William Sloane Kennedy

“ Every writer knows what he suffered. Did we not all expect that first precious production of ours to fairly set the editor wild with enthusiasm, so that nothing short of death or apoplexy could prevent him from assigning it the most conspicuous position in the very next issue of his paper?
But one day, as our boy-poet was mending a stone fence along the highway, in company with Uncle Moses, along came the postman on horseback, with his leathern bag of mail, like a magician with a Fortunatus' purse; and, to save the trouble of calling at the house, he tossed a paper to young Whittier. ”

“ These fresh improvisations are as perfect works of art as the finest Greek marbles. In them Whittier at length succeeds in freeing himself completely from the shackles of didacticism. Such ballads as "The Witch's Daughter" and "Telling the Bees" are as absolutely faultless productions as Wordsworth's "We are Seven" and his "Lucy Gray," or as Uhland's "Des Sänger's Fluch," or William Blake's "Mary." There is in them the confident and unconscious ease that marks the work of the highest genius. ”

“ His verses speak in the dialect of the people, and deal with themes with which they are familiar. He lifts toil above its drudgery, and sanctifies, as with a sacred glow, the things with which men in common spheres chiefly have to do. He admired nature as he saw in it the landscapes which surrounded his several homes, the rolling green hills of Haverhill and Bradford, the mighty trees of Oak Knoll, the flowing stream and graceful curves of the Merrimack; the sober and quiet graces of Amesbury; and with his pen he stamped upon them immortality. ”

“ When the reader, who has worked gloomily along through Whittier's anti-slavery and miscellaneous poems, reaches the "Songs of Labor," he feels at once the breath of a fresher spirit,—as a traveller who has been toiling for weary leagues through sandy deserts bares his brow with delight to the coolness and shade of a green forest through whose thick roof of leaves the garish sunlight scarcely sifts. ”

“ So sings the poet of the Isles of Shoals, Celia Thaxter, who, it is said, was discovered and introduced to the world by Whittier,—her rocky home being still one of his favorite summer resorts.
Landward, your gaze sweeps the beautiful salt-meadows and rests on the woods beyond, or reaches still farther to the steeples of Newburyport rising sculpturesquely in the pellucid atmosphere, and often at evening filling the air with faint silver hymns that chime with the liquid undertone of the pouring surf. ”

“ If ever in modern days the character of the apostle John has been reproduced among men it was in John G. Whittier. See with what sweetness and meekness the shy and loving Quaker moved through the ranks of society in times of peace and prosperity, and with what an adamantine boldness and bravery he stood up before the mob in Philadelphia when his types and manuscripts were scattered, his printing office burned and himself threatened with personal violence by the foes of human equality and freedom. ”

“ Let us suppose that it is winter, and that we are all cosily seated around the blazing fireplace. Now, let us talk over together the old days and scenes. The best picture of the inner life of the Quaker farmer's family can of course be had in "Snow-Bound,"—a little idyl as delicate, spontaneous, and true to nature in its limnings as a minute frost-picture on a pane of glass, or the fairy landscape richly mirrored in the film of a water-bubble. After such a picture, painted by the poet himself, it only remains for the writer to give a few supplementary touches here and there. ”

“ A deep solemnity and high consecration filled the heart of every man and woman in that little band. Heart answered unto heart in glowing sympathy. They did their work like men inspired. Perfect unanimity prevailed. They were too eagerly engaged to adjourn for dinner, and "baskets of crackers and pitchers of cold water supplied all the bodily refreshment." Among those who were present and spoke was Lucretia Mott, "a beautiful and graceful woman," says Whittier, "in the prime of life, with a face beneath her plain cap as finely intellectual as that of Madame Roland." ”

“ But there is this distinction: the moral in Dante and Milton and Shakspere and Emerson is so garnitured with beauty that while our souls are ennobled our imaginations are gratified. But in many of Whittier's poems we have the bare skeleton of the moral, without the rounded contour and delicate tints of the living body of beauty. His reform poems have been called stump-speeches in verse. His anti-slavery poems are, with a few exceptions, devoid of beauty. ”

“ Let us heartily agree with Principal Shairp when he says that the true end of the poet "is to awaken men to the divine side of things; to bear witness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, the nobility that lies hid, often obscured, in human souls; to call forth sympathy for neglected truths, for noble but oppressed persons, for downtrodden causes, and to make men feel that through all outward beauty and all pure inward affection God himself is addressing them." We may admit all this, and yet find fault with the moralizations and homilies of Whittier. ”

“ Oh, no; no more than did the apostle John—the apostle of love—forsake his Christian faith when the persecutors immersed him in boiling oil and exiled him to a desert island in the Ægean Sea.
The poetry of Mr. Whittier is a complete autobiography. It is a reflection, as in a polished mirror, of himself. We miss only the accidents of dates and places, which are of merely external importance; but we find in his works, amply displayed, the portraiture of the man; even as the architect records himself and his thoughts in his plans, and builds his own soul into his edifices. ”

