"And while in life's late afternoon,

Where cool and long the shadows grow,

I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far."

Throughout "Snow-Bound" you may discover lines as excellent as these.

Quite apart from its artistic merit, "Snow-Bound" is an important document for one who would understand the native Yankee country. "Flemish pictures of old days," Whittier calls the poem; and in one sense the term is happy. He lovingly sets forth a very simple form of existence, with a minute detail something like that of the Flemish painters. Typical Flemish pictures, however, representing a European peasantry whose life is consciously that of an inferior class, abound in touches which indicate profound coarseness of temper. No Flemish life could have been humbler, none more simple, than the life which "Snow-Bound" pictures; but this life of self-respecting dignity is utterly free from the grossness which usually depraves the lower ranks of any old, complex society. One begins to see how the national inexperience of New England was bound to teach earnest Yankees those lessons of human equality which Whittier never for a moment doubted.

Such vividness as distinguishes the descriptive passages of "Snow-Bound" transpires throughout Whittier's descriptive verse. Here, for example, are some lines which take one to heart of our drowsy New England summers:

the

very

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Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold
The tawny Incas for their gardens wrought,
Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod,
And the red pennons of the cardinal flowers
Hang motionless upon their upright staves.
The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind,
Wing-weary with its long flight from the south,
Unfelt; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf
With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams,

Confesses it. The locust by the wall
Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm.
A single hay-cart down the dusty road
Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep
On the load's top. Against the neighbouring hill,
Huddled along the stone-wall's shady side,
The sheep show white, as if a snow-drift still
Defied the dog-star. Through the open door
A drowsy smell of flowers gray heliotrope,
And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette -
Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lend
To the prevailing symphony of peace."

And here are more lines, which always come to mind when one looks across the salt-marshes of Hampton:

"Just then the ocean seemed

To lift a half-faced moon in sight;
And shoreward o'er the waters gleamed,
From crest to crest, a line of light.

"Silently for a space each eye

Upon that sudden glory turned;

Cool from the land the breeze blew by,

The tent-ropes flapped, the long beach churned
Its waves to foam; on either hand

Stretched, far as sight, the hills of sand;

With bays of marsh, and capes of bush and tree,

The woods' black shore line loomed beyond the meadowy sea."

Superficially commonplace, if you will, passages like these, as they grow familiar, prove more and more admirable in their simple truth. Of course they lack lyric beauty. Whittier's metrical range was very narrow, and his rhymes were often abominable. But whenever he dealt with the country he knew so well, he had an instinctive perception of those obvious facts which are really most characteristic, and within which are surely included its unobtrusive beauty and its slowly winning charm. With this excellent simplicity of perception he combined excellent simplicity of heart and phrase.

In general, of course, the most popular literature is narra

tive. So Whittier's Yankee ballads often seem his most obvious works,-"Skipper Ireson's Ride," for example, or that artlessly sentimental "Maud Muller," where a New England judge is made to play the part of a knight-errant of romance. Like his admirable poetry of Nature, these are simple and sincere. In sentiment, too, the first is fervid. Both in conception and in phrase, however, these, with all the rest we may let them stand for, are so commonplace that one finds critical admiration out of the question. They belong to that school of verse which perennially flourishes and withers in the poetical columns of country newspapers.

Whittier's true claim to remembrance will rest on no such popularity as this, even though that popularity chance to be more than momentary. In the first place, his simple pictures of New England Nature are often excellent. In the second place, the fervour of his lifelong faith in the cause of human freedom sometimes breathed undying fire into the verses which he made concerning the conflict with slavery. Throughout them his faults appear. In 1836 Congress passed a bill excluding from the United States Post Office all Abolitionist publications; against this bill Whittier wrote a passionate "Summons to the North," which among other verses contains the following:

"Torture the pages of the Holy Bible,

To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood?
And in oppression's hateful service libel
Both man and God?"

Worse rhymes than he thus comprised in four lines, you shall search the language for in vain; but in that same poem are stanzas like these:

"Methinks from all her wild, green mountains;

From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie
From her blue rivers and her welling fountains,
And clear cold sky;

"From her rough coast and isles, which hungry Ocean
Gnaws with his surges; from the fisher's skiff,
With white sail swaying to the billows' motion
Round rock and cliff;

"From the free fireside of her unbought farmer;

From her free labourer at his loom and wheel;
From the brown smith-shop, where, beneath the hammer,
Rings the red steel;

"From each and all, if God hath not forsaken
Our land, and left us to an evil choice,

Loud as the summer thunderbolt shall waken
A People's voice."

Seven years later, when the Fugitive Slave Law was enforced in Boston, he wrote that passionate address," Massachusetts to Virginia," of which the following passage is an example;

"From Norfolk's ancient villages, from Plymouth's rocky bound To where Nantucket feels the arms of ocean close her round;

"From rich and rural Worcester, where through the calm repose
Of cultured vales and fringing woods the gentle Nashua flows,
To where Wachuset's wintry blasts the mountain larches stir,
Swelled up to Heaven the thrilling cry of God save Latimer!'

"And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea spray; And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett Bay! Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill,

And the cheer of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from Holyoke Hill.

"The voice of Massachusetts! Of her free sons and daughters,
Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters!
Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall stand?
No fetters in the Bay State! No slave upon her land!"

War, of course, was utterly abhorrent to his Quaker principles; but when inevitable war came, he greeted it in such spirit as this:

And when in 1865 the amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery, was at last adopted, he wrote perhaps his noblest poem, "Laus Deo," of which these three stanzas may

At heart Whittier was no more stirred than were the other antislavery leaders, nor was he gifted with such literary power as sometimes revealed itself in the speeches of Parker or of Phillips, or as enlivened Mrs. Stowe's novel with its gleams of creative genius. But Whittier surpassed all the rest in the