JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER WHITTIER is the poet of New England country life, almost as truly and fully as Burns is of the country life of Scotland. For this he was fitted by all the circumstances of his own life. He was born and bred a farmer's boy, on the same farm which his first American ancestor, Thomas Whittier, had taken up and cleared in 1647, and in the very house which this Thomas Whittier had built for himself in 1688. This sturdy pioneer came to New England in 1638, when he was eighteen years old, and so was nearly seventy when he built the house which was to be Whittier's birthplace. Of his ten children, five were boys, and each of the five boys, like his father, was over six feet tall, and strong correspondingly. The youngest son, Joseph, Whittier's great-grandfather, had nine children, of whom the youngest, Whittier's grandfather, married Sarah Greenleaf, and had eleven children, of whom the youngest but one was Whittier's father. There was naturally but little property to divide among so many children, and the older sons usually went out and made their own way in the world, while the farm was left to the youngest — in the last case, to the two youngest, Whittier's father and his uncle, Moses Whittier, who is one of the family group in Snow-Bound.' John Greenleaf Whittier was born December 17, 1807. He lived and worked on the farm, but he lacked the sturdy strength of his ancestors, and the hard work, done when a mere boy, resulted in physical injury and weakness which lasted for the rest of his life. His education was that of a typical country boy in those days; he attended the district school in the outskirts of the town where he lived, and later earned for himself two short terms at the neighboring academy. Only once in his boyhood did he go so far away from home as to visit Boston. Thus, in ancestry and training, Whittier differs from the other New England poets, who were all college bred, and spent their youth in a city or an academic town. One other important point is to be noted, that Whittier's family were devout Quakers. Books were naturally scarce in the household, except for the Bible and the lives of Quaker worthies. He read all the poetry he could get hold of, from the dry Davideis' spoken of in 'Snow-Bound' to something of Gray and Cowper. He wrote rhymes on his slate after the nightly chores' were done. But his real awakening to poetry came through Burns, as he has told us so vividly and beautifully in his tribute to the Scotch peasant-poet. Whittier's first printed verses appeared when he was eighteen years old, in the local newspaper, edited by William Lloyd Garrison, then only twenty. Garrison at once sought out his new contributor, and urged the necessity of further education and cultivation of his talent. Sir,' replied Whittier's father, 'poetry will not give him bread.' Whittier, however, earned enough by shoemaking to support himself for one term at Haverhill Academy in 1827, and by school-teaching enough for another term in 1828. During these two years he wrote for the local papers, especially the Haverhill Gazette, something like a hundred poems. A college education seemed out of the question, but Whittier obtained employment in the following winter as hack editor of a Boston trade journal, the American Manufacturer. The following summer his father fell seriously ill, and he had to return home and take charge of the farm. But here he found an opportunity for continuing his other work, in the editorship of the chief local paper, the Haverhill Gazette. His father died in June, 1830. In July he went to Hartford, Conn., to be editor of the New England Review, and continued to conduct it until the end of 1831, although he was compelled to spend a good deal of that year at home in Haverhill, and ultimately to give up his editorial position, on account of serious illness. In these excursions into the outside world, at Boston, and particularly at Hartford, which was then somewhat of a literary centre, and where he held an important position, Whittier's outlook had of course been greatly broadened, and his literary ambition strengthened. His letters at the time show a strong desire and even hope of winning fame as a poet. His editorial work had also drawn him into politics, and when he returned to Haverhill, in spite of his ill health, he took an important practical part in the local contests. In September, 1832, he wrote: Even if my health was restored, I should not leave this place. I have too many friends around me, and my prospects are too good to be sacrificed for any uncertainty.' The prospect which he was unwilling to sacrifice was that of being elected to Congress in the following year. It appears that he could probably have been elected in 1832, but he was not yet of the required age. Both his literary and political ambitions, however, seemed to be once for all sacrificed when, almost by a sort of religious conversion, he devoted himself to the abolition cause. The abolitionists were at that time a small and persecuted band, despised by all 'respectable' people in church, state, or university, and generally looked on much as an avowed anarchist