in the North. The social and intellectual development of America has never proceeded so fast as that of England. The England of King William III. was far more different from the England of Queen Elizabeth than was the Boston of Joseph Dudley from that of John Winthrop. In the same way there was far more likeness between the Southern States of President Buchanan's time and the Southern States of General Washington's than between the New England of 1860 and the New England of 1789. Up to the time of the Civil War, indeed, the South still lingered in the eighteenth century; and at least in New England the force of what we have called its Renaissance was bringing men nearer to the contemporary nineteenth century of Europe than anything American between 1650 and 1800 had ever been to any Europe contemporary with itself. Yet in the fact that the impulses of the New England reformers to set the world right finally concentrated themselves on the affairs of other people, and not on their own, there proves to be a trait which reveals how little the temper of New England has ever strayed from the temper of the mother country. For no peculiarity has been more characteristic of the native English than a passion to reform other people than themselves, trusting meantime that God will help those who forcibly help somebody else. IX JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER AMONG the antislavery leaders of Massachusetts was one who, with the passing of time, seems more and more distinguished as a man of letters. John Greenleaf Whittier, born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1807, came of sound country stock, remarkable only because for several generations the family had been Quakers. The first New England manifestations of Quakerism, in the seventeenth century, had taken an extravagantly fanatical form, which resulted in tragedies still familiar to tradition. As the Friends of New England had settled down into peaceful observance of their own principles, however, letting alone the affairs of others, they had become an inconspicuous, inoffensive body, neglected by the surrounding orthodoxy. Theologically, they believed in God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible. The interpreter of the divine word they found not in any established church nor in any officially sanctified order of ministers, but in the still, small voice given to mankind by the Heavenly Father. "To all human beings, they held, God has given an inner light, to all He speaks with a still small voice. Follow the light, obey the voice, and all will be well. Evil-doers are they who neglect the light and the voice. Now the light and the voice are God's, so to all who will attend they must ultimately show the same truth. If the voice call us to correct others, then, or the light shine upon manifest evil, it is God's will that we smite error, if so may be by revealing truth. If those who err be Friends, our duty bids us expostulate with them; and if they be obdurate, to present them for discipline, which may result in their exclusion from our Religious Society. The still small voice, it seems, really warns everybody that certain lines of conduct are essentially wrong, among which are the drinking of spirits, the frequenting of taverns, indulgence in gaming, the use of oaths, and the enslavement of any human being." In this faith there is clearly involved a conclusion at odds with Calvinism. To Quakers, inasmuch as every man possesses within himself the power of seeing the inner light and of hearing the still, small voice of God, all men are essentially equal. When the antislavery movement began, then, Whittier, a lifelong adherent of this traditional faith, found himself in a relation to militant philanthropy very different from that of ancestral Calvinists. These, lately emancipated by the new life of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, came to the reform with all the hotness of head which marks converts. Whittier, on the other hand, had inherited the principles to which the men with whom he allied himself had been converted; and so, although a lifelong and earnest reformer, he is the least irritating of reformers to those who chance not to agree with him. Again, sprung from a class which made his childhood literally that of a barefoot boy, and growing up in days when the New England country was still pure in the possession of an unmixed race whose capacity for self-government has never been surpassed, Whittier naturally and gently, without a tinge of invidiousness, could base not only on religious theory, but also on personal inexperience, his fervent faith in the equality of mankind. In the fact that throughout his connection with the antislavery movement he unswervingly advocated the use of strictly constitutional means to bring about reform, there is again something deeply characteristic. From the beginning some abolitionists were for resort to force; but Whittier always believed that their end might be attained by the ballot. For, after all, an election is an opportunity given every mature man in the community, to declare by his vote what ought to be done and who ought to do it. Very good; if, as Whittier's faith taught him, God speaks to every human being who will listen, the voice of the people, provided they listen to the voice within them, is literally the voice of God. When a popular election goes wrong, it is only because the people have been deaf to the divine whisper of truth. Whittier's youth was passed in the Yankee country. His education never went beyond country schools and two terms at the Haverhill Academy; but he had a natural love for literature. When he was nineteen years old, a poem of his was printed in the Newburyport "Free Press," then edited by William Lloyd Garrison. At twenty-one he was already a professional writer for country newspapers. At twenty-three he was editor of the "Haverhill Gazette." A year later he was made editor of a paper in Hartford, Connecticut; but his health, never robust, troubled him, and he returned to Massachusetts. In 1831 he published his first volume, a little book of verses called "New England Legends;" and during the same year, that in which Garrison established the "Liberator" at Boston, he became actively and ardently interested in the movement against slavery. Until 1840 this kept him constantly busy; in that year he resigned his charge of the "Pennsylvania Freeman," a journal devoted to the cause of abolition in Philadelphia. He removed to Amesbury, Massachusetts, where he lived thenceforth. From 1826 until the end, no year went by without his publishing poems. His temperament was shy, and his later life uneventful. He died just across the border of New Hampshire in 1892. very Though Whittier was precocious, and his literary career extended over more than sixty-five years, he was not prolific. He never wrote much at a time, and he never wrote anything long. In the seven volumes of his collected works there are few which might not have been produced at a single sitting. Again, his work throughout these sixty-five years was far from varied in character; like Bryant, he rarely excelled himself and rarely fell below. The limited circumstances of his life combined with lack of humour to make his writings superficially commonplace. What gives them merit are occasional passages where simplicity emerges from commonplace into dignity and sometimes into passion. For half a century, Bryant remained correct and delicately sentimen eal; for longer still Whittier remained simple, sincere, and fervent. His masterpiece, if the word be not excessive, is "SnowBound," written when he was about fifty-seven years old. At that time, when most of his immediate family were dead, he tenderly recalled his memories of childhood. The vivid simplicity of his descriptions every one must feel; his picture of a winter evening at his old home, for example, almost appeals to the eye: "Shut in from all the world without, We sat the clean-winged hearth about, With nuts from brown October's wood." Nor is the merit of "Snow-Bound" merely descriptive. Throughout it you will find phrases which, except for mere lyric music, have a simple felicity almost final. Take the couplet, for example, in which he speaks of his aunt, no longer young, who never married: "All unprofaned she held apart The virgin fancies of the heart." Or take the lines in which he remembers a sister, dead early in life: |