Oh, no; me thinks from all her wild green mountains - From her rough coast, and isles, which hungry Ocean From the free fireside of her unbought farmer Rings the red steel From each and all, if God hath not forsake Loud as a summer thunderbolt shall waken A people's voice. Most of the singers of liberty in America have been beneath their task. Their eagle has been a "property" eagle (the sordid pun happens to be tragically true), and their flag has been a painted cloth, a crude bunting which Congressmen are wont to spatter with words. Whitman and Whittier, each in his own sincere tones, have spoken with the authentic voice of liberty and spoken many times during long lives. Lowell's muse uttered liberty once or twice, but his democracy was literary and not instinctive. Emerson, who held a lyre crude as Whittier's in a highly cultivated hand, sang twice or thrice in ringing tones of rebellion. Whittier, shy and gentle, nurtured in a childlike faith and untrained, unperplexed by culture, sends the tones of his trumpet across the world, to England, the arch-hypocrite mouthing liberty and defending slavery, and to the Pope, vicar of the prince of peace entangled in cowardly and murderous politics. While American statesmen, North and South, play their cunningly stupid games, and the agitators hurl indignant rhetoric, and the respectable proslavery Bostonians mob the orators, Whittier, cradled in an unwarlike creed, blazes forth in bellicose rebuke, strikes again and again at the smooth brow of evil with verses virile and aflame. His single purpose overwhelms the obstacles of his verbal hesitations. There is no mistaking him, even when the ear protests against his unintentional dissonances. Whether his work is poetry or rhymed propaganda, it is literature, for it expresses a man and events in words that are to-day alive with emotion. One who by temperament and by the habit of other reading feels himself out of sympathy with Whittier's hoarse verses has but to open his mind and present fresh surfaces to the impact of Whittier's intensity in order to be smitten by it. Whittier's religious verse is a mixture of banality and exaltation. At its worst it is but the grotesque psaltery with which Protestant Christianity from Doctor Watts to Doctor Moody has offended the sensitive ear. At its best it is the passion of worship which transcends particular belief or doubt and imparts immediately the religion of the singer. "Laus Deo" is a moving song of adoration; its triumphant ecstasy is instantly contagious. His less inspired hymns are sweet and manly, in spite of their childishness, and now and again their childishness becomes rather a childlike simplicity which is near to poetry. Of Whittier's narratives and ballads, some, like "The Witch's Daughter," are of good substance but unpoetic in expression. Others, like "Maud Müller," are simply bad, as Whittier, with his mischievous modesty, was the first to admit. "Cassandra Southwick" is a good ballad; it has swing and rush and a lively pictorial effect. "Skipper Ireson's Ride" is excellent; it has the haunting ring of true balladry; it repeats itself over and over in the reader's ears; and whatever is of unforgettable rhythm, of a rhythm that carries and continually reminds one of the content, is true poetry. Chant this over once and it will stay in the memory: Old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, The best of poets is he who dreams something that the rest of mankind would never, never think of and makes it real Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley. A lesser type of poet, but a genuine poet, is he who celebrates the actual land on which he lives, the daily scenes familiar to many eyes, the people among whom he moves. Whittier is the unrivalled portrayer of the New England landscape. Burden him with every disability that criticism can impute to a poet; unfrock him from the priesthood of perfect singers; reduce him to the plain common ground of minor poets, where he placed himself, the simplest, most undeluded common citizen in the democracy of letters; remember every gaucherie of which he is innocently guilty: he still keeps "on Yankee hills immortal sheep." His masterpiece is "Snow-Bound." The placid fidelity of the poem, the justice of the details, the apparently unsought felicity of the words identify it inevitably and forever with the experience of every one who has lived in New England. This page happens to be shaping itself in a New England farmhouse in January. The open wood fire is still burning, ably reinforced by steam coils. The wires are strung along the road for electric lights which will star the wintry darkness next year. The cosmopolitanism which has unified the world has reached to this corner of New England and softened the asperities of the ancestral character. The walls of a room near by, once filled with nasal hymns, give their mural ears to the strange magic of Debussy and Strauss. The intellectual atmosphere has changed, the people are different in many ways, some good, some bad; electric cars go by the door, and an abominable new house of green and brown shingles is an unlovely neighbour to this white house designed and built long ago by the village carpenters. Many aspects of the world out the window are unlike anything that Whittier saw. And yet "Snow-Bound" is true; it describes yonder landscape. The poem stands through all changes permanent as one of the granite boulders sheeted in snow. The fingers of life moulded the words. Through the plain verses actuality said itself, and actuality is immortal. If one who had been brought up in a New England village should be stricken blind, "SnowBound" would give him eyes again for all that Whittier describes. The rustic muse of the poem is like the mother at the hearth Recalling in her fitting phrase, The sketches of character are good portraits, not too highly praised when they are compared to Chaucer's Prologue; the faces are alive and ruddy in the firelight, homelybeautiful like "Flemish pictures" (Whittier's own just analogy) - the father, a "prompt, decisive man," the uncle "innocent of books," and the aunt - was ever more charming tribute to the elderly maiden? The morning dew, that dried so soon Then the sister Keeping with many a light disguise And the strongest portrait of all (strange that Whittier of all men could draw it so richly!), is that of the cultivated passionate woman: A certain pardlike, treacherous grace |