William Morton Payne

“ The substantial oak farmhouse which, late in life, he erected for his large family near Haverhill, is still standing. Descended from him in the fourth generation, John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet, was born in this house, 17 December, 1807. This is the homestead described with minute and loving fidelity in Snow-Bound, and it is typical of the many thousands of its sort that dotted the New England country-side, rearing in the old Puritan tradition a sturdy pioneer stock that was to blossom later in the fine flower of political and ethical passion, of statesmanship and oratory and letters. ”

“ From childhood he was steeped in the legendry of New England, its tales of Indian raids, of Quaker persecutions, of picturesque pioneers, and of romantic adventure; while the wide reading which made Whittier in later life a cultivated man fed his narrative faculty with old-world themes, ranging all the way from the Norse to the Oriental. The grim tragic economy of the folk-ballad, as it sprang from the heart of the people in England, Denmark, or Germany, never imparted its secret to him, although in The Sisters he came near to plucking the heart out of that mystery ”

“ The life of the household in which the poet grew to manhood is reproduced in Snow-Bound with a fidelity which makes of that poem, for its truthfulness and sincerity, one of the imperishable things in American literature—a document whose significance is becoming fully apparent only now that the phase of life it describes has all but vanished from American life, whether in New England or elsewhere. ”

“ The majority of the poems occasioned by these themes are too entirely of and for the moment to have any lasting value, but their immediate effect was potent in strengthening the mighty moral resolve of the nation, and they made Whittier perhaps the best beloved of contemporary American poets. When this mass of work is sifted by criticism, only a few pieces seem to preserve much of the fire which made them so effective at the time of their publication. ”

“ The ballad of Barbara Frietchie still has power to thrill its readers, and the terrible Ichabod, occasioned by Webster’s willingness to make terms with the abhorred evil of slavery, has lost little or none of its original force. “It is a fearful thing,” says Swinburne, paraphrasing the Scriptures in praise of Victor Hugo, “for a malefactor to fall into the hands of an ever-living poet.” And nowhere in the Châtiments of the French poet is there to be found a greater finality of condemnation than that with which Whittier stamped the subject of this truly great poem. ”

“ These traits were permanently stamped upon Whittier’s character, and all rested upon a foundation of unshakable faith in the spiritual order of the world. Christianity has perhaps never assumed a purer or lovelier guise than it took in the lives of those New England Quakers of whom Whittier was the type. ”

“ Akin to Snow-Bound, and to be mentioned as offering a foretaste of its subtle charm, is the short poem The Barefoot Boy, dated some ten years earlier, and cast in the same mould of retrospective yearning for the happy and wholesome days of childhood.
§ 8. Anti-Slavery Poems. The most considerable section of Whittier’s verse in point of volume is that in which the poet voices the burning indignation fanned in his breast by the curse of negro slavery in America. ”

“ In 1836, the Haverhill homestead was sold, and he bought in Amesbury, a few miles down the Merrimac, the cottage which was to be his home for the rest of his life. He occupied various editorial positions, which, together with activities in connection with the abolitionist agitation, kept him moving about until 1840, when he found his health badly broken and returned to Amesbury, there to remain for the greater part of the half-century that was still vouchsafed to him. ”

“ He found in the doctrines of the Society of Friends exactly the framework which his nature needed, saying that “after a candid and kindly survey” of all the other creeds, “I turn to my own Society, thankful to the Divine Providence which placed me where I am ”