however good we may find such men as John Woolman and Elias Boudinot, they make us feel painfully that the Salt of the Earth is something very different, to say the least, from the Attic variety of the same mineral. Let Armstrong and Whitworth and James experiment as they will, they shall never hit on a size of bore so precisely adequate for the waste of human life as the journal of an ordi- 10 nary Quaker. Compared with it, the sandy intervals of Swedenborg gush with singing springs, and Cotton Mather is a very Lucian for liveliness.

Yet this dry Quaker stem has fairly 15 blossomed at last, and Nature, who can never be long kept under, has made a poet of Mr. Whittier as she made a General of Greene. To make a New England poet, she had her choice between Puritan 20 and Quaker, and she took the Quaker. He is, on the whole, the most representative poet that New England has produced. He sings her thoughts, her prejudices, her scenery. He has not for- 25 given the Puritans for hanging two or three of his co-sectaries, but he admires them for all that, calls on his countrymen

war.

The Yankee lingo is insoluble in poetry, and the accent would give a flavor of essence-pennyr'y'l to the very Beatitudes. It differs from Lowland Scotch 5 as a patois from a dialect.

But criticism is not a game of jerkstraws, and Mr. Whittier has other and better claims on us than as a stylist. There is true fire in the heart of the man, and his eye is the eye of a poet. A more juicy soil might have made him a Burns or a Béranger for us. New England is dry and hard, though she have a warm nook in her, here and there, where the magnolia grows after à fashion. It is all very nice to say to our poets, 'You have sky and wood and waterfall and men and women,-in short, the entire outfit of Shakespeare; Nature is the same here as elsewhere'; and when the popular lecturer says it, the popular audience gives a stir of approval. But it is all bosh, nevertheless. Nature is not the same here, and perhaps never will be, as in lands where man has mingled his being with hers for countless centuries, where every field is steeped in history, every crag is ivied with legend, and the whole atmosphere of thought is hazy with the Indian summer of tradition. Nature without an ideal background is nothing.

We may claim whatever merits we like (and our orators are not too bashful), we may be as free and enlightened as we choose, but we are certainly not interesting or picturesque. We may be as beautiful to the statistician as a column of figures, and dear to the political economist

'Sons of men who sat in meeting with 40 as a social phenomenon; but our hive

their broadbrims o'er their brow, Answering Charles's royal mandate with a thee instead of thou,'

would hardly do. Whatever Mr. Whittier 45
may lack, he has the prime merit that he
smacks of the soil. It is a New Eng-
land heart he buttons his strait-breasted
coat over, and it gives the buttons a
sharp strain now and then. Even the 50
native idiom crops out here and there
in his verses. He makes abroad rime with
God, law with wa, us with curse, scorner
with honor, been with men, beard with
shared. For the last two we have a cer- 55
tain sympathy as archaisms, but with the
rest we can make no terms whatever,-
they must march out with no honors of

has little of that marvelous bee-bread that
can transmute the brain to finer issues
than a gregarious activity in hoarding.
The Puritans left us a fine estate in con-
science, energy, and respect for learning;
but they disinherited us of the past. Not
a single stage-property of poetry did they
bring with them but the good old Devil,
with his graminivorous attributes, and
even he could not stand the climate
Neither horn nor hoof nor tail of him has
been seen for a century. He is as dead
as the goat-footed Pan, whom he suc-
ceeded, and we tenderly regret him.
Mr. Whittier himself complains some-
where of

The rigor of our frozen sky,'

5

may be an eddy where the feeling lingers and reflects a bit of scenery, but for the most part it can only catch gleams of color that mingle with the prevailing tone and enrich without usurping on it. This volume contains some of the best of Mr. Whittier's productions in this kind. 'Skipper Ireson's Ride' we hold to be by long odds the best of modern ballads. There are others nearly as good in their way, and all, with a single exception, embodying native legends. In 'Telling the Bees,' Mr. Whittier has enshrined a country superstition in a poem of ex

and he seems to have been thinking of our clear, thin, intellectual atmosphere, the counterpart of our physical one, of which artists complain that it rounds no edges. We have sometimes thought that his verses suffered from a New England taint in a too great tendency to metaphysics and morals, which may be the bases on which poetry rests, but should not be carried too high above-ground. With- 10 out this, however, he would not have been the typical New England poet that he is. In the present volume there is little of it. It is more purely objective than any of its forerunners, and is full of the most 15 quisite grace and feeling. The Garrison charming rural pictures and glimpses, in which every sight and sound, every flower, bird, and tree, is neighborly and homely. He makes us see

'The old swallow-haunted barns,
Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
Through which the moted sunlight streams,
And winds blow freshly in to shake
The red plumes of the roosted cocks
And the loose hay-mow's scented locks,'-

'The cattle-yard

With the white horns tossing above the wall,'

the spring-blossoms that drooped over the river,

'Lighting up the swarming shad,'

and

'the bulged nets sweeping shoreward With their silver-sided haul.'

of Cape Ann' would have been a fine poem, but it has too much of the author in it, and to put a moral at the end of a ballad is like sticking a cork on the point 20 of a sword. It is pleasant to see how much our Quaker is indebted for his themes to Cotton Mather, who belabored his un-Friends of former days with so much bad English and worse Latin. 25 With all his faults, that conceited old pedant contrived to make one of the most entertaining books ever written on this side the water, and we wonder that no one should take the trouble to give us a 30 tolerably correct edition of it. Absurdity is common enough, but such a genius for it as Mather had is a rare and delightful gift.

This last volume has given us a higher 35 conception of Mr. Whittier's powers. We already valued as they deserved his force of faith, his earnestness, the glow and hurry of his thought, and the (if every third stump-speaker among us were not a 40 Demosthenes, we should have said Demosthenean), eloquence of his verse: but here we meet him in a softer and more meditative mood. He seems a Berserker turned Carthusian. The halfmystic tone of The Shadow and the Light' contrasts strangely, and, we think, pleasantly, with the warlike clang of From Perugia.' The years deal kindly with good men, and we find a clearer and richer quality in these verses where the ferment is over and the rile has quietly settled. We have had no more purely American poet than Mr. Whittier, none in whom the popular thought found such ready and vigorous expression. The future will not fail to do justice to a man who has been so true to the present. The Atlantic Monthly, Nov., 1860.

Every picture is full of color, and shows
that true eye for Nature which sees
only what it ought, and that artistic mem- 45
ory which brings home compositions and
not catalogues. There is hardly a hill,
rock, stream, or sea-fronting headland in
the neighborhood of his home that he has
not fondly remembered. Sometimes, we 50
think, there is too much description, the
besetting sin of modern verse, which has
substituted what should be called wordy-
painting for the old art of painting in
a single word. The essential character 55
of Mr. Whittier's poetry is lyrical, and
the rush of the lyric, like that of a brook,
allows few pictures. Now and then there