impregnable simplicity of his inborn temper, derived from his Quaker ancestry and nurtured by the guilelessness of his personal life. Another trait he possessed, and a trait rare in temperaments eager for reform. This is magnanimity. It appears nowhere more clearly than in almost the only departure from chronological order in the final collection of his works, which he himself arranged. Until 1850, Webster, whose devotion to the ideal of Union had compelled him to oppose every aggression of the South, had been held by the antislavery men an heroic leader. His Seventh of March Speech, which supported a Fugitive Slave Bill, brought down on him a storm of antislavery indignation never expressed more fervently than in a poem by Whittier, still generally included in popular collections of American lyrics. He called this poem "Ichabod;" and here are some of its verses: "So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn Which once he wore! The glory from his grey hairs gone "Let not the land once proud of him Insult him now, Nor brand with deeper shame the dim, "But let its humbled sons instead, From sea to lake, A long lament, as for the dead, "Then pay the reverence of old days To his dead fame; Walk backwards, with averted gaze, In 1850 no man condemned Webster more fiercely than Whittier. No more sincere poem than "Ichabod” was ever written. But two years after "Ichabod" saw the light, Webster was dead; and it was nine years more before the Civil War came; and Whittier survived the Civil War for nearly a generation. In 1880, reflecting on the past, he wrote about Webster again. This poem he called the “Lost Occasion," and in his collected works he put it directly after the "Ichabod" which he had so fervently written thirty years before. The "Lost Occasion" has generally been neglected by the makers of American anthologies, so "Ichabod " is traditionally supposed to express Whittier's final feeling about Daniel Webster. In this case tradition is unjust to both men. The single deviation from chronology in Whittier's collected works shows that the poet desired his final sentiment concerning our greatest statesman to be phrased in no lines of fervid denunciation, but rather in such words as these: "Thou shouldst have lived to feel below Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthrow; The late-sprung mine that underlaid Thy sad concessions vainly made. Thou shouldst have seen from Sumter's wall The star flag of the Union fall, And armed rebellion pressing on The broken lines of Washington. The prescient ages shaping with And evermore that mountain mass Thy nobler self, thy life at best!" Throughout the records of antislavery you may find passionate indignation and self-devoted sincerity; but you shall search those records far and wide before you shall find a mate for this magnanimous utterance. As time passes, Whittier seems more and more the man among the antislavery leaders of New England whose spirit came nearest to greatness. So, as the years pass, he tends to emerge from the group of mere reformers, and to range himself too with the true men of letters. To them - to the literature of renascent New England, as distinguished from its politics, its scholarship, its religion, its philosophy, or its reform-we are now to turn. And we have come to this literature almost insensibly, in considering the work of one who, beginning life as a passionate reformer, may remain for posterity a living poet. In the autumn of 1857 there appeared in Boston the first number of the periodical, still in existence, which more than anything else represents the literature of the New England Renaissance. In the early years of the century, the characteristic publication of literary Boston was the "North American Review." In the 40's the "Dial," limited as was its circulation, was equally characteristic of contemporary literary energy. From 1857 until the renascent literature of New England came to an end, its vehicle was the "Atlantic Monthly." This youngest and last of the native periodicals of Boston may be distinguished from its predecessors in various ways. Obviously, for one thing, while the primary function of the "North American Review" was scholarly, and that of the "Dial" philosophic, that of the "Atlantic" was literary. In the second place, the "North American Review" was started by young men who at the moment had no vehicle for expression, and who thought they had a good deal to say. The "Dial" was similarly started by a group of enthusiasts comparatively little known in letters. The "Atlantic," on the other hand, did little more than establish a regular means of publication for men whose reputation was already established. After the dignified fashion of half a century ago, the articles in its earlier numbers were not signed. Whoever takes the trouble to ascertain their writers, however, will be surprised to find how few of them had not attained distinction before 1857. In more senses than one, the earlier periodicals began youthfully; and the "Atlantic" mature. was always To understand the mature literature which at last thus concentrated, we have spent what may have seemed excessive time on its environment. Yet without a constant sense of the influences which were alive in the New England air, the literature which finally arose there can hardly be understood. It was all based on the traditions of a rigid old society, Puritan in origin and immemorially fixed in structure. To this, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, came that impulse of new life which expressed itself in such varied ways, in the classically rounded periods of our most finished oratory; in the scholarship which ripened into our lasting works of history; in the hopeful dreams of the Unitarians, passing insensibly into the nebulous philosophy of the Transcendentalists, and finally into first fantastic and soon militant reform. Each of these phases of our Renaissance gave us names which are still worth memory: Webster, Everett, and Choate; Ticknor, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman; Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau; Theodore Parker, Phillips, and Sumner; Mrs. Stowe, and Whittier. Thus grouped together, we can see these people to have been so dissimilar, and sometimes so antagonistic, that human friendship between them, or even mutual understanding, was hardly possible. At the same time, as we look at them together, we must see that all possessed in common a trait which marks them as of the old New England race. Each and all were strenuously earnest; and though the earnestness of some confined itself to matters of this world, to history, to politics, or to reform, while that of others was centred, like that of the Puritan fathers, more on the unseen eternities, not one of them was ever free from a constant ideal of principle, of duty. Nor was the idealism of these men always confined to matters of conduct. In Emerson, more certainly than in the fathers themselves, one feels the ceaseless effort of New |