is now. They were, in fact, setting themselves in opposition to what was then the law of the land, and to what seemed, to Northerners as well as Southerners, part of the very basis of its social and economic system. Whittier had far more common sense and balance than most of the abolitionists in 1833. He counted the cost with Quaker coolness of judgment,' says Pickard, 'before taking a step that closed to him the gates of both political and literary preferment. He realized more fully than did most of the early abolitionists that the institution of slavery would not fall at the first blast of their horns. When he decided to enter upon this contest, he understood that his cherished ambitions must be laid aside, and that an entire change in his plans was involved. He took the step deliberately and after serious consideration.' What induced Whittier to take this step, even while realizing its cost so clearly, was an intense idealistic belief, a belief amounting almost to religious fervor, in the principle of universal liberty and equality. Late in life, giving counsel to a boy of fifteen, Whittier said, 'My lad, if thou wouldest win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause.' This is not the place to give any extended account of Whittier's work in the abolition movement. It has been treated with admirable completeness and fairness in Professor Carpenter's Whittier. Strange as this seems to us now, Whittier was, aside from his poetry, one of the most able workers in practical politics on the abolition side. He held together a small band of followers in his own congressional district, and kept the balance of power in such a way as often to force anti-slavery declarations from any candidate who wished to be elected. He had taken no part in founding the New England AntiSlavery Society in 1832; but in 1833 he was a delegate from Massachusetts to the Convention at Philadelphia which founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. (See note on page 260.) He later became somewhat estranged from the purely idealistic faction of the abolitionists, led by Garrison, who refused to have anything to do with a government based, as it seemed to them, on false principles, or even to vote under it, and who advocated immediate dissolution of the Union in order to break away from the slave power. Whittier was elected as representative to the Massachusetts Legislature in 1835, and again in 1836, but could not serve his second term on account of ill health, and was unable, for the same reason, to take office himself at any subsequent time. He still continued to play an active part in politics, however, even to the end of his life. He is described in a letter quoted by Professor Carpenter, as one of the greatest workers, politically, even, in all our State. I sometimes wonder how so fine a mind can stoop to such drudgery. But Whittier has as much benevolence as he has ideality. He knows the drudgery must be done, and, since no one else does it, will do it himself. May Heaven bless him.' Whittier was largely instrumental in securing the nomination of Charles Sumner to the Senate, and in persuading him to accept the nomination. His correspondence with Sumner, from 1840 on, is very important for the history of that period. Toward the end of Sumner's life, when he had been censured by the Massachusetts Legislature for advocating the proposal that the names of battles fought against fellow-citizens should no longer be inscribed on regimental flags, it was Whittier who aroused public opinion to compel the repeal of this vote of censure. In 1834 Whittier was instrumental in bringing the English abolitionist, George Thompson, to New England, and this caused bitter personal opposition. He accompanied Thompson to New Hampshire, and at Concord they were stoned and shot at by a mob, and barely escaped. Whittier went to Philadelphia in 1838, to edit the Pennsylvania Freeman; Pennsylvania Hall, where he had his office, was burned by a mob without interference from the authorities. He took part, from 1835 to 1850, in the editing of several anti-slavery papers, and in many anti-slavery conventions. During all this time, he was a great influence by his poetry also. The ringing lines of "Expostulation,' and of Massachusetts to Virginia,' were declaimed again and again through the North and West. The anti-slavery movement rapidly grew, and won the allegiance of men like Dr. Channing in 1836, and Lowell in 1841. But it was still the unpopular cause, and abolitionists were mobbed in Massachusetts as late as 1861. Whittier's anti-slavery poems form the larger part of his work for all this period. His earliest volumes were almost entirely made up of them, - the Poems, of 1837, the Ballads, Anti-Slavery Poems, etc., of 1838, and the Voices of Freedom, of 1841. Of course little of this verse can survive, except for its historic interest. Sometimes, however, though local and temporary in its origin, it expresses something universal and eternal, as with the idea of freedom in Expostulation,' of truth and honor and the shame of their betrayal, in Ichabod,' of loathing at the triumph of wrong, in The Christian Slave' and The Rendition.' Massachusetts to Virginia' is one of the greatest of poems of places,' making the very rocks arise and speak. 