of unacknowledged shame; in Ichabod he uttered a word of individual scorn that will rise up for quotation whenever any strong leader misuses, or is thought to misuse, his powers. Every one knows the lines in which Webster is pilloried for his defection:

Of all we loved and honoured, naught

Save power remains ;

A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has filed;

When faith is lost, when honour dies,

The man is dead!

Then pay the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!

It is instructive that only when his note is thus pierced by individual emotion does the reformer attain to universality of appeal. Unfortunately most of Whittier's slave songs sink down to a dreary level-down to the almost humorous bathos of the lines suggested by Uncle Tom's Cabin:

What he needed above everything else, what his surroundings were least of all able to give

him, was a canon of taste, which would have driven him to stiffen his work, to purge away the flaccid and set the genuinely poetical in stronger relief—a purely literary canon which would have offset the moralist and reformer in him, and made it impossible for him (and his essays show that the critical vein was not absent by nature) to write of Longfellow's Psalm of Life: "These nine simple verses are worth more than all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live-the moral steam enginery of an age of action." While Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were writing in England, the earlier tradition had not entirely died out in America that the first proof of genius is an abandonment of one's mind to temperament and "inspiration." Byron had written verse as vacillating and formless as any of Whittier's; Shelley had poured forth page after page of effusive vapourings; Keats learned the lesson of self-restraint almost too late; Wordsworth indulged in platitudes as simpering as "holy Eva"; but none of these poets suffered so deplorably from the lack of criticism as the finest of our New England spirits. The very magnificence of their rebellion, the depth and originality of their emotion, were a compensation for their licence, were perhaps inevitably involved in it. The humbler theme of Whittier's muse can offer no such apology; he who sings the commonplace joys and cares of the heart needs above all

to attain that simplex munditiis which is the last refinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes himself commonplace. And Whittier knew this. In the Proem to the first general collection of his poems, he wrote:

Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,
No rounded art the lack supplies;
Unskilled the subtle line to trace,
Or softer shades of Nature's face,

I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.

Nor mine the seer-like power to show
The secrets of the heart and mind;

To drop the plummet line below

Our common world of joy and woe,

A more intense despair or brighter hope to find.

But at this point we must part company with his confession. His reward is not that he showed a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts on the shrine of Freedom, but that more completely than any other poet he developed the peculiarly English ideal of the home which Cowper first brought intimately into letters, and added to it those homely comforts of the spirit which Cowper never felt. With Longfellow he was destined to throw the glamour of the imagination over "our common world of joy and woe."

Perhaps something in his American surroundings fitted him peculiarly for this humbler rôle. The fact that the men who had made the new colony belonged to the middle class of society

tended to raise the idea of home into undisputed honour, and the isolation and perils of their situation in the earlier years had enhanced this feeling into something akin to a cult. America is still the land of homes. That may be a lowly theme for a poet; to admire such poetry may, indeed it does, seem to many to smack of a bourgeois taste. And yet there is an implication here that carries a grave injustice. For myself, I admit that Whittier is one of the authors of my choice, and that I read him with ever fresh delight; I even think there must be something spurious in that man's culture whose appreciation of Milton or Shelley dulls his ear to the paler but very refined charm of Whittier. If truth be told, there is sometimes a kind of exquisite content in turning from the pretentious poets who exact so much of the reader to the more immediate appeal of our sweet Quaker. In comparison with those more exalted muses his nymph is like the nut-brown lass of the old song

But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say No.

And often, after fatiguing the brain with the searchings and inquisitive flight of the Masters, we are ready to say with Whittier:

I break my pilgrim staff, I lay
Aside the toiling oar;

The angel sought so far away

I welcome at my door.

There, to me at least, and not in the ballads which are more generally praised, lies the rare excellence of Whittier. True enough, some of these narrative poems are spirited and admirably composed. Now and then, as in Cassandra Southwick, they strike a note which reminds one singularly of the real ballads of the people; in fact, it would not be fanciful to discover a certain resemblance between the manner of their production and of the old popular songs. Their publication in obscure newspapers, from which they were copied and gradually sent the rounds of the country, is not essentially different from the way in which many of the ballads were probably spread abroad. The very atmosphere that surrounded the boy in a land where the traditions of border warfare and miraculous events still ran from mouth to mouth prepared him for such balladry. Take, for example, this account of his youth from the Introduction to Snow-Bound:

Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary resource in the long winter evenings. My father when a young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French villages. My uncle was ready with his record of hunting and fishing, and, it must be confessed, with stories, which he at least half-believed, of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who was born in the Indian-haunted region of Somersworth, New Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth,