days glorious in defence of “Liberty and Union, one and inseparable.”—Whittier.
13. See footnote to Ichabod.
14. This poem was written in strict conformity to the account of the incident as I had it from respectable and trustworthy sources. It has since been the subject of a good deal of conflicting testimony, and the story was probably incorrect in some of its details. It is admitted by all that Barbara Frietchie was no myth, but a worthy and highly esteemed gentlewoman, intensely loyal and a hater of the Slavery Rebellion, holding her Union flag sacred and keeping it with her Bible; that when the Confederates halted before her house, and entered her dooryard, she denounced them in vigorous language, shook her cane in their faces, and drove them out; and when General Burnside’s troops followed close upon Jackson’s, she waved her flag and cheered them. It is stated that May Quantrell, a brave and loyal lady in another part of the city, did wave her flag in sight of the Confederates. It is possible that there has been a blending of the two incidents.—Whittier.
15. On hearing the bells ring on the passage of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The resolution was adopted by Congress, January 31, 1865. The ratification by the requisite number of States was announced December 18, 1865. [The suggestion came to the poet as he sat in the Friends’ Meeting-house in Amesbury, where he was present at the regular Fifth-day meeting. All sat in silence, but on his return to his home, he recited a portion of the poem, not yet committed to paper, to his housemates in the garden room. “It wrote itself, or rather sang itself, while the bells rang,” he wrote to Lucy Larcom.]
16. Recited by one of the little group of relations, who stood by the poet’s bedside, as the last moment of his life approached.
