Whittier's art is restricted. He never achieved the final majesties of the grand style. But within his limits he is genuinely good. His verse lacks some of the virtues, and by compensation it is free from some of the vices, of his university-bred contemporaries, who wrote so often with the pens of the ages that they did not learn firmly to grasp their own. Whittier's poems are indigenous to the soil as lilacs and elm trees, and they are also the voice of a very great man. Through a medium which he did not fully master, he did manage to convey with power and vividness his fiery convictions, blazes of passion across the blue serenity of his faith. With the sureness that plain simple vision gives to an imperfect draughtsman, he made pictures of his landscape that are unsurpassed, if not unsurpassable. If the day comes when they are no longer enjoyed, on that day the last Yankee will have died. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE John Greenleaf Whittier was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, December 17, 1807. He died at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, September 7, 1892. His schooling was imperfect and his Quaker-Puritan father did not approve his addiction to verse. He read some poetry, notably Burns, and his sister secretly sent his early rhymes to the Newburyport Free Press, edited by William Lloyd Garrison. This opened his career as poet and journalist. He became editor of The Haverhill Gazette and The New England Magazine. His newspaper work brought him into practical relations with politics, and he might have gone to Congress; but he refused. He was a capable, sane worker for the cause of Abolition, was attacked by respectable mobs and met them bravely. He went to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835. In 1837 he went to Philadelphia to work on The Pennsylvania Freeman. Thereafter he lived at Amesbury and Danvers, Massachusetts. He did not marry. His works are: Legends of New England, 1831; Moll Pitcher, 1832; Justice and Expediency, 1833; Mogg Megone, 1836; Poems, 1837; Ballads, Anti-Slavery Poems, etc., 1838; Lays of My Home, 1843; The Stranger in Lowell, 1845; Supernaturalism in New England, 1847; Voices of Freedom, 1849; Old Portraits and Modern Sketches, 1850; Songs of Labour, 1850; The Chapel of the Hermits, 1853; Literary Recreations and Miscellanies, 1854; The Panorama, 1856; Home Ballads, 1860; In War Time, 1863; National Lyrics, 1865; Snow-Bound, 1866; The Tent on the Beach, 1867; Among the Hills, 1868; Miriam, 1870; The Pennsylvania Pilgrim, 1872; Hazel Blossoms, 1874; Centennial Hymn, 1876; The Vision of Echard, 1878; The King's Missive, 1881; The Bay of Seven Islands, 1883; Saint Gregory's Guest, 1886; At Sundown, 1892. The standard life of Whittier is by Samuel T. Pickard in two volumes. CHAPTER VIII POE NO MAN more truly than Poe illustrates our conception of a poet as one who treads the cluttered ways of circumstance with his head in the clouds. Many another impoverished dreamer has dwelt in his thoughts, apart from the world's events. And of nearly all artists it is true that their lives are written in their works, and that the rest of the story concerns another almost negligible personality. In the case of Poe the separation between spiritual affairs and temporal is unusually wide. His fragile verse is pitched above any landscape of fact; his tales contain only misty reflections of common experience; and the legendary personage which he has become is a creature inspired in other imaginations by his books, not a faithful portrait of the human being who lived in America between 1809 and 1849. The contrast between his aspirations and his earthly conditions, between the figure of romance he would fain have been and the man in authentic records stripped of myth and controversy, is pitiful, almost violent. This poet, with a taste for palaces and Edens, lived in sprawling cities that had not yet attempted magnificence. This bookish man, whom one envisages poring over quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, owned no wonderful library, not even such a "working" collection as a literary man is supposed to require, but feasted on the miscellaneous riches that fell now and then upon the arid desk of the hack reviewer. This inventor of grotesque plots had no extraordinary adventures, none certainly that make thrilling anecdote. Capable of Chesterfieldian grace of style, and adept in the old-fashioned Southern flourish of manner, he left few "polite" letters, and those few are undistinguished. To follow Poe's course by the guide of literary landmarks is to undertake a desolate journey. men. As his artistic self is apart from things, so it is apart from In his criticisms, it is true, he is found in open and somewhat controversial relations with the writers of his time and vicinity. As editor, he had dealings with the world of authors and journalists. But his acquaintance among the "literati" includes no man of letters who is now well remembered, and implies no possibility of flashing exchange between his imagination and another as brilliant. He never met his intellectual equal in the flesh, except Lowell, whom he saw only once. Irving in Sunnyside was not nearer than Irving in Spain. Not a friend was qualified to counsel or encourage Poe in his work, not a neighbour in art was competent to inspire him. He was the flower of no group of writers, but stands alone, original, aloof. The isolation of Poe from the best minds of his day is not well understood by those who have not a correct geographical conception of America in 1840. One of the most authoritative English reviews expressed surprise that a recent book on Boston omitted from the chapter devoted to littérateurs the name of Poe, who was born in Boston and was the finest of American poets. The intellectual life of the only Greater Boston that has produced literature was as remote from Poe as was Victorian London, and he was the only important critic in America who understood the relative magnitudes of those two centres of light. His caustic opinions about the Bostonians, which seem more discerning to us than they did to our New England fathers, are witness to his detachment from the only considerable movement in American literature of those dim "provincial" times. Whatever influence contemporaneous thought exerted on Poe came from books and not from men, not from experience with the world. Though a few reflections of his contacts with life, such as the English school in "William Wilson," are to be made out in his stories, and though in some of his essays a momentary admiration or hostility of a personal nature slipped a magnifying lens beneath his critical eye, yet the finger of circumstance is seldom on his pages, the echoes of human encounter are not heard in his art. The nature of Poe's disseverance from life is one of the strangest in the annals of unworldly men of books. He was not among those who, like Lamb, transfigure petty and dull experience, or those who combat suffering with blithe philosophies like Stevenson; he was not a wilful hermit; nor was he among those invalids who, in constrained seclusion, have leisure for artistry and contemplation. He was a practical editor in busy offices. He no doubt thought of himself, Mr. Poe, as urbane and cosmopolitan. He had knocked about the world a little. For a while he was in the army. He was |