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,

told us of the inroads of the savages, and the narrow escape of her ancestors.

No doubt this legendary training helped to give more life to Whittier's ballads and border tales than ordinarily enters into that rather factitious form of composition; and for a while he made a deliberate attempt to create out of it a native literature. But the effect was still deeper, by a kind of contrast, on his poetry of the home. After several incursions into the world as editor and agitator, he was compelled by ill health to settle down finally in the Amesbury house, which he had bought in 1836; and there with little interruption he lived from his thirty-third to his eighty-fifth year, the year of his death. In SnowBound his memory called up a picture of the old Haverhill homestead, unsurpassed in its kind for sincerity and picturesqueness; in poem after poem he celebrated directly or indirectly "the river hemmed with leaning trees," the hills and ponds, the very roads and bridges of the land about these sheltered towns. On the one hand, the recollection of the wilder life through which his parents had come added to the snugness and intimacy of these peaceful scenes, and, on the other hand, the encroachment of trade and factories into their midst lent a poignancy of regret for a grace that was passing away. Mr. Pickard's little guidebook, to which I have already referred, brings together happily the innumerable allusions of local interest; there is no spot in America, not

even Concord, where the light of fancy lies so entrancingly:

A tender glow, exceeding fair,

A dream of day without its glare.

For it must be seen that the crudeness of Whittier's education, and the thorny ways into which he was drawn, marred a large part, but by no means all, of his work. There are a few poems in his collection of an admirable craftsmanship in that genre which is none the less difficult-which I sometimes think is almost more difficult-because it lies so perilously near the trivial and mean. There are others which need only a little pruning, perhaps a little heightening here and there, to approach the same perfection of charm. Especially they have that harmony of tone which arises from the unspoiled sincerity of the writer and ends by subduing the reader to a restful sympathy with their mood. No one can read much in Whittier without feeling that these hills and valleys about the Merrimac have become one of the inalienable domiciles of the spirit—a familiar place where the imagination dwells with untroubled delight. Even the little things, the flowers and birds of the country, are made to contribute to the sense of homely content. There is one poem in particular which has always seemed to me significant of Whittier's manner, and a comparison of it with the famous flower poems of Wordsworth will show the difference between

what I call the poetry of the hearth and the poetry of intimate nature. It was written to celebrate a gift of Pressed Gentian that hung at the poet's window, presenting to wayside travellers only a 'grey disk of clouded glass":

They cannot from their outlook see
The perfect grace it hath for me;

For there the flower, whose fringes through

The frosty breath of autumn blew,

Turns from without its face of bloom
To the warm tropic of my room,
As fair as when beside its brook
The hue of bending skies it took.

So from the trodden ways of earth

Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,
And offer to the careless glance

The clouding grey of circumstance.

There is not a little of self-portraiture in this image of the flower, and it may be that some who have written of Whittier patronisingly are like the hasty passer-by-they see only the grey disk of clouded glass.

And the emotion that furnishes the loudest note to most poets is subdued in Whittier to the same gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidence enough that his heart in youth was touched almost to a Byronic melancholy, and he himself somewhere remarks that " Few guessed beneath his aspect grave, What passions strove in chains." But was there not a remnant of self-deception

here? Do not the calmest and wisest of us like to believe we are calm and wise by virtue of vigorous self-repression? Wordsworth, we remember, explained the absence of love from his poetry on the ground that his passions were too violent to allow any safe expression of them. Possibly they were. Certainly, in Whittier's verse we have no reflection of those tropic heats, but only "the Indian summer of the heart." The very title, Memories, of his best-known love poem (based on a real experience, the details of which have recently been revealed) suggests the mood in which he approaches this subject. It is not the quest of desire he sings, but the home-coming after the frustrate search and the dreaming recollection by the hearth of an ancient loss. In the same way, his ballad Maud Muller, which is supposed to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is attuned to that shamelessly provincial rhyme,

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been !

It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it was with the judge and the maiden; only, as we learn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likely to be mingled strangely with relief, and the sadness to take on a most comfortable and flattering Quaker drab-as it did with our "hermit of Amesbury."

If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier a hope and an ever-present consolation-peculiarly