6 - In the meantime, Whittier was writing other poems, more enduring than the mass of his anti-slavery work. The Lays of my Home was published in 1843, the first collected edition of his Poems in 1849, Songs of Labor in 1850, the Chapel of the Hermits and Other Poems in 1853, the blue and gold' edition of his Poetical Works in 1857. Except for the publication of his works, there is little to note in his life-story. He had given up the farm, and moved to a little house in the near-by village of Amesbury, where he lived until 1876. His income was very small, until after the publication of Snow-Bound,' in 1866, for in the earlier years he could necessarily earn but little by his writings. For twenty years,' he said, I was shut out from the favor of booksellers and magazine editors; but I was enabled, by rigid economy, to live in spite of them, and to see the end of the institution that proscribed me.' 'Snow-Bound,' and all his later works, brought him large profits. During the war Whittier wrote little. His feeling is expressed intensely in 'The Waiting' and The Watchers,' and he wrote the best ballad of the war in 'Barbara Frietchie.' He hailed the coming of emancipation in Laus Deo' and the Emancipation Hymn.' In 1866 came 'Snow-Bound,' in 1867 the Tent on the Beach,' in 1869 Among the Hills,' in 1870 the Ballads of New England. These are his most important volumes, and mark his late maturity as a poet, which came only with his freedom from the partisan struggle that had filled the best years of his life. he says truly of himself in Hater of din and riot He lived in days unquiet; Trod the hard ways of duty, An Autograph;' while in his Prelude to the Tent on the Beach,' he expresses more fully this feeling of what his life had been :— And one there was, a dreamer born, A weapon in the war with wrong, Yoking his fancy to the breaking-plough That beam-deep turned the soil for truth to spring and grow. Too quiet seemed the man to ride The winged Hippogriff Reform; Was his a voice from side to side To pierce the tumult of the storm? To hold his way against the public frown, The ban of Church and State, the fierce mob's hounding down. For while he wrought with strenuous will The work his hands had found to do, He heard the fitful music still Of winds that out of dream-land blew. What the strange voices whispered down; The common air was thick with dreams, — In still, shut bays, on windy capes, He heard the call of beckoning shapes, And, as the gray old shadows prompted him, To homely moulds of rhyme he shaped their legends grim. Whittier never married. Circumstances,' he wrote, 'the care of an aged mother, and the duty owed to a sister in delicate health for many years, must be my excuse for living the lonely life which has called out thy pity. . . . I have learned to look into happiness through the eyes of others.' Still more cogent reasons for not marrying were his comparative poverty, his ill health, and especially the strong feeling of the Quakers that it was not permissible to marry out of their own sect. There are beautiful memories of his school-boy loves in poems like 'My Playmate,'' Benedicite,' 'A Sea Dream,' Memories,' and In School-Days,' and these poems of dim and delicate reminiscence, untouched by the realities of life, sometimes seem more beautiful than any songs of living passion. His home, for many years, was made by his younger sister, Elizabeth, until her death, in 1864 ; then by his niece, Elizabeth Whittier, till her marriage, in 1876. After this he lived most of the time with three sisters, his cousins, at Oak Knoll, Danvers. His faculties remained unimpaired to the last, and he died at the age of eighty-four, September 7, 1892. Whittier was primarily the poet of abolition; but enough has already been said on that part of his work. Next, he was the poet of Nature in New England. His poems of the Merrimac Valley, of Lake Winnipesaukee and the mountains near it, of Hampton Beach and the Marblehead coast, are unsurpassed in simple truth and love. But most of all he is the poet of country life in New England. This means more than at first appears, for it was from these New England homes that the larger number and the more energetic of the young men, like the older brothers of Whittier's father and grandfather, went out to take and make the great Northwest and then the greater West; moreover Whittier, in speaking for his own section, often expresses what the whole of America is and means as contrasted with the Old World, — in The Last Walk in Autumn,' for instance. There are two or three other points to be noted in summary. One is the simple beauty, truth, and modesty of Whittier's own nature, constantly and unconsciously showing itself in his many personal poems, and in his modest estimate of his own work, as in the Proem.' Another is that he ranks as our truest, though not our greatest, narrative poet. This has already been touched on in speaking of Longfellow; as a writer of ballads, Whittier surpasses Longfellow in everything except that which is after all the first essential, but only one essential,-spirited movement. And finally, he is our chief religious poet. