would not be difficult to show from passages in his prose works that his heart was never quite at ease in that Puritan land. The recollection of the sufferings which his people had undergone for their faith' sake rankled a little in his breast, and he was never in perfect sympathy with the austerity of New England traditions. We catch a tone of relief as he turns in imagination to the peace that dwelt "within the land of Penn":

Who knows what goadings in their sterner way
O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey,
Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay?

What hate of heresy the east-wind woke?
What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke
In waves that on their iron coast-line broke?

It was no doubt during his early residence in Philadelphia that he learned the story of the good Pastorius, who, in 1683, left the fatherland and the society of the mystics he loved to lead a colony of Friends to Germantown. The Pilgrim's life in that bountiful valley between the Schuylkill and the Delaware

Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay
Along the wedded rivers-

offered to Whittier a subject admirably adapted to his powers. Here the faults of taste that elsewhere so often offend us are sunk in the harmony of the whole and in the singular unity of impression; and the lack of elevation that so often stints

VOL. III.-4.

our praise becomes a suave and mellow beauty. All the better elements of his genius are displayed here in opulent freedom. The affections of the heart unfold in unembittered serenity. The sense of home seclusion is heightened by the presence of the enveloping wilderness, but not disturbed by any harsher contrast. Within is familiar joy and retirement unassailed-not without a touch of humour, as when in the evening, "while his wife put on her look of love's endurance," Pastorius took down his tremendous manuscript

And read, in half the languages of man,
His Rusca Apium, which with bees began,
And through the gamut of creation ran.

(The manuscript still exists; pray heaven it be never published!) Now and then the winter evenings were broken by the coming of some welcome guest-some traveller from the Old World bringing news of fair Von Merlau and the other beloved mystics; some magistrate from the young city,

Lovely even then

With its fair women and its stately men

Gracing the forest court of William Penn;

or some neighbour of the country, the learned Swedish pastor who, like Pastorius, "could baffle Babel's lingual curse,"

Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den
By Wissahickon, maddest of good men.

Such was the life within, and out of doors were the labours of the gardener and botanist, while

the seasons went

Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent
Of their own calm and measureless content.

The scene calls forth some of Whittier's most perfect lines of description. Could anything be more harmonious than this, with its economy of simple grace,

Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed?

No poem would be thoroughly charcteristic of Whittier without some echo of the slavery dispute, and our first introduction to Pastorius is, indeed, as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. But the question here takes on its most human and least political form; it lets in just enough of the outside world of action to save the idyl from unreality. Nor could religion well be absent; rather, the whole poem may be called an illustration through the Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide, speaking to him not with loud and controversial tones, as it spoke to George Fox, but with the still, small voice of comfortable persuasion:

A Voice spake in his ear,

And lo! all other voices far and near

Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear.

The Light of Life shone round him; one by one
The wandering lights, that all misleading run,
Went out like candles paling in the sun.

The account of the grave Friends, unsummoned by bells, walking meeting-ward, and of the gathered stillness of the room into which only the songs of the birds penetrated from without, is one of the happiest passages of the poem. How dear those hours of common worship were to Whittier may be understood from another poem, addressed to a visitor who asked him why he did not seek rather the grander temple of nature:

But nature is not solitude;

She crowds us with her thronging wood;
Her many hands reach out to us,

Her many tongues are garrulous;
Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes.

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul

Feels less the outer world's control;

The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied

By these still forms on every side,

The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth birthday Longfellow wrote a sonnet on The

Three Silences of Molinos-the silence of speech, of desire, and of thought, through which are heard "mysterious sounds from realms beyond our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time in his life has caught, or seemed to catch, those voices and melodies is quite able to appreciate the charm of Whittier through the absence of so much that calls to us in other poets.