“ The loveliness of their lives is like a beautiful perfume in the society in which they move. As you see the Quaker women of Philadelphia, with their pure, tranquil faces, and plain, immaculate dress, moving about among the greedy and vile-mannered non-Quaker canaille of that democratic city, they seem like Christian and Faithful [Pg 190] amid the crowds of Vanity Fair. Their faces are like a benediction, and you thank heaven for them. The liberal Friends in America have many great and noble names on their roll of honor. ”

“ He was so meek and retiring; he was so keenly sensitive to the wrongs done by man to man; he was so devoid of self-seeking; so pure and exalted in motive, and so sturdy a defender of the rights of the oppressed; he was so full of trust in God that we seem never to have seen his equal among men. His beautiful gentleness of character and his inflexible and fearless advocacy of the cause of righteousness—even when such advocacy involved persecution and personal [Pg 6] harm and loss, a rare combination of qualities—remind us of the sentiment of Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"The gentle are the strong." ”

“ This love of freedom, this hatred of oppression, intensified by persecution, both ancestral and personal, stimulated by contact with Puritan democracy, as well as by the New England Transcendental movement, and flowering out luxuriantly in the long struggle against slavery,—this noble sentiment, and that long self-sacrificing personal warfare in behalf of the oppressed, form the true glory of Whittier's character. ”

“ In a letter read at the third decade meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, Mr. Whittier said: "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."
In his earlier years our poet was wholly ignorant of the fact that an artist should love beauty for its own sake. The simple-hearted Quaker and Puritan farmer-youth thought it almost a sin to spend his time in the cultivation of the beautiful. ”

“ Locality exercises a great influence on a poet's genius. Whitman, for example, has always lived by the sea, and he is the poet of the infinite. Whittier was born, and passed his boyhood and youth, in a green, sunken pocket of the inland hills, and he became the poet of the heart and the home. The [Pg 49] one poet wrestled with the waves of the sea and the waves of humanity in great cities; the other lived the simple, quiet life of a farmer, loving his mother, his sister, his Quaker sect, freedom, and his own hearth. Both are as lowly in origin as Carlyle or Burns. ”

“ And surely a sect that has produced such characters as Lucretia Mott, John Bright, and John G. Whittier, must win our intellectual respect. But it is only because these persons, like Milton, were in most respects above their sect that we admire them. There are proofs manifold, however, throughout the prose and poetry of Whittier that he has nominally remained within the pale of Quakerism all his days. Doubtless such a course was essential to the very existence in him of poetic inspiration. His genius is wholly lyrical. A song or lyric is the outgushing of pure emotion. ”

“ In that venerable receptacle, just completing its half-century of existence—for the date of the edition before me is 1842—I find the names of John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes next each other, in their due order, as they should be. All around are the names of the dead—too often of forgotten dead. ”

“ The wrath of the reformer has expended itself, and the poet now returns, with mind elevated and more tensely keyed by his moral warfare, to the study of the beautiful in native themes and in homely life. "The Shipbuilders," "The Shoemakers," "The Fishermen," and "The Huskers" are genuine songs; and more shame to the craftsmen celebrated if they do not get them set to music, and sing them while at their work. One cannot help feeling that Walt Whitman's call for some one to make songs for American laborers had already been met in a goodly degree by these spirited "Songs of Labor." ”

“ There is more of fancy than of creative imagination in Whittier.
The artistic quality, or tone, of his mind is a fusion of that of Wordsworth and that of Byron. In his best ballads and other lyrics you have the moral sincerity of Wordsworth and the sweet Wordsworthian simplicity (with a difference) ; and in his reform poems you have the Byronic indignation, and scorn of Philistinism and its tyrannies. As a religious poet, he reveals the quiet piety and devoutness of Cowper; and his rural and folk poems show that he is a debtor to Burns. ”

“ His whole soul is on fire with love of country. [Pg 201] As in the case of Whitman, his country is his bride, and upon it he has showered all the affectional wealth of his nature. The Quaker may be too obtrusive in his prose writings, but it is not so in the greater and better portion of his poetry. When the rush and glow of genuine poetical inspiration seize him, he invariably rises in spirit far above the weltering and eddying dust-clouds of faction and sect into the serene atmosphere of genuine patriotism. Read his "Last Walk in Autumn," where he says:—
"Home of my heart! ”

“ And in that age men will look back with veneration, not so much, perhaps, to the scholar-poets as to the hero-poets, like Whittier, who put faith in the rights of man and woman, who did believe in divine democracy, and were not ashamed of it, but nursed it patiently through its puling infancy, well assured of its undying grandeur when it should come to man's estate. ”

“ Mr. Stedman, in his fine synthetic survey of American poetry, published in The Century, has remarked that most of our early poetry and painting is full of landscape. The loveliest season in America is the autumn, when, as Whittier beautifully says, the woods [Pg 257] "wear their robes of praise, the south winds softly sigh,"—
"And sweet, calm days in golden haze
Melt down the amber sky."
We have plenty of idyls of autumn color, like Buchanan Read's "Closing Scene," and portions of Longfellow's "Hiawatha." But American winter landscapes are as poetical as those of autumn. ”