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES HOLMES was a great believer in ancestry, and very proud of his own. Through his mother he was connected with the Phillipses, and was a cousin of Wendell Phillips; with the Bradstreets, and was a direct descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess; with the Quincys, and was the great-grandson of Dorothy Q.;' with the Hancocks, one of whom had married the second Dorothy Quincy, niece of the first; and with the Wen dells, one of the old Dutch families who came to America about 1646. He was named for his maternal grandfather, the Honorable Oliver Wendell. On the other side of the family his great-great-grandfather, John Holmes, of Puritan stock, settled in Woodstock, Conn., in 1686. His grandfather, David Holmes, the Deacon' who built the 'One-Hoss Shay,' was a captain in the French and Indian wars, and surgeon in the Revolutionary army. His father, Rev. Abiel Holmes, graduated at Yale in 1782, preached in Georgia for six years, and then came to settle in Cambridge, Mass., where for forty years he was pastor of the First Church. He was also an author and lecturer, and wrote the Annals of America, the first important history after the Revolution. He lived in the house with the gambrelroof,' which stood near the site of the present Harvard Gymnasium, and which is so often alluded to in Holmes's writings and so lovingly described in the Poet at the Breakfast Table. Here Holmes was born, almost under the shadow of the elms in the Harvard College yard, August 29, 1809. He went to school first in Cambridge, then at Phillips Academy, Andover. While at the Academy, he made a translation in heroic couplets of the first book of Virgil's Æneid. He entered Harvard with the 'famous class of '29' (see notes on 'The Boys,' pages 374, 375). Beside his own classmates who later became illustrious, he knew in college Charles Sumner, of the class of 1830, and Wendell Phillips and John Lothrop Motley, of 1831. After graduation he spent a year in the Law School, and published during this year more than a score of poems, many of them in a college periodical, the Collegian. Most of these were humorous skits, but there ring out among them the thrilling lines of 'Old Ironsides.' Thus from the beginning, as throughout his life, love of fun and love of country were two chief elements in Holmes's poetry. At the end of the year he abandoned the law and took up the study of medicine. From 1833 to 1835 he spent a little more than two years in study abroad, mostly at Paris, and came back to take his degree at the Harvard Medical School in 1836. At the same Commencement he read his Phi Beta Kappa poem: Poetry; A Metrical Essay.' This was published later in the year, with other poems, among them the 'Last Leaf," which had already appeared in a miscellaneous collection, the Harbinger, in 1833. We may say that he commenced' doctor and poet at the same time; and his profession and his poetry were to be the two chief interests of his life, neither ever crowding out the other. During the following years he published or edited a number of important medical books, was professor of anatomy at Dartmouth College for a short time, settled in Boston in 1840 to the practice of his profession, and was married in that year to Miss Amelia Lee Jackson. In 1846 he published his second volume of collected Poems, and in 1847 was appointed professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard, a position which he held as an active teacher until 1882, and as professor emeritus until his death, in 1894, in all fortyseven years. Like the other New England poets, Holmes came rather late to his maturity as a writer. It was not until he began the Breakfast Table series, on which, even more than on his verse, will depend his ultimate fame, that he began also to write his best poetry. The Chambered Nautilus,' the One-Hoss Shay,' Latter-Day Warnings,' 'Contentment,' 'Parson Turell's Legacy,' The Living Temple,' 'The Voiceless,' all appeared first with the Autocrat papers (1857-58). Among these are two of his best humorous narratives, and two of his best serious lyrics. In the Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859) appeared The Boys,' Under the Violets,' and Holmes's two best hymns. The Civil War period called out some of his strongest verse, notably Union and Liberty,' 'The Voyage of the Good Ship Union,' and the poem on Bryant's seventieth birthday. Meanwhile he had begun that series of poems for his class reunions, in which there is not a break for thirty-nine years, and which thus forms one of the largest and most characteristic sections of his work. Occasional poetry is usually doomed to sure and quick oblivion. Holmes had the rare faculty of giving it a touch of greater vitality, while at the same time fitting it closely to the occasion. Class loyalty, and college loyalty, and the lasting reality of men's friendships, are not merely local and occasional things. Holmes has expressed these in his class poems, and in others like At a Meeting of Friends,' and 'At the Saturday Club,' and in his trib |