acteristic of his works. Yet Mr. Pickard in his official biography brings the poem into no relief; Professor Carpenter names it in passing without a word of comment; and Colonel Higginson in his volume in the English Men of Letters Series does not mention it at all-but then he has a habit of omitting the essential. Among those who have written critically of American literature the poem is not even named, so far as I am aware, by Mr. Stedman or by Professors Richardson, Lawton, Wendell, and Trent. I confess that this conspiracy of silence, as I hunted through one historian and critic after another, grew disconcerting, and I began to distrust my own judgment until I chanced upon a confirmation in two passages of Whittier's letters. Writing of The Pennsylvania Pilgrim to his publisher in May, 1872, he said: "I think honestly it is as good as (if not better than) any long poem I have written"; and a little later to Celia Thaxter: "It is as long as SnowBound, and better, but nobody will find it out." One suspects that all these gentlemen in treating of Whittier have merely followed the line of least resistance, without taking much care to form an independent opinion; and the line of least resistance has a miserable trick of leading us astray. In the first place, Whittier's share in the Abolition and other reforming movements bulks so large in the historians' eyes that sometimes they seem almost to forget Whittier the poet. And the critics have taken the same cue. "Whittier,"

says one of them, "will be remembered even more as the trumpet-voice of Emancipation than as the peaceful singer of rural New England."

The error, if it may be said with reverence, can be traced even higher, and in Whittier we meet only one more witness to the unconcern of Nature over the marring of her finer products. The wonder is not that he turned out so much that is faulty, but that now and then he attained such exquisite grace. Whittier was born, December 17, 1807, in East Haverhill, in the old homestead which still stands, a museum now, hidden among the hills from any other human habitation. It is a country not without quiet charm, though the familiar lines of Snow-Bound make us think of it first as beaten by storm and locked in by frost. And, notwithstanding the solace of an affectionate home, life on the farm was unnecessarily hard. The habits of the grim pioneers had persisted and weighed heavily on their dwindled descendants. Thus the Whittiers, who used to drive regularly to the Quaker meeting at Amesbury, eight miles distant, are said to have taken no pains to protect themselves from the bleakest weather. The poet suffered in body all his life from the rigour of this discipline; nor did he suffer less from insufficiency of mental training. Not only was the family poor, but it even appears that the sober tradition of his people looked askance at the limited means of education at hand. Only at the earnest solicitation of outsiders was the boy allowed to attend

the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was a little of everything: farm worker, shoemaker, teacher-he seems to have shifted about as chance or necessity directed. There were few-he has told us how few-books in the house, and little time for reading those he could borrow. But if he read little, he wrote prodigiously. The story of his first printed poem in the Free Press of Newburyport and of the encouragement given him by the far-sighted editor, William Lloyd Garrison, is one of the best known and most picturesque incidents in American letters. The young poet-he was then nineteen-was launched; from that time he became an assiduous writer for the press, and was at intervals editor of various country or propagandist newspapers.

The great currents of literary tradition reached him vaguely from afar and troubled his dreams. Burns fell early into his hands, and the ambition was soon formed of transferring the braes and byres of Scotland to the hills and folds of New England. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rang seductively in his ears. Byron, too, by a spirit of contrast, appealed to the Quaker lad, and one may read in Mr. Pickard's capital little book, Whittier-Land, verses and fragments of letters which show how deeply that poison of the age had bitten into his heart. But the influence of those sons of fire was more than counteracted by the gentle spirit of Mrs. Hemans—indeed, the worst to be said of Whittier is that never, to the

It

day of his death, did he quite throw off allegiance to the facile and innocent muse of that lady. is only right to add that in his later years, especially in the calm that followed the civil war, he became a pretty widely read man, a man of far more culture than he is commonly supposed to have been.

Such was the boy, then-thirsting for fame, scantily educated, totally without critical guidance or environment, looking this way and that-who was thrust under the two dominant influences of his time and place. To one of these, transcendentalism, we owe nearly all that is highest, and unfortunately much also that is most inchoate, in New England literature. Its spirit of complacent self-dependence was dangerous at the best, although in Whittier I cannot see that it did more than confirm his habit of uncritical prolixity; it could offer no spiritual seduction to one who held liberally the easy doctrine of the Friends. But to the other influence he fell a natural prey. The whole tradition of the Quakers-the memory of Pastorius, whom he was to sing as the Pennsylvania Pilgrim; the inheritance of saintly John Woolman, whose Journal he was to edit-prepared him to take part in the great battle of the Abolitionists. From that memorable hour when he met Garrison face to face on his Haverhill farm to the ending of the war in 1865, he was no longer free to develop intellectually, but was a servant of reform and politics. I am not, of

course, criticising that movement or its achievement; I regret only that one whose temper and genius called for fostering in quiet fields should have been dragged into that stormy arena. he says in lines that are true if not elegant:

Hater of din and riot,

He lived in days unquiet;
And, lover of all beauty,
Trod the hard ways of duty.

As

It is not merely that political interests absorbed the energy which would otherwise have gone to letters; the knowledge of life acquired might have compensated and more than compensated for less writing, and, indeed, he wrote too much as it was. The difficulty is rather that "the pledged philanthropy of earth" somehow militates against art, as Whittier himself felt. Not only the poems actually written to forward the propaganda are for the most part dismal reading, but something of their tone has crept into other poems, with an effect to-day not far from cant. Twice the cry of the liberator in Whittier rose to noble writing. But in both cases it is not the mere pleading of reform but a very human and personal indignation that speaks. In Massachusetts to Virginia this feeling of outrage calls forth one of the most stirring pieces of personification ever written, nor can I imagine a day when a man of Massachusetts shall be able to read it without a tingling of the blood, or a Virginian born hear it without a sense

VOL. III